pjsua: Looks good, sounds … well …

This will be short: I have a screenshot for pjsua, but I think that might be all I can offer on it.

pjsua is a command-line SIP client — in other words, a software phone.

Personally I put things like this in the same mental box with Skype or Ekiga or linphone. I’m ashamed to say that Skype is the only one of those three I have used beyond a cursory startup, and I quit it not long after the Microsoft takeover. Not that my decision was related, but. …

Anyway, pjsua appears to have plenty of options to run your online phone needs. I have to say “appears” because I don’t have a SIP number that I know of, except perhaps via my GMail account, and I thought that was only available to U.S. residents. Or at least that’s what it told me last time I checked.

I can’t say if this is better than linphone, but suspect pjsua is a little more technical than linphone. Of course, to be honest, I’ve used both linphone and pjsua about the same amount of time, so what do I know … ? 😕

Regardless, I’m betting either one is better than Skype.

So my unfortunate brief encounter with pjsua boils down to, “Looks good, probably sounds good too.” 😐

prips: Print ranges of IP addresses

I have a feeling that prips is either an absolute godsend, or something you can more or less dismiss out of hand.

And that’s about all it does, as far as I have found. prips spits out ranges of IP addresses, in increments or within ranges that you define. Or CIDR, too.

It doesn’t ping them, or attack them, or even test them. All it does is send them to STDOUT.

It’s sad to think that for some, like me, this will be easily forgotten. I just don’t have a real frame for reference for it. And most of the tools that I see have built-in IP range flags.

Or on the other hand, if you rely on a tool that doesn’t have its own built-in IP range function, prips will probably make your life a lot easier.

And that’s all. 😉

linphone: Deserving of more attention

Another one for the category of “must try later:” linphone.

I believe this is primarily a graphical program, but as you can see it does have a console-only mode.

I can’t vouch for sound quality at all; in fact, I can’t even vouch that it works.

Call it a logistical issue, but I don’t have a second person online that I can test it with, in the immediate future. 😕

So it may be a few weeks before I can actually try it out fully. But I intend to.

At present, if I need Skype-like services, I unfortunately use Skype. And while it is more or less the gold standard for Internet voice, I am not a huge fan.

If linphone can provide a similar function at or around the same quality, I’d be overjoyed to switch. More news at 11.

geoiplookup: Another very simple tool

Next contender for the simplest-but-still-useful award … geoiplookup.

That’s not my real IP address, by the way. I stole that off a random web page. 😈

But in the tradition of groups and a few other one-shot, one-line tools, geoiplookup returns a general geographic location for an IP address.

I don’t know how useful that could be; after all, saying an address is located in the U.S. is only one or two steps down from saying “it’s on Planet Earth.” 🙄

Still, I can imagine this might be useful if you’re tracing Internet activity, or you want to know whose jurisdiction you’re in, according to your IP address.

But that’s about all I can think of. Perhaps there is another kung-fu master way to use this, and I just lack the insight.

Part of geoip in Arch, geoip-bin in Debian.