I've been threatening to mess around with Asterisk for a while now — it's the voice-over-IP hotness at the moment. Well, with taxes finished unexpectedly early and a professional motivation for getting it under my belt, I took the plunge today. Signed up for a $5/month DIY account with BroadVoice, compiled the tarball (@Home is for the weak!) and immediately ran begging to the #asterisk IRC channel for help.

Well, I eventually got it figured out. Disappointingly, the text-to-speech project Festival is already installed under FC4, and not in a way that Asterisk can use. However, there's a handy little hack out there (bottom of this page) that lets you get away with generating then throwing away WAV files instead of actually streaming sound from the Festival server.

All of which is to say that, in a new feature that will doubtless make your life much richer and easier, you can now dial a phone number and have a robot read you the latest RSS headlines from this blog. I know, pretty useful. Give 202-318-0196 a ring if you want to hear what a wasted Saturday sounds like.

This may not stick around that long — it's just a proof-of-concept science project. And yes, I realize how stupid it is.