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I converted a rotary phone into a meeting handset
- WesolyKubeczek 1y agoIf you use such a thing on a regular kind of meeting that happens over zoom or similar, your arm will atrophy and fall off from having to hold that thing for the duration. The only remedy I see is to give everyone such a contraption and make it mandatory.
- BoxOfRain 1y agoThis would be an excellent way to make sure the standup stays terse, we could even put lead weights in the handsets to further increase this virtue.
- sokoloff 1y agoNB: Many of these older phones already came with metal weights insides to give a feeling of more substance to them. Not always in the handset, though it wouldn’t surprise me if some did have them.
- dylan604 1y agoUsually, the base of the phone itself was a sturdy metal plate. So while not the handset itself, the phone unit was usually a pretty decent self defense weapon candidate as was widely displayed in many a fight scene in movies from the time.
- phantasmish 1y agoThey make those shoulder-rest addons for phone handsets. Not too bad to use for extended periods with one of those, with both hands free.
- wffurr 1y agohttps://www.etsy.com/listing/631698424/vintage-rest-a-phone-from-itt-push?ref=elp_anchor_listing https://www.etsy.com/listing/631698424/vintage-rest-a-phone-...
- jon-wood 1y agoBack in the day when phones of this style were the only ones available we learned to hold the handset between our shoulder and our ear, leaving both hands free for other things.
- WesolyKubeczek 1y agoCue neck pain
- bluGill 1y agoThat was one of the things they considered when they designed phones. A lot of money was spent on ergonomics getting this "right". Of course we now know a lot more about ergonomics today, but they did the best they could and did a great job considering.
- pimlottc 1y agoThat’s why you’d get the big foamy cushion you could stick on the back so you could rest it on your shoulder
- nkrisc 1y agoThere were countless products available when I was a kid that were meant to make holding a handset between your ear and shoulder comfortable.
- villgax 1y agoSomeone please make a Moto Razr form factor and snap bluetooth device so I can keep my big and costly device in my bag and use it only when I actually need to.
- pvtmert 1y agolove the hangup part. so, i can finally "rage quit" the meeting that discusses 99th revision of a doc where a comma should be added here or there.
- 6c696e7578 1y agopkill -9 -f '(chrome|firefox)' is my rage quit, it's like hanging up but hitting the keys on the keyboard as hard as you'd throw the phone down
- Cthulhu_ 1y agoYou can quit anyway, just say "I've given you write permission, I trust you"
- ipython 1y agoI enjoyed the llm generated rotary phone image which had no “3” position but two “8”’s
- thih9 1y agoThe author did too: > Rest assured, though, the image is almost exactly what the phone looks like, except with a bit more 8 and a bit less 3.
- voidUpdate 1y agoI enjoy how this article shows the issues with both image generation models and language models
- egorfine 1y agoI like this guy's optimism of letting AI create a USB sound card out of a microcontroller from scratch.
- abound 1y agoProbably not a bad litmus test for current and future generations of LLMs though, I'd be curious to try it out on the latest crop.
- bluGill 1y agoOnly so long as nobody knows you are using it. Soon as anything becomes a metric people with game it.
- stavros 1y agoIt got really close! Audio played, it was just crackly/poppy. The microphone didn't work, though.
- thih9 1y ago> Half an hour and fifty dollars later, I realized I had spent fifty dollars on this, and that this was not sustainable because, if anything, the code was getting more and more buggy the more Claude fixed it. Off topic, this has been my experience with AI so often that it prevents me from exploring AI uses more. I liked Cursor’s “auto” plan but that now seems gone. I’d happily switch to a provider that offers a similarly “unlimited” usage.
- wongarsu 1y agoIt's difficult to offer unlimited usage of something that's so expensive to run. OP could have used a $20/month Claude or Cursor plan for "unlimited" usage within their quota had they been willing to use a different model than the $75/Million Token Opus 4
- stavros 1y agoI would have, had I realized how much it would cost.
- fuzzfactor 1y agoWell if cost is an object, there's always the quick & easy way :) >Vintage Retro 3.5Mm Telephone Handset https://www.amazon.com/Telephone-Receiver-Radiation-Microphone-Computers/dp/B0C74QXNWQ?th=1 https://www.amazon.com/Telephone-Receiver-Radiation-Micropho...
- stavros 1y agoFor an update, Codex has been massively better for me. I should probably give it another go, especially now with Codex Max, as it has been much better at not getting stuck like this. Give it a go if you get the chance, although with the general caveat that people have massively different experiences with LLMs, for some reason. I think maybe it has to do something with the prompting style, my hypothesis is that some people's prompting styles fit certain LLMs better. I don't know how else to explain the fact that my very experienced friends prefer Sonnet to Codex, for example, whereas I had the opposite experience.
- Medox 1y ago> Since I didn’t want to make any permanent changes to the phone, I didn’t want to remove these tabs, or to solder anything onto them. I just wanted to connect a cable to them in the easiest way possible. Same here but I want to go for a xilink bluetooth adapter and maybe even sacrifice and old smartphone with a separate sim. Not sure if the AI stuff will work but it seems possible….
- stavros 1y agoI've got you: https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-saga/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-saga/
- a022311 1y agoInteresting how 10 years later we saw an actual cellphone with this color...
- stavros 1y agoDid we? Which one?
- toast0 1y agoI had a Blu Win HD in basically that color: https://www.meetgadget.com/gadget/71500/BLU+Win+HD/photos/img/ad8c5a03c1411ab967755e22497a4aa5.jpg https://www.meetgadget.com/gadget/71500/BLU+Win+HD/photos/im... Although, that's contemporaneous with your post.
- stavros 1y agoInteresting, I didn't know of this!
- a022311 1y agoThe latest iPhone is pretty close I think.
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- eniac111 1y agohttps://petrovs.info/post/2023-01-12-shaiba/ https://petrovs.info/post/2023-01-12-shaiba/ This is my USB rotary dial. It's always fun with the young people when I bring it to IT conferences.
- nirav72 1y agoI bet the reaction was similar to what my teenage kids had when I showed them some VHS tapes I found in storage.
- dxdm 1y agoWhat was their reaction like, for those of us who don't have teenagers at home to repeat the experiment on?
- dfxm12 1y agoIt might have been similar to your reaction when you saw (depending on your age): a floppy disk (3.5") a floppy disk (5.25") a floppy disk (8")
- dxdm 1y agoI'm flattered, but you're only speculating, and at least for me this is not helpful. It does not tell me what their reaction was, which is a little sad, because I am curious what happens when somebody for whom Facebook is ancient tech encounters video cassettes. FWIW, I thought 8 inch floppies were weirdly big, but that's just a different form factor. It was normal to use floppies, tape or vinyl records for data and media storage. These days things are magically beamed through the sky in the most normal fashion. I think video tapes may seem a little weirder than just a larger box.
- dxdm 1y ago(The person I asked originally replied while I was typing the above. Their reply is in a sibling comment to my original question.)
- H1BCurryChef 1y ago[flagged]
- jjkaczor 1y agoInteresting - summer 2024 I picked-up an old rotary, my plan is to make it ring when a "insert-corporate-instant-messaging/voip/meeting" application call comes in... But time, no time...
- shermantanktop 1y agoThere’s almost always time, as in wall clock time. It’s usually energy and attention that is in limited supply.
- stavros 1y agoI like to say that everyone has the same 24 hours a day, it's a matter of priorities.
- sebastianconcpt 1y agoThe feeling of the hang up is so satisfying. An important piece of UX.
- stavros 1y agoPlus the sound through the handset sounds like nostalgia!
- foobarian 1y agoSince you didn't modify the original phone, I wonder if the oldschool dialing way of digit-banging would work. For each digit N, you hit the hangup button N times, pause, then go to next digit. Used to do that on our family's Pupin that looks like this one [1] [1] https://in.pinterest.com/pin/rare-vintage-pupin-bakelite-rotary-phone-1960s-mid-century-decor-in-2025--4595993861985110016/ https://in.pinterest.com/pin/rare-vintage-pupin-bakelite-rot...
- stavros 1y agoNo, the hangup rocker goes to another GPIO than the dialing rocker in the rework.
- ThePowerOfFuet 1y ago>For each digit N, you hit the hangup button N times, pause, then go to next digit N+1 times for each digit N. The digit 1 was two clicks of the hookswitch, and the digit 0 was eleven.
- stavros 1y agoWas it? I've dialed like that a few times and I always clicked N times. Here's the code for the phone, BTW, as I forgot to include it in the article: https://github.com/skorokithakis/dialogue/blob/master/src/main.cpp https://github.com/skorokithakis/dialogue/blob/master/src/ma...
- foobarian 1y agoI remember it being N at least in ex-Yu. But now that I think about it I forget if it was a reverse-click i.e. the pulse was created by releasing the pressure plate briefly. In that case we'd have a fencepost thing and there would be N+1 physical presses maybe
- jtwaleson 1y agoVery cool but I think my wireless bluetooth one is even cooler ;) https://blog.waleson.com/2024/10/bakelite-to-future-1950s-rotary-phone.html https://blog.waleson.com/2024/10/bakelite-to-future-1950s-ro... It actually supports using the rotary dial to call phone numbers on your smartphone.
- stavros 1y agoI think my full-blown mobile rotary phone is EVEN cooler: https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-saga/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-saga/ It actually makes calls itself and has a SIM.
- jtwaleson 1y agook you win
- xhkkffbf 1y agoSomeone should make a Bluetooth box that outputs to a standard phone connector so any standard phone would work. Has anyone done that?
- kleiba 1y agoRelevant Seinfeld bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvTYSnIxb-k&t=54s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvTYSnIxb-k&t=54s
- freedomben 1y agoNeat! On a mostly serious note, I went looking to buy a handset that just plugs in via USB and is a normal speaker/microphone, and I was quite surprised there wasn't anything like that out there, at least not that I could find. Am I the only one that wants something like this? Does anybody know where to get one?
- syUchs 1y agothere is accually a marketing guy (founded competeitor to redbull in germany) who mad this comercially. https://herbworld.com/en/products/retro-telephone-red https://herbworld.com/en/products/retro-telephone-red
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- neilv 1y agoSome of those old phones are nicely slammable. What's even more bulletproof are vintage street payphones. Nothing keeps a daily standup call on track like a payphone atmosphere of being on the run. ("Quick, what's sprint status and blockers?! We've got 60 seconds before they complete the trace!") Add an accelerometer, and you can detect when the handset is hanging from the armored payphone cable, because they dropped it as they ran away. Trigger dial tone sound, to mark end of meeting. A variation on this theme is using a "burner" flip phone for meetings, so that you can end each one by snapping the phone in half, and stomping the pieces on the ground. Which is cathartic, but less environmentally sustainable.