4 ms·

I set up a little neighbourhood pbx this year on an oracle cloud always free instance. Took a couple of days. Any family can buy a WiFi-enabled office phone an

I set up a little neighbourhood pbx this year on an oracle cloud always free instance. Took a couple of days. Any family can buy a WiFi-enabled office phone and I’ll set up an extension for them. It’s working great! My six year old had a 15 minute chat with classmate while we were making dinner today; they have arranged a play date for next Monday. A couple of weeks ago a 5 year old invented prank calls. Every now and then the phone will ring and we’ll pick up and she’ll sing a a couple of lines out of Frozen before hanging up. It’s made our community much closer.

stronglikedan 4mo ago
Sadly, all the busybodies in my community would make this unbearable, since they'd have direct lines to people instead of having to wait to see them outside to complain to them.
- jagged-chisel 4mo ago
  I mean, you’re not required to answer. Nor to have the ringer on. Nor to have the phone active …
bitwize 4mo ago
Well it beats asking for Amanda Hugankiss. That's really cool. Recently I had the fantasy of setting up a PBX here in the house and bringing back "dial up internet" for me and my wife, as a doomscrolling mitigation measure. Probably won't work though, as we each have smartphones plus she wants her streamers to play back full-fat 4K.
- jon-wood 4mo ago
  You could absolutely set up some traffic shaping on a router which drops social media sites down to 56kbps while allowing Netflix to use as much bandwidth as it needs to stream in 4K.
picofarad 4mo ago
CenturyLink started on somebody's porch. The original party line was tied together with barbed wire fencing between farms. I also run a PBX. and a PBX behind a VPN firewall.
patrickdavey 4mo ago
Can you point to an article on how to do this? This sounds _amazing_
- scrappyjoe 4mo ago
  Here’s my ansible playbook if you want to give it a go. https://github.com/riazarbi/homephone https://github.com/riazarbi/homephone

stronglikedan 4mo ago

Sadly, all the busybodies in my community would make this unbearable, since they'd have direct lines to people instead of having to wait to see them outside to complain to them.

jagged-chisel 4mo ago
I mean, you’re not required to answer. Nor to have the ringer on. Nor to have the phone active …

bitwize 4mo ago

Well it beats asking for Amanda Hugankiss. That's really cool. Recently I had the fantasy of setting up a PBX here in the house and bringing back "dial up internet" for me and my wife, as a doomscrolling mitigation measure. Probably won't work though, as we each have smartphones plus she wants her streamers to play back full-fat 4K.

jon-wood 4mo ago
You could absolutely set up some traffic shaping on a router which drops social media sites down to 56kbps while allowing Netflix to use as much bandwidth as it needs to stream in 4K.

picofarad 4mo ago

CenturyLink started on somebody's porch. The original party line was tied together with barbed wire fencing between farms. I also run a PBX. and a PBX behind a VPN firewall.

patrickdavey 4mo ago

Can you point to an article on how to do this? This sounds _amazing_

scrappyjoe 4mo ago
Here’s my ansible playbook if you want to give it a go. https://github.com/riazarbi/homephone https://github.com/riazarbi/homephone