Germinal Center

Picnics in Paris

cjlee112 — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 03:42:00 +0000

We just returned from a week’s vacation in Paris. We rented a small studio apartment and thus ate out only for special occasions. In the meantime we dined lavishly every meal on delights from boulangeries, charcuterie, cheese shops, wine stores, farmer’s markets, etc. I’ve posted some pictures here.

We really enjoyed having picnics. We lived a few blocks away from a nice park (the park by the Sèvres-Babylone metro station), and would just walk there with a bag full of delicacies, a couple baguettes, and a bottle of wine. Our first picnic we started with

- various charcuterie from Gilles Véron (just around the corner) on fresh baguette as open faced sandwiches: fromage de tête; jambon persillé; pâté de compagne; terrine provençale.

- 2008 Brouilly

- slices of small cucumbers

- Selles-sur-Cher fromage de chêvre on baguette

- Kalamata olives

- “donut” peaches

- fresh cherries

- pain d’épices

We had great fun until they kicked us out of the park at closing time…

On another occasion we cooked at home: to the same basic starters listed above we added quiche aux poirreaux (from Schmid, a shop by the Gare de l’Est), a mushroom omelette, a 2006 Mont Louis, a cheese omelette made with a Emmenthaler-like cheese we brought with us from Sweden, and a dish concocted from fried zucchini, onions and potatoes.

Since we could eat cheaply and well most meals in our apartment, we could approach the few times we ate out as special occasions. This was a very nice way of doing things in an expensive city like Paris, and I think we’ll do this again in the future.

Postbot is cool!

cjlee112 — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 23:10:29 +0000

Postbot is an app for posting to wordpress from a Google Android phone. I am using it for this post. Hopefully I can post about books I want to recommend more easily this way, without firing up a computer…

Grandstream Budgetone 201 VOIP Phone Setup

germinalcenter — Tue, 26 May 2009 05:09:35 +0000

I’ve set up a VOIP phone — it just plugs into ethernet. Gives me a real telephone with zero monthly cost, a real phone number in my area code, and zero cost for receiving and making calls (via Google Voice). This phone costs $49 at Amazon, and works great with gizmo and Google Voice. Seems very reliable and has good audio quality. Here are the settings that work for me, so other people can get going easily — should take about 5 minutes to get everything set up! Hope this helps you…

Settings:

first, on your phone:
- Press menu button, down arrow, menu to see its IP address
Next on your computer, connected to the same network:

- point web browser at the phone by entering its IP number in the URL field
- factory default login is just “admin”

Click the Account tab and enter the following fields:
- SIP server: proxy01.sipphone.com
- SIP user ID: 1747xxxyyyy (i.e. enter your Gizmo phone number here)
- Authenticate ID: same as SIP user ID
- Authenticate password: enter your Gizmo password here
- local SIP port: 5060
- NAT traversal (STUN): Yes
- Send DTMF: via SIP INFO (only)

vocoders (this is just default…)
1. pcmu
2. pcma
3. g.723.1
4. g729a/b
5. g.726-32
6. iLBC
7. g.722
8. gsm

Click Update to enter these settings.

Click Advanced Settings tab:

Admin Password: choose a new password and enter it here, then don’t forget it!!
STUN server: stun01.sipphone.com:3478

Click Update to enter these settings.

Click Basic Settings:

Set your time zone.

Click Update to enter these settings.

Click Reboot to restart the phone with your new settings. Once the phone reboots, you should see a black square symbol in the upper left corner of the display. I believe this indicates successful login to Gizmo’s server.

Try calling the Gizmo echo-test number to see that everything is working fine: 1-747-474-3246.