Somehow it's turned into one of those really busy months, where I've been working on stuff more than anything else. Thing is, most of it isn't really worth talking about; not yet, anyway. Lifestyle maintenance is like that. It's not glamorous, interesting, or even all that fun, but it still has to get done, if only for the sake of one's mental health.
For starters, I've been trying to free up some room in my office (where I spend most of my days, if only because of my day job). Talking to someone a week or two ago about home …
In a previous post I talked about what I had to do to get a classic touch tone telephone (wow, I didn't know how much they were going for on the collector's market...) onto my home network with some scrounged parts and a Cisco ATA. This is all well and good, but the question then becomes, what do I do with it? How do I make it do something actually useful? Or failing that, something interesting?
I also mentioned in a previous post that I'd considered putting up a Project MF node at home but it seems like it'd be …
Note: The more I worked on this article, the more I realized that it needed to be split into two separate articles. There was more ground to cover here than I originally thought. This article covers configuring a travel router running OpenWRT as a gateway for an ATA, and a Cisco ATA. The Asterisk configuration stuff will come later.
As seems to happen during the time of the covid-19 plague, it's really easy to clear one's backlog of "wouldn't it be nice if" and household repair projects in a short period of time. I mean, hell, I recabled my server …
One of my holiday break hobby projects, a palate cleanser if you will, was reconditioning a classic Radio Shack touch tone dialer I'd picked up on eBay somewhen around Thanksgiving. They're retrotech to be sure, dating back to the days when the touch-tone dialing that we take for granted these days (so much so that we don't even hear them anymore because we use mobile phones) was actually pretty rare.
Note: A lot of the following history of telephony has been edited to reflect only the salient points for this article. Telephony experts out there will probably rankle a bit …
From time to time I carp about how generally lousy our bandwidth is out here. Verizon (our CLEC in the Bay Area) has all but given up on maintaining their infrastructure out here, aside from the bare minimum to keep the copper from turning to verdigris. They gave up on deploying fiber some years ago (local mirror) some years ago, and from the poking around I've done on their side of the fence, their general stance in the Bay Area appears to be "Get everyone on celllar so we can ignore …
You only need three people to make a blue box if you're standing around bored - two whistling at the proper pitches to make DTMF tones and a third to whistle in-band signaling tones. Finding someplace to whistle to is a bit trickier.
(Thanks, Lyssa and Jade! Anybody got an oscilloscope we can borrow?)
The SWAT team charged with the town of Lake Forest in Washington state was dispatched to the house of a local family after being informed that a heavily armed drug dealer had killed at least one individual and was in possession of a large stock of distributable drugs on the premises. As one would expect, they geared up for a full assault and hit the house like gang busters. There's one important fact which they didn't have at the time, and this fact made all the difference: The original 911 call that alerted police to this house was faked. Computer …
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