5 ms·

"Of course, no one wants to place phone calls by typing a lengthy command into their terminal" Are you kidding ? That is all I've ever wanted to do. I have b

by rsync 7y ago

"Of course, no one wants to place phone calls by typing a lengthy command into their terminal" Are you kidding ? That is all I've ever wanted to do. I have been asking, casually, for a "gnu-phoneutils" package for several years that would give us a small phone tooling suite ... I have largely built this out myself with twilio and, in some ways, it is no longer necessary given that I have built my own little mini-telco inside of twilio, but still ...

jdillaaa 7y ago
Can you provide more info on this Twilio mini-telco? I’ve been working on something similar to work around the lack of well supported libraries for telephony
- rsync 7y ago
  My phone uses a sim card from a verizon MVNO. I don't even know the phone number. "My" phone number was provisioned, and has always lived, in Twilio. I set up a simple call forward and SMS forward to my SIM number. When I land in a foreign country, I get a new sim card and just point the forwards to the new number. Easy. I wrote a shell script that allows me to SMS from the command line from my phone number. So I can SMS people from an airplane even though my handset is off. If I lost my handset I could still SMS you. It's also nice to have a proper date/time stamped SMS log that lives in /var/mail/sms ... I use this a lot. My favorite thing about all of this is that I have finally removed voicemail from my life. Hint: you need to tell your carrier, with star-71, to forward to a "black hole" number at the end of your call sequence, otherwise verizon will jump in and say "the wireless blah blah voicemail box that is not set up blah blah ...". So my twilio number rings for X seconds (whatever I set the timeout to) but then the call progresses to verizon, but verizon has been instructed with star-71 command to forward calls to a second number I set up in twilio that does nothing but hang up. That's my "black hole" number and you can insert that into the end of a lot of workflows like this. Calling has to be done with a voip app on your phone because, of course, you cannot call from your twilio number directly from your phone. Well, you could, if perhaps you called yourself and then set up some logic where you type in the phone number you really want and then twilio forwards you there, but I think it's easier to use a nice VOIP app ... I use groundwire, but whatever works. I might try to formalize all of this and present it at Signal next year ... there are a lot of other neat things you can do ....
  - bbmario 7y ago
    PLEASE. This is such an amazing topic for a presentation.
  - BillinghamJ 7y ago
    Have you tried using a Twilio Wireless SIM? You can then make actual calls directly through twilio systems
    - rsync 7y ago
      Yes, I have - and indeed that would solve a major usability issue - however I live in a ATT/Tmobile dead-zone and the Twilio SIMs are issued by T-Mobile ... So I have some weirdness in my workflow just to connect to VZW. Oh, btw - if you use a verizon MVNO, use US Mobile and not straighttalk because straighttalk does not allow tethering whereas US Mobile does ... EDIT: one more thing ... using a voip dialer instead of the native iOS dialer is a bit clunky but it also gives me the ability to dial from any of my twilio numbers. So I can pick my "from" number - either personal or rsync.net or (throwaway personal that we give to salespeople). So there is a pro/con involved in using a twilio SIM and the native dialer vs. using a voip dialer...
  - nexuist 7y ago
    Is this economical? As in, are you paying less in Twilio fees than you would for a similar telco plan?
    - rsync 7y ago
      I have no idea ... Certainly it costs some amount more because I pay for US Mobile (verizon MVNO) and then the twilio fees, but I think my monthly Twilio bill is negligible ...
    - jdillaaa 7y ago
      Hijacking here, I use a similar setup and the fees are way less than my Telco plan. Standard telco is basically only worth keeping for the Data plans.
  - 7y ago
bbmario 7y ago
Can you make calls with Twilio? Like, from my Headset to a Phone?
choward 7y ago
The only thing I would fix is the "lengthy" part. I want it to be a simple command (I suppose I could wrap it or alias it), but other than that it sounds perfect.
wicket 7y ago
unicsy_demo [1][2] is probably what you're looking for. It's packaged and available for Maemo Leste and postmarketOS, both of which run on the PinePhone. [1] https://pavelmachek.livejournal.com/139660.html https://pavelmachek.livejournal.com/139660.html [2] https://github.com/pavelmachek/unicsy_demo/ https://github.com/pavelmachek/unicsy_demo/
keverets 7y ago
You might want to check out jmp.chat ... it does SMS via XMPP and can place phone calls via SIP all on a fully free-software stack that you could modify and use independently if desired.
chriswarbo 7y ago
I've used an OpenMoko Freerunner as my sole phone for about 10 years. Their freesmartphone.org API is pretty nice: it uses a daemon (the v1 reference implementation used Python, I think v2 uses Vala) which accepts commands over DBus. There's a program called "cli-framework" for commandline interaction; it opens a Python terminal with a library that wraps the DBus API. I've not used the commandline for calls, but I have used it to read and delete SMS (when I'm too lazy to go and pick up the handset, so I SSH into it instead ;) ). One project I've not gotten round to yet is an answering machine, so calls are immediately answered and audible (via headset), and I can choose whether or not to "pick up". This looks like it would be easy enough with the freesmartphone.org API, some Python and GTK+. From what I can tell, this isn't possible on Android due to the API not allowing access to calls. Symbian allowed it, and it seems to have a few answering machine apps.

by rsync 7y ago

jdillaaa 7y ago

Can you provide more info on this Twilio mini-telco? I’ve been working on something similar to work around the lack of well supported libraries for telephony

rsync 7y ago
My phone uses a sim card from a verizon MVNO. I don't even know the phone number. "My" phone number was provisioned, and has always lived, in Twilio. I set up a simple call forward and SMS forward to my SIM number. When I land in a foreign country, I get a new sim card and just point the forwards to the new number. Easy. I wrote a shell script that allows me to SMS from the command line from my phone number. So I can SMS people from an airplane even though my handset is off. If I lost my handset I could still SMS you. It's also nice to have a proper date/time stamped SMS log that lives in /var/mail/sms ... I use this a lot. My favorite thing about all of this is that I have finally removed voicemail from my life. Hint: you need to tell your carrier, with star-71, to forward to a "black hole" number at the end of your call sequence, otherwise verizon will jump in and say "the wireless blah blah voicemail box that is not set up blah blah ...". So my twilio number rings for X seconds (whatever I set the timeout to) but then the call progresses to verizon, but verizon has been instructed with star-71 command to forward calls to a second number I set up in twilio that does nothing but hang up. That's my "black hole" number and you can insert that into the end of a lot of workflows like this. Calling has to be done with a voip app on your phone because, of course, you cannot call from your twilio number directly from your phone. Well, you could, if perhaps you called yourself and then set up some logic where you type in the phone number you really want and then twilio forwards you there, but I think it's easier to use a nice VOIP app ... I use groundwire, but whatever works. I might try to formalize all of this and present it at Signal next year ... there are a lot of other neat things you can do ....
- bbmario 7y ago
  PLEASE. This is such an amazing topic for a presentation.
- BillinghamJ 7y ago
  Have you tried using a Twilio Wireless SIM? You can then make actual calls directly through twilio systems
  - rsync 7y ago
    Yes, I have - and indeed that would solve a major usability issue - however I live in a ATT/Tmobile dead-zone and the Twilio SIMs are issued by T-Mobile ... So I have some weirdness in my workflow just to connect to VZW. Oh, btw - if you use a verizon MVNO, use US Mobile and not straighttalk because straighttalk does not allow tethering whereas US Mobile does ... EDIT: one more thing ... using a voip dialer instead of the native iOS dialer is a bit clunky but it also gives me the ability to dial from any of my twilio numbers. So I can pick my "from" number - either personal or rsync.net or (throwaway personal that we give to salespeople). So there is a pro/con involved in using a twilio SIM and the native dialer vs. using a voip dialer...
- nexuist 7y ago
  Is this economical? As in, are you paying less in Twilio fees than you would for a similar telco plan?
  - rsync 7y ago
    I have no idea ... Certainly it costs some amount more because I pay for US Mobile (verizon MVNO) and then the twilio fees, but I think my monthly Twilio bill is negligible ...
  - jdillaaa 7y ago
    Hijacking here, I use a similar setup and the fees are way less than my Telco plan. Standard telco is basically only worth keeping for the Data plans.
- 7y ago

bbmario 7y ago

Can you make calls with Twilio? Like, from my Headset to a Phone?

choward 7y ago

The only thing I would fix is the "lengthy" part. I want it to be a simple command (I suppose I could wrap it or alias it), but other than that it sounds perfect.

wicket 7y ago

unicsy_demo [1][2] is probably what you're looking for. It's packaged and available for Maemo Leste and postmarketOS, both of which run on the PinePhone. [1] https://pavelmachek.livejournal.com/139660.html https://pavelmachek.livejournal.com/139660.html [2] https://github.com/pavelmachek/unicsy_demo/ https://github.com/pavelmachek/unicsy_demo/

keverets 7y ago

You might want to check out jmp.chat ... it does SMS via XMPP and can place phone calls via SIP all on a fully free-software stack that you could modify and use independently if desired.

chriswarbo 7y ago

I've used an OpenMoko Freerunner as my sole phone for about 10 years. Their freesmartphone.org API is pretty nice: it uses a daemon (the v1 reference implementation used Python, I think v2 uses Vala) which accepts commands over DBus. There's a program called "cli-framework" for commandline interaction; it opens a Python terminal with a library that wraps the DBus API. I've not used the commandline for calls, but I have used it to read and delete SMS (when I'm too lazy to go and pick up the handset, so I SSH into it instead ;) ). One project I've not gotten round to yet is an answering machine, so calls are immediately answered and audible (via headset), and I can choose whether or not to "pick up". This looks like it would be easy enough with the freesmartphone.org API, some Python and GTK+. From what I can tell, this isn't possible on Android due to the API not allowing access to calls. Symbian allowed it, and it seems to have a few answering machine apps.