aaron42net

6 ms·

1.
by aaron42net 11d ago
The booth now is shut down for the year. And I have some stats to share: For 2026 the booth was setup from Sunday, August 30 around 1pm to Sunday, September 6th at 6am, but was broken for a little over a day starting Thursday afternoon due
2.
by aaron42net 15d ago
Fixed this. Thanks for the report.
3.
by aaron42net 16d ago
I've implemented this. There's no random function with voip.ms, but there are time-based rules. So it'll play the Matrix easter egg about 1/90th of the day after no answer.
4.
by aaron42net 16d ago
Currently, it looks like I have it configured to allow all destinations that are $0.40/minute or less with voip.ms's "value" routing. This is enough to call all numbers in ~120 countries and some numbers (usually landli
5.
by aaron42net 16d ago
That was the look I was going for, but the base is actually 1" plywood with a 45 degree bevel and rounded corners, painted with a few coats of a grey deck paint. There are 6 massive bolts holding the booth pedestal to the base. Assem
6.
by aaron42net 17d ago
No worries. I'm happy you found it interesting enough to share, and that others found it interesting enough to upvote and ask questions about. The single phone line was mostly at capacity with the /r/BurningMan crowd trying
7.
by aaron42net 17d ago
Last year, it was roughly 2/3 outbound vs 1/3 inbound, based on total talk time in the 6.5 days it was set up. There were 1,460 outbound calls successfully made to 835 different numbers in 23 countries, with a total talk time of 3
8.
by aaron42net 17d ago
I've had to replace the handset (mic and speaker) and the LEDs in the sign a few times since 2013, but I've mostly left the hardware alone otherwise except switching to Starlink in 2022. Until then, it got Internet via Burning Man
9.
by aaron42net 17d ago
It's ~$13/year to keep the same phone number, and <= $0.01/minute for all incoming calls and any outgoing calls to North America. Most of the cost comes from outgoing international calls, whose price varies (see https:&#
10.
by aaron42net 17d ago
The basics are that it's using a cheap VoIP adapter that you'd plug a classic touch-tone phone into, allowing it to make phone calls over the Internet through a low-cost telco provider called voip.ms. Here's a list they maint
11.
by aaron42net 17d ago
Anything or nothing. One of my favorites is to ask the person what's the most amazing thing they've seen that day, and you'll likely get widely varying answers given where they are. But you could also call and try to sell som
12.
by aaron42net 17d ago
It has changed a bit in recent years, but there's still only very spotty cell service at Burning Man. Enough people can figure out how to look up a phone number that this phone still dials out thousands of times during the week. The b
13.
by aaron42net 17d ago
Yes, that wouldn't be hard with the normal voip.ms call routing. But my intent was for it to be as visually and functionally identical as possible to a phone booth you would've found on a street corner a few decades ago, just in a
14.
by aaron42net 17d ago
I figured out where the bad street name came from; it's apparently a Google AI Search hallucination. It's apparently what I get for not clicking through to read the relevant page on Burning Man's site.
15.
by aaron42net 17d ago
A little of both. It was popular enough off of a Reddit post last year that people were hearing a lot of busy signals. I thought it might entertain some folks to see just how busy the phone has been in the last hour.
16.
by aaron42net 17d ago
Sadly, not easily. The voip.ms API can show me that the phone is logged in, and I can poll the phone bill ("call detail records") but that only shows calls after they've completed. But there isn't anything available fo
17.
by aaron42net 17d ago
The only data I collect is my phone bill, and the only thing I do with it show hourly stats on the site and a summary of calls at the end of the event.
18.
by aaron42net 17d ago
I’ve been asked repeatedly to record/transcribe calls, and this has been my stance. Let’s just let two people enjoy a private conversation.
19.
by aaron42net 17d ago
voip.ms. They were the cheapest I could find when I built this in 2013, and they’ve worked just fine since.
20.
by aaron42net 17d ago
I think I've heard of at least a few groups dropping free-to-use phone booths in rural areas without much cell service, sans any form of revenue.
21.
by aaron42net 17d ago
Thanks for the report. Fixed.
22.
by aaron42net 17d ago
My phone booth is definitely not the first out there. Brad's was there at least 2004-2006, and this one's been out most years since 2013.
23.
by aaron42net 17d ago
I ripped the coin-aware guts out of a pay phone I bought from Craigslist, and replaced them with a basic touch-tone board, then hooked that up to a voice-over-IP adapter so it can make calls over the Internet. All of that is powered via po
24.
by aaron42net 17d ago
This phone is my project. I'm happy to answer questions.
25.
by aaron42net 1y ago
Cloudflare uses JA3 and now JA4 TLS fingerprints, which are hashes of various TLS handshake parameters. https://github.com/FoxIO-LLC/ja4/blob/main/technical_details... has more details on how that works
26.
by aaron42net 2y ago
Will Prowse's favorite large panels are cheaper than that, including a 370w bifacial for $111 each in small quantities: https://signaturesolar.com/all-products/solar-panels/ Related video: https://
27.
by aaron42net 5y ago
By default, many compilers include things like local filesystem paths, build server hostnames, or build timestamps into their binary artifacts. These will obviously differ build-to-build. Even without that, it's possible to accidental
28.
by aaron42net 5y ago
Over the years, I've had direct knowledge of or involvement with maybe a dozen or so events that have ended up in the mainstream news. And in almost every case it has been inaccurate in some way, sometimes getting basic facts wrong an
29.
by aaron42net 5y ago
On cell networks, video content is by far the largest consumer of bandwidth. And the default for video generally is to auto-adjust the resolution to the highest quality that the network supports. This kind of sucks, since bandwidth is a s
30.
by aaron42net 5y ago
The default region for global services including https://console.aws.amazon.com is us-east-1, but there are usual regional alternatives. For example: https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com It would probably be clea

More ›