Apropos of nothing in particular... that brings back a memory (I used to dispatch for a 911 center in the 910 area code). You get some weird stuff in 911 centers sometimes (go figure, right?). In this case, the thing that sticks in my mind is this payphone that used to be on Bald Head Island by the gazebo. It apparently developed some sort of intermittent fault (possibly due to exposure to salt air, but who really knows?) where it would occasionally call 911 on its own. Or at least that seemed to be the case. We'd occasionally get a call from it, with no one speaking on the other end, and we'd send BHI public safety out there and they wouldn't find anybody around it.
Now you might speculate that it was kids playing or something, but based on the time(s) of the calls, the demographics of the island, etc. we always believed it was just some sort of phone malfunction.
Wild! I wonder if the line was shorting out and pulse-dialing random numbers, and it just happened to be 911 sometimes, but that's a total shot in the dark. (I vaguely thought payphones had some kind of special connection to the CO, not like a normal phone line you can just DTMF or pulse dial on, but maybe that's made up.)
That was my first thought. In NZ, 911 has redirected to our emergency number 111 for about 25 years now, but before that, 911 led to a recorded message telling you to hang up and dial 111. I found this out by getting there by accident by pressing the hang-up button a lot of times quickly (for curiosity reasons). In NZ pulse coding for 911 is 1 pulse, then 9 pulses, then 9 again (our rotary dials going the other way is why we use an emergency number starting with 1). I probably pressed the hang-up button once, then decided to press it a bunch more times.
(I vaguely thought payphones had some kind of special connection to the CO, not like a normal phone line you can just DTMF or pulse dial on, but maybe that's made up.)
FWIW, at one time (relative to here in the US at least) there were at least two different major "kinds" of payphones. COCOTS (Customer Owned Coin Operated Telephones)[1] and what I call (for lack of a better term) "telephone company payphones". The latter being owned and controlled by the local telco. Part of the difference is how signaling works. For a COCOT, it is the case that the line is a plain jane line, that you could - ahemcough theoretically cough - beige box onto and dial calls using DTMF or pulse dialing. For those phones, the "magic" that made it a "pay" phone was inside the phone itself. For the "telephone company payphones" the line was configured differently and tones were sent in-band over the line to tell the switch that the coins had been deposited. This is the idea behind the old "red box" notion of recording the coin tones and playing them back to get free calls.
So yeah, a COCOT line could almost certainly be subject to something like random shorts being interpreted as pulse dialing and could possibly call 911. For a telephone company payphone I'm less sure if those supported pulse dialing or not. The lack of coin tones shouldn't matter since calls to 911 are always free, but I'm not sure if the line was different in other ways as well, or not.
Which one the BHI phone was, I never knew. But this was in the late 90's and by then a lot of the old skool telephone company payphones had disappeared in favor of COCOT's so if I had to guess, I'd guess it was a COCOT.
I do IT support for a 911 center. We get about one of these per month coming from landlines on the ILEC's old copper cable plant.
On one serendipitous occasion the fault came from a school district I also support. The fault came from a contingency landline kept around in case the VoIP phone system lost digital PSTN connectivity. I was able to plug-in to the line w/ a butt set and hear clicky, buzzy, nightmarishly bad PSTN sounds thru it.
We turned it over to the ILEC and they "fixed" it. Given the number of "roadkill" splice pedestals I see in my area I feel pretty confident the ILEC isn't doing any maintenance of the copper cable plant at all. (It makes me pretty irritated, considering the favorable tax subsidies they received to build it.)
Given the number of "roadkill" splice pedestals I see in my area I feel pretty confident the ILEC isn't doing any maintenance of the copper cable plant at all.
Yep. In a number of places the old ILEC's have publicly declared their intention to deprecate the old copper based PSTN. In other areas, they seem to be practicing a sort of "malicious neglect" and just letting it decay on the vine, to avoid spending money on maintenance.
It's unrelated (as far as I know) but in an interesting bit of synchronicity, a BHI public safety officer died under somewhat mysterious/controversial circumstances somewhere in that area. It was a few years after I moved out of the area and I'm not familiar with all of the details.
I'd say not, since they also have reviews of UI that the site is exhibiting, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
The curator of the site is Fey Vercuiel, who apparently has done UI/UX on some AAA games, so it's not exactly nobody, and besides, I think the main site stands on its own fairly well.
There are also a lot of categories you can explore. I think for this kind of site, having clear examples of something you already have in mind as inspiration can help in ideation as a jumping off point, and having a site to share that context with others to collaborate is useful to me, and perhaps to you?
The naviagation is kind of broken, so you have to click on the menu headings as links instead of expanding them, since the contents flow behind the content in the foreground for some reason.
I posted it because I was reminded of this fictional map UI when I saw this actually existing map UI on these AR glasses I saw today:
> I've waited 10 years for Glasses like this – Even Realities G1 [video]
What is 'blog spam'? Someone can write a blog post and post it here if they deem it relevant. The community then decides through voting whether or not it is worth our attention no?
This isn't Reddit where everyone is allergic to self-promotion.
If this is blog spam, everything is. The disappointment sinks in when you realize that they are people who are waiting for things rather than trying to create functional equivalents.
For sure we are getting toys like that by next xmass. I legit going into my parts bin to see if I can wipe something up to stick in a teddy bear right now... Might not have movement, but a talking teddy bear is fun little project.
will I think the devkit on our website will speed up your project. And if you would like extra parts (like a servo) for a moving teddy head, I am happy to send it to you free of charge. email me at akash at starmoon dot app
Started with nginx proxy with rules to cache base on url/params. Wanted more control over it and explored lua/redis apis, and opted to build a app to do be a little more smart for what i wanted. Extra ec2 cost is negligible compared to cache savings.
Yes!
It's amazing how many things you can do with lua in nginx.
I had a server that served static websites where the files and the certificates for each website were stored in a bucket.
Over 20k websites with 220ms overhead if the certificate wasn't cached.
There's always gullible marks. You could just tell them to open the web developer tools for their browser instead of pushing predatory products, though.
You think they are doing this from NK ip blocks/asn? Their physical links are more or less enemy of enemy with US, so they have no incentive to block. Its impossible to keep them off the internet.
I imagine pretty easily. They likely don’t have to find it, nothing gets dug in North Korea without US watching it via satellite. Chinas air defenses likely don’t exist in North Korea.
I have no doubt the US has plans to cut them (and probably anyone else you can imagine) off in the event of war.
It's probably of higher intelligence value to let them connect and intercept everything than it is to cut them off and not know what's going on. If you look at their border with China, it's only tens of meters from fairly populated areas, so setting up high bandwidth microwave links wouldn't be hard. Also bombing a sovereign nation is an act of war and comes with consequences.
reply