Review: Ooma - Take 2

Almost two years ago, I wrote about my experience with Ooma and how disappointed I was with it. I decided to give it another chance and did so in June. After 2 months of testing, my wife and I were satisfied with the voice quality and features, so I ported our number over to Ooma and dropped the $62 a month landline.

The price for Ooma can't be beat even if you pay the $120 a year for Ooma premier which I chose to do. The premier service got me a free number port, enhanced caller ID (without this you just get the number and it matches it with your phone book to show the name), a second phone number/line, voicemail sent to email and text, Google Voice extensions and ability to forward all calls to a cell phone if my Internet connection goes down.

The basic question is if the voice quality is good and is it reliable. So far voice quality has been much better than it was last time I tried. This could be due to newer hardware, a different router, or any other number of factors. We've had a few blips, but overall the quality is more than acceptable. Reliability is a little different story. Last week they had a major outage that lasted a few hours that was blamed on a power outage. It made me question my decision, but considering we have cell phones for backup, it wasn't a hug concern.

Pretty much everything else is gravy to me. We had a basic answering machine, so voicemail that sends to email is a great feature, but takes the excitement out of coming home and seeing the light flashing on the answering machine!

I picked up a Telo handset a little over a week ago with the intention of using it as a work line. The phone would allow me to be on a call without tying up the home number. After a few missteps setting of Google Voice extensions, I managed to set it up such that the handset is my work line for both incoming and outgoing calls. When I call out, it shows my Google Voice number. The handset is mediocre in that it is slow in scrolling through the numbers and doesn't have a headset jack. However, it is good enough for my needs. I've used the speakerphone for a number of conference calls without any problems.

The only gotcha with any VOIP solution is what happens when the power woes out. I plugged my router, cable modem, Ooma box, and cordless phone base station into a UPS. That should be good enough for a few minutes. With cell phones easily reachable, this isn't a big concern.

Pros

• Inexpensive even with the premier service and $3.50 in monthly fees.
• Voicemail works well and sending messages to email is useful.
• Google Voice extensions makes it convenient to have a work phone.
• Decent voice quality.

Cons

• Recent outage is a little disconcerting.
• Steep initial cost, but cost recovery can happen in about 7 months.
• Telo Handset is a mediocre cordless phone.

Summary
For those looking to keep a home phone, but want to reduce cost, Ooma is currently a decent option. As long as Ooma stays in business and the voice quality remains good, I'll be happy. With the initial cost of $180 + tax (from Costco), the $120 Premier service for the year and $3.50 per month the first year cost is around $350. I will be able to recoup the entire first year cost in less than 6 months. After the first year with the premier service, I'll be paying about $14 a month which is $48 a month less than I was paying.

Changing my Password

Anyone that works in a company that accepts credit cards has to deal with periodic password changing as well as a few other issues dealing with passwords. This is due to PCI Data Security Standard, a document that specifies how companies handle security for credit cards and related information. For instance, your password has to be a certain length, have certain characters in it, must be changed at certain intervals, and your account must be locked after so many failed attempts.

The last one is the one that got me the last time I changed my password. While I can remember my password, I have a number services/devices that automatically check for mail. I have my iPhone and my iPad both connected to my work account, as well as Outlook. This basically creates 7 connections (3 each for the iOS devices) and if my limit is less than 7, I get locked out almost immediately. So here's my process:

1. On iPhone, go into Settings->Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Set Mail, Contacts and Calendars to Off for my work account.
2. On iPad, go into Settings->Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Set Mail, Contacts and Calendars to Off for my work account.
3. Quit Outlook on my Mac.
4. Open Keychain Access. Search for all work saved logins. Delete them.
5. Login to VPN.
6. Change password. (If you're locked out, call someone to fix it.)
7. Close Browser.
8. Launch Outlook. Enter password.
9. Launch Browser. Login to corporate site. Tell Safari to remember password.
10. Carefully change password on iPhone. Re-enable Mail, Contacts and Calendars.
11. Carefully change password on iPad. Re-enable Mail, Contacts and Calendars.

Protected PDFs are a waste of time

Today I had to electronically sign some documents and then the document was available to download as a PDF. Preview on the Mac wouldn't properly render it and required Adobe Reader. As I refuse to put that awful program on my machine, I tried to use VMWare Fusion with some PDF writers on it, tried printing to a Printopia printer, but everything failed. I finally put Adobe Reader on another machine, installed CUPS-PDF, played with a few options in Reader (told it to output as an image), and ended up with a 700 MB PDF that Preview could read! I then opened it in Preview and printed it to a PDF. I ended up with an 11 MB file that was had all the Adobe protection stripped out of it. I can't select text in the PDF as it is an image based PDF, but I didn't want it. I simply wanted a copy of the document in a format I could use with Paperless.

I love the PDF format, but I hate extensions like this that just make me go through hoops to get what I'm entitled to have. (I could have printed the 37 pages and scanned them back in, but that would be a waste of paper, not time because I spent more time with all my hoops.)

Energy conservation through guilt

The other day I received a letter from SDGE, my local power company giving me a run down of my electric and natural gas usage compared to 100 of my neighbors with similar house sizes. We aren't the most efficient, but we aren't the least efficient, either. Of course, there were tips in there on how to reduce consumption, but the letter is quite clever in making people a bit competitive to encourage them to conserve more.

I think we do a reasonable amount to conserve; we run our air conditioning a few times a year, we turn off lights, and I turn off a bunch of my computer equipment at the end of the day. However, can more be done? I was at Fry's last week getting a power strip to combine a bunch of other strips and picked up 2 little energy conservation helpers.

The first is a Belkin Conserve Socket which I bought not because of the energy savings aspect, but because I forget to unplug chargers for my RC car and helicopters. I am always afraid of leaving them when I'm not around as the warnings on the labels are pretty scary. Also, I had 2 chargers for my RC car melt and the batteries start overheating. This gadget should give me a little piece of mind.

The second was an APC 4 outlet surge protector with a timer. You basically set on and off times for it and it switches off power to the outlets. I was trying to figure out where to place it to handle a few chargers I have lying around (outlets are kind of scarce in my office) when today I figured out what to do with it.

Like a lot of geeks, I have a large collection of equipment centered around the TV. I have a Mac Mini for a media center, 2 El Gato EyeTVs, a Time Capsule, an Ooma, a cordless phone, a cable modem, 3 Squeezebox devices, 2 audio distribution units, 1 amplifier, 2 8 port gigabit switches, a Wii, a coax amplifier and a TV. With all that stuff, what could I have automatically turn off and what was consuming the most? While much of the equipment uses wall warts and uses a little power each, the big consumers are probably the audio distribution units, so I plugged those 2 into the timer surge protector as well as 2 other small devices. That takes care of cutting power to 4 devices. Next, I unplugged the amplifier I don't use.

Lastly, I have an APC UPS that has a master controlled outlet which shuts down power to 3 other outlets when the main device draws very little power. I set my Mac Mini as the master unit and used Energy Saver to set a schedule for it to shut down around 11:30 pm and wake up around 4:30 am in time to start processing TV shows that it recorded. Then I plugged in the EyeTVs and a hard drive into the controlled outlets. So of all the mess I have, I just set 8 devices to stop drawing power for at least 5 hours a day (the audio stuff I set to come on even later). While this isn't the end of my quest to reduce power consumption, it is a decent start.

I like the idea of the timer controlled power strips, so I may pick up a few more of those.

Too bad SDGE stopped sending the real time power consumption data to Google. I'll have to search to see if something is available as I have a smart meter and it would be neat to see if my efforts are doing something.