Installing a payphone in my house • Hacker News Board

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#121

Post by hnbad » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 9:22 AM UTC

jamal-kumar wrote: post #27

idontwantthis wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rewatched all 3 recently, and I have to say I don't remember why I and everyone else disliked the sequels so much. They are exciting, and tell a good story. I haven't watched the new one yet.

Ever watch the newest one they made? It's like baudrillardian banality taken to its logical extreme. The first half is literally a clip show. Comes off as a shitty superhero movie of now but with matrix characters

The movie is infinitely better if you understand it within its real world context.

The Wachowskis did not want to make another Matrix movie but the studio approached them and said that they would make the movie either way but they would be given full artistic freedom if they agreed. They basically had the choice of doing this themselves or letting the studio turn it into a soulless franchise detached from their own vision.

The movie is mostly an allegory for how the movie was created and why it shouldn't exist. Aside from mindless indulgence the ending is also giving a middle finger to the production company. The philosophy is dull because everything that needed to be said was already said so the only thing left to do is repeat it more blatantly for the audience in the back.

That doesn't mean it's a great movie and you can argue that a movie should be enjoyable without context, but for me knowing this context allowed me to enjoy it through that lens a lot more than I probably would have had I not come into this knowing this.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#122

Post by blangk » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 9:26 AM UTC

marzetti wrote: post #83

Thanks for this article and the comments. Reminds me of a trick we kids did in the early 60s (yeah, sorry) with the British 'phone box' pay phones. We called it 'tapping the phone', but it wasn't spy style listening. Passed from kid to kid the amazing trick was you could dial the number by tapping the handset (10 taps for zero, 9 taps for 9, ..) and the phone would ring the number but you didn't then have to 'press b…

We used to get the money back with a pretty reliable mechanical method, stuffing a flattened MacDonald's straw into the machine above the spare change slot and jiggling in and out. You needed a coin for the call but could return and re use it each time or even for the same call.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#123

Post by hnbad » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 9:29 AM UTC

jamal-kumar wrote: post #41

ck2 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do not watch the fourth. Not kidding. It's not worth the curiosity. Yes the 2nd and 3rd were great despite critics. The fourth is a "WTF who wrote this garbage money grab" the entire time, it's not even "fan service" because it destroys everything with poor writing and terrible acting, feels like someone was shouting "we'll fix it in post" after every first take rushing to the next shot to churn it out. Remember how…

I'm really of the opinion that they did that on purpose given the philosophical underpinnings of the original. Like, to make a point, because Warner Bros owned the rights to their franchise and were going to make some banal crap anyways, with or without the Wachowskis.

That's literally why.

Also 2 and 3 were mostly bad because releasing two part movies wasn't a thing at the time and thus the films had to be forced into (unsatisfying) single-movie narrative arcs despite having an obvious overarching narrative.

Re-watching 2 and 3 as a double feature years later makes them less of a trainwreck and more of a mildly underwhelming but watchable and solid sequel to a movie so good it was impossible to follow up on. It finishes the story, literally ends the universe it created and ties up the loose ends.

On the other hand 4 is the sequel that never should have been but ultimately exists to seal the franchise permanently shut because any attempt to build on it can only be read as a soulless cashgrab because there is now literally nothing left to tell. WB didn't want to let its IP die so the Wachowskis had to drive a stake through its heart and kiss it goodbye.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#124

Post by mihaic » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 9:31 AM UTC

hnbad wrote: post #121

jamal-kumar wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever watch the newest one they made? It's like baudrillardian banality taken to its logical extreme. The first half is literally a clip show. Comes off as a shitty superhero movie of now but with matrix characters

The movie is infinitely better if you understand it within its real world context. The Wachowskis did not want to make another Matrix movie but the studio approached them and said that they would make the movie either way but they would be given full artistic freedom if they agreed. They basically had the choice of doing this themselves or letting the studio turn it into a soulless franchise detached from their own v…

My thoughts exactly. As a fan of the first Matrix, it felt a bit cathartic to see the honesty upfront, so I could just see this movie as a standalone statement with some decent visuals. It was pretty much the opposite of watching the latest Star Trek series, that have completely departed from the original philosophy.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#125

Post by franga2000 » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 9:32 AM UTC

sangnoir wrote: post #116

franga2000 wrote: post #112

Just last month I got the opportunity to assist with an art installation that involved a phonebooth, which meant I got to take one home and poke around its insides. It was some of the most delightfully 90s tech I've seen in a while - 2-layer PCBs, all through-hole components, only a few well-known ICs... I ended up carefully removing all the "brains" and hooking up the insides to a raspberry pi, which could join a Di…

Vy any chance, did you write about the project somewhere? I have a similar project on the back burner, but with a rotary-dial handset, and I doubt a pi could provide enough juice to ring.

I plan to write a blog post about it soon™, but my schedule is absolutely packed this month, so probably not for a while. Here's a placeholder link: https://m.frangez.me/PhoneBooth

I'm using two of those 2€ sound cards from China to drive the handset and ringer speakers and both work quite well. I would probably need to add a small amplifier if I wanted the ringer to be heard from the street through the metal enclosure and plexiglass booth, but that wasn't a requirement for this project.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#126

Post by guerrilla » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 9:56 AM UTC

hnbad wrote: post #119

dQw4w9WgXcQ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be Gen-Z or younger. Small-time "fraud" antics like this were part of the hacker ethos throughout the 80s and 90s, some highlights being the Anarchist Cookbook, Matthew Broderick changing school records in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Kevin Mitnick as one of the notable poster children of the new era of cyber enforcement crackdowns. Even the word "hacker" meant something a lot different than today where kid…

Outside of movies these antics were confined to a specific (wealthy, male, usually white) demographic, though. Likewise a lot of 80s movies happily depict "funny" antics that would even at the time have been considered sexual assault or rape if the perps weren't wealthy white college "boys". Sure, culture has become more sensitive to these things overall and criminal prosecution of credit card fraud and computer crim…

> Outside of movies these antics were confined to a specific (wealthy, male, usually white) demographic, though.

Um no, definitely not.

> Sure, culture has become more sensitive to these things overall

Decades of fearmongering in media, omnipresent surveillance and the buying off of all competent hackers did a good job of that.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#127

Post by account42 » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 10:26 AM UTC

slazaro wrote: post #100

I was just analizing the Luhn algorithm and... the step to reverse the digits doesn't seem to do anything, right? None of the other steps depend on it and in the end you just sum all of the digits together... Is it because the amount of initial digits might not have the same parity and therefore you'd sum a different set of digits depending on whether you reverse or not?

I think it only matters for which digits you double if there are an even number of digits.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#128

Post by genewitch » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 10:39 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #117

franga2000 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mic and speaker in the 90s Iskra payphones are far superior in sound quality to anything you'd find in a cheap phone these days. I hooked one up to Discord last month for an art instalation and could not believe my ears when it sounded way better than the 3 other people in the call using flagship smartphones.

One thing has not improved one iota in the 30 years I've had a cell phone - the voice quality.

I'm not sure this is true universally. I just spoke to a friend for the first time since I got a phone that does "HD" calling, and although I've been speaking to them for 25 years on the phone, I didn't recognize their voice. I feel like POTS and edge->3g calling made me miss out on a lot of detail and intonation. I'm just glad I get to experience this call quality with non-technically inclined friends before I go completely deaf.

I use a lot of voip services and there's something to be said for the phone companies actually making a competitive product, here.

I suppose one could argue that "HD calling" is technically just VoIP as well.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#129

Post by genewitch » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 10:45 AM UTC

Slartie wrote: post #91

nahmean wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one point it was. You could even record the sound on a handheld recorder and play it back. But it hasn’t worked in a long while. Pay phones mitigated this in a low tech way - by software muting the handset. Edit: oh yeah, and after that, you’d just call the operator and tell them the keys were sticky and to dial the number for you, then you’d “insert the coins” by playing the tones. Well, or you just third party b…

> Pay phones mitigated this in a low tech way - by software muting the handset. So does this mean that there was a dedicated second microphone hidden somewhere within the payphone body, that would continue to record the sound the coins made?

The coins weren't recorded, it was just a short tone that indicated 5¢. A quarter was five quick tones. A dime two.

I used to mess with the proctor test set (dialing 117 in the US at least on GTE) and only ever convinced it I inserted a nickel even with many tries using a digital recorder or a computer speaker.

Re: Installing a payphone in my house

#130

Post by bjelkeman-again » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 10:48 AM UTC

marzetti wrote: post #83

Thanks for this article and the comments. Reminds me of a trick we kids did in the early 60s (yeah, sorry) with the British 'phone box' pay phones. We called it 'tapping the phone', but it wasn't spy style listening. Passed from kid to kid the amazing trick was you could dial the number by tapping the handset (10 taps for zero, 9 taps for 9, ..) and the phone would ring the number but you didn't then have to 'press b…

In Sweden, at the high school I went to, we had pay phones which would behave as if you had inserted a coin if you zapped it with static electricity. We used this for a while to make prank calls to other countries. Typically to random numbers we just tried, sometimes in the middle of the night in the other country.