Berlin FAQ Blog

So, after years of procrastinating we finally get round to buying a cordless telephone because the bleatings of the existing telephone are not always audible throughout all corners of the PenguinSphere, and cordless telephones have long since entered the realm of "pile'm high and sell'm cheap". We now have a model which claims it has an operational modus of 300 metres, which is further than the outer limits of the PenguinNet, so it must be good.

Except... nowhere to plug the damn thing in. OK, mains electricity is not the problem, another extension cord won't make any difference. No, it is the rat's nest of cabling which emanates from the telephone socket which is the problem. You see, PenguinHQ has been online since pre-DSL days, which means ISDN, which means between the actual Deutsche Telekom socket and half-way sane telecoms equipment there is an ISDN Thingy, a DSL Splitter Thingy (or possibly the other way round, I haven't dared look down there for years) and an Analogue Converter Box Thingy (because ISDN-compatible equipment never really took off). Alas, the analogue converter box thingy only has an 'a' socket and a 'b' socket, which are already occupied by the Normal Telephone and Answering Machine, and the Fax Machine respectively. A frantic search through the Big Box of Cables'n'Stuff brings to light various items of Telecoms Socketry, but none which would allow the addition of a Secondary Telephone to the Primary Telephone, unless the Secondary Telephone could be persuaded to pretend to be an Answering Machine, but won't, though it did come with an alternative socket adapter which fits into no other socket I possess.. (If however you are in urgent need of a USB -> PS/2 converter however, please let me know, I seem to have an insane number of them).

Being a Technical Person, it doesn't take me long to find out that the Fax Machine has a socket which will connect to the Cordless Phone, and actually works without further modification, animal sacrifice etc. etc.. However, being ISDN, the Fax Machine has its own number, and by extension any attached item of telecoms equipment, which is pretty pointless because anyone actually wanting to talk to an inhabitant of the PenguinSphere would call on one of the other two numbers which ISDN provides. Alas, it appears impossible to persuade the Analogue Converter Box Thingy to work together with the Fax Machine in such a way so that Real Person telephone calls get passed on to Cordless Telephone and Non-Cordless-Telephone without having the Fax Telephone ring at the same time, which would rather invalidate the point of the whole operation, and makes a Whole Lot of Bloody Noise to Boot.

Through consultation of the Interweb I have learnt that it may be possible to attach two F-Machines to the same TAE socket, which might solve the problem via a trip to a specialist equipment store. In the meantime I recommend carrier pigeons should you have anything of import that the PenguinSphere should know, because in completely unrelated news I'm about to migrate some of the Penguin Legacy Domains to a new server, and I'm thinking it might just be easier to give up on the whole darn thing and buy a sheep farm somewhere.

Update thanks to Conrad I have now acquired a TAE NFF / 1 x RJ11 ("Western") adapter plug (that's another 10 Euros I won't see again) and the whole caboodle is now working as planned (though I should probably make some sort of diagram should we ever have to move).