Note: The more I worked on this article, the more I realized that it needed to be split into two separate articles. There was more ground to cover here than I originally thought. This article covers configuring a travel router running OpenWRT as a gateway for an ATA, and a Cisco ATA. The Asterisk configuration stuff will come later.

As seems to happen during the time of the covid-19 plague, it's really easy to clear one's backlog of "wouldn't it be nice if" and household repair projects in a short period of time. I mean, hell, I recabled my server …

Previously in this series I showed you how to migrate a Matrix server to use Postgres, a database server designed for busy workloads, such as those of a busy chat server.  This time around I'll demonstrate how to integrate Synapse with a STUN/TURN server to make the voice and video conferencing features of the Matrix network more reliable.  It's remarkably easy to do but it does take a little planning.  Here's why I recommend doing this:

If you are reading this, chances are you're behind a NATting firewall, which means that your device doesn't have a publically routable IP …

EDIT - 20200804 - Updated the Nginx stanzas because the newer versions of Certbot do all the work of setting up SSL/TLS support for you, including the most basic Nginx settings.  If you have them there you'll run into trouble unless you delete them or comment them out.  Also, Certbot centralizes all of the appropriate SSL configuration and hardening settings into a single includable file (/etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf) for ease of maintenance.

A couple of years ago I spent some time trying to set up Matrix, a self-hosted instant messaging and chat system that works a little like Jabber, a …

In my last post on the topic of exocortices I discussed the Huginn project, how it works, what the code for the agents actually look like, and some of the stuff I use Huginn's agent networks for for in my everyday life. In short, I call it my exocortex - an extension of the information processing capabilities of my brain running in silico instead of in vivo. Now I'm going to talk about Halo, a separate suite of bots which augment Huginn to carry out tasks that Huginn by itself isn't designed to carry out very easily, and thus extend my …

If you're involved in the retrocomputing or PC history scenes, chances are you've heard of double-sided floppy disks that are formatted for one system on side A and another system on side B. For example, I've got a copy of the game Ninja which had the C-64 version of the game on one side and the Atari port on the other. At the time this was a pretty straightforward thing to do because drives only read one side of a disk at a time. A couple of weeks back, PC historian Trixter came across a highly unusual 5 1/4 …