Alec Saunders SquawkBox

The NY Times published a story on the Mosquito Ringtone (also known as Teen Buzz) this morning. Allegedly inaudible to adults, this 17Khz ringtone has become popular among teens looking to be able to send and receive text messages surreptitiously in class. They even included a sample of the ringtone, so you could determine for yourself whether it's audible or not.

Well, I had no trouble hearing it, and according to the convenient chart provided (reproduced at left), at the age of 42 most people my age can't hear anything beyond 13Khz. Apparently, I am more youthful than I thought…

Wondering what I could hear, I took a quick trip to the NCH Swift Sound website, and downloaded the NCH Tone Generator application. This little tool is used by audio engineers to generate various different kinds of tones ranging from square waves to pink noise to sine waves, and a bunch more. I generated a four different sets of tones at 15Khz, 16Khz, 17Khz, and 18Khz and listened to them, comparing them with the mosquito. The mosquito is a very dirty tone, with lots of noise in it. Perhaps that's because it's been converted to MP3, or perhaps it's not a pure sine wave. In any case, while the allegedly 17Khz mosquito tone is quite audible, I had difficulty hearing a true 17Khz sine wave. The 18Khz tone was inaudible. You can listen to all four WAV files for yourself and do your own comparison. I recommend not turning the volume way up. Despite the fact that they are nearly inaudible, they are still very high energy sound, and my ears were sore after several listenings.

• Mosquito
• 15102 Hz pure sine wave
• 16000 Hz pure sine wave
• 16961 Hz pure sine wave
• 17959 Hz pure sine wave

Related links: ringtone

I’m not sure who’s behind it, but there’s a new Ottawa Bloggers site up.  Thin on content at the moment, but that’s OK.  I just found out that there’s a meetup on July 19th at the Clocktower Brew Pub.  Woo hoo!

Overheard at EBay Devcon: a pending, big Tuesday announcement at EBay Live.  Andy thinks they’re going to announce the worldwide integration of Skype Click to Call within the EBay portal.  It makes a ton of sense to do that, from a strategy perspective, but is it a big announcement?  Other possibilities: a big partnership announcement, an acquisition, or a tight Paypal / Skype integration.  Or, perhaps the announcement will be a tight Paypal / EBay / Skype integration.  Imagine looking at an item on EBay, Skyping the vendor, and concluding the transaction by pressing the pay button in Skype.

Exciting stuff!

I’ve been working on configuring TrixBox, the new name for Asterisk@Home, using Ward Mundy’s excellent guide.  I have to say that TrixBox is nice!  But it still doesn’t prevent you from doing stupid things, which Ward points out in this sidebar:

ATTN: “Type A” Males. With apologies to our female readers, let me chat privately for a moment with the guys. If you have a wife (and want to keep her) or if you have teenage daughters (and want to avoid being killed in your sleep), you’d better get most of this PBX design right if you plan to use Asterisk to replace your existing home phone system. Otherwise, the day after you install your new system, a typical discussion with your spouse will begin with something like this: “What was wrong with our old phones that just rang when someone called and I could actually hear what they were saying when I answered?” With that caveat in mind, let’s jump right in to freePBX.

Too true…