Adventures with Skype! as I think I blogged before I am hugley impressed with Skype - the quality is great and as a free internet VOIP solution it rules! Voicemail, calls to and from the public 'phone network and a great set of interfaces which look and drive like regular 'phones make it the first one of it's kind that all my family will be happy to use - and that's what makes technology penetrate. Anyhow - I'd be using Skype for a while with a cheap headset that worked just fine (from Lindy). I have a couple of machines on my network that never get switched off and so I thought one would be ideal to host a Skype account and have a hardware 'phone hanging off it. I have a couple of DECT 'phones in the house (both registered to the same basestation in the cellar where all the computers live - very convenient!) so I bought one of these USB -> Telephone line adaptors (basically makes your 'phone line look like another sound card to Windows). Then with a bit of software called Skypemate (which essentially maps telephone key-presses to the appropriate controls in Skype) you can make Skype calls on your regular 'phone handset. It works remarkably well when you've waded through all the "beta product" problems! It happily routes calls to that handset when they arrive either over Skype or over the normal 'phone line. It means both modes can exist while you decide if you want to ditch BT (or your normal telco) - for free (or nearly free) calls who wouldn't. It's here but there are a few caveats:

• Looking into the unit's RJ11 connectors I spotted that only two pins are populated - now I'm assuming that this is an American gadget where they don't have the same practise of stripping off the 48v ring tone at the master socket and presenting it on pin 3 with an earth on pin 4. With this in mind I crimped up a couple of RJ11 - bare end cables and took my master socket off the wall. I routed the single twisted pair incoming 'phone line into the unit and took the output ("TEL") back to the master socket (so as to strip off the 48v ring tone) and plugged my DECT base station into the master socket. It all works!
  They'll have trouble selling these as cracking open your master socket breaks your BT/Telewest/Telco's domestic agreement and without having access to the twisted-pair incoming line you can't get ring-tone into the box - it only has two pins on the RJ11 in and out. If you take the BT output of the master socket it has already had the ring-tone stripped off the pair and it is presented as a 4-wire.
  
• Skypemate hooks into the Skype API and if you don't uninstall any previous versions the slug-trail prevents Skype from ringing the 'phone's bell when a Skype call comes in - you can kill these only registry entries within Skype by going to the control which other programs can access Skype entry in prefs.
  
• Performance is everything - I origionally hung this off my aging server (dual 500Mhz P2s) - not pokey enough - very jerky sound quality and often missed the calls. When I moved it on to the media PC (single 1.6Ghz P4) there were no problems and the speach quality improved no end. I made a few calls while that machine was playing back a full-screen DivX without any frames fropping.

So, I am a huge fan - now if someone produced an embedded client that you could hang off your aDSL or cable router (i.e. ethernet in, telephone socket out) then they'd be on to a winner. Chatting with friends in Thialand for an hour and a half for no money in the middle of the day is very liberating and having a 'phone number that none-skype people can call means I really can be rid of my regular telephone line and all the associated line-rental costs (oh, and did I mention Skype calls are free or nearl-free!).
Adam Harris of VOIP Interactive gave me a load of advice - he's a good guy.