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Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

businessinsider.com

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Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

#161

Post by deltoidmaximus »

philips wrote: post #87
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #65

I "made" something like this 7-8 years ago for our first kid. When I say "made" I mean I bought a "fixed wireless terminal" for $40 on eBay, a classic landline phone for $30, and a cell phone subscription for kids ($5/month). Then I connected the parts, and voila, we had a landline for kids. Obvious benefits include low cost, full interop with all other phones, and having the kids learn our phone numbers by heart aft…

I made something using a VOIP phone and voip.ms. What provider has a $5/mo kids cell subscription!? voip.ms is about $1.30/mo with the cost of the phone number (DID) and "minutes". I have some more breadcrumbs on this thread if you are interested in details on my setup too.

Regarding minutes, how many minutes? My kids basically hog my VoIP "landline" talking to their cousins 50% of the time they're home. (They're actually playing games together and using the phone as voice chat). I've been thinking of trying to get a second line for them to hog but didn't want anything with limited minutes.

Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

#162

Post by xp84 »

bit_logic wrote: post #68

Why does it seem like many parents are unaware that a hand me down iPhone can be heavily locked down with screen time settings? A list of things you can do: - allowed list of apps, can reduce it to just phone, imessage, and utilities like weather app - effectively permanent downtime, just set the end time less than start time such as 3:00 am to 2:59 am (technically 1 minute of non downtime). This blocks apps except f…

Same exact reason 90% of people don’t use the Shortcuts app. This stuff is obvious for you and me, but tedious and painful for everyone else, and it’s still easy to miss one thing that leaves it easy to circumvent. There are people whose full time job is managing MDM in IT departments, and it’s not just because of the number of devices they manage. It’s because this stuff is complicated. And that’s for grownups, whose judgment is expected to be better than 12-year-olds, and who can be fired.

Also Screen Time is a little better in a few ways than what Android offers, but it’s still a joke, is incredibly Byzantine, and limits your options as a parent.

Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

#163

Post by nekusar »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #22

>some gen Xers don't say hello.. That's entirely pragmatic in this data collecting age. Being silent and hanging up as soon as you hear the spam won't get you marked as a phone line that has a human on the other end nor do you risk your voice being recorded. If you're silly enough to say your name when answering you'll just end up with text and email that is now personalised with your name (it's much faster to identi…

Theres a class of spam calls that start with what sounds like a pitch rising "bloop". 100% of the time this is a spam/scam.

Not sure what system they're using, or why there's that characteristic BLOOP.

Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

#164

Post by tty456 »

papyrus9244 wrote: post #158
alexchengyuli wrote: post #97

Funny enough, China already ran this experiment. Kids' smartwatches started as call-only devices for safety. Then they added friend lists, status updates, like counts, popularity rankings. Little Genius now has 48% of the global kids' smartwatch market [1]. Kids delete real-life friends for not having enough likes on the watch. Once a device enters a kid's social life, there's no market incentive to keep it simple. […

>Then they added friend lists, status updates, like counts, popularity rankings. That sounds absolutely horrible.

Why?

Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

#165

Post by greesil »

dTal wrote: post #107
greesil wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking something like an esp32 + mesthastic / LoRa + REST API on the LAN, discoverable via multi cast. The "landline" is a tablet or phone with an app that talks to the esp32. Separately, a parent with the app does the Diffie-Hellman key exchange over SMS, NFC, or some other channel with the friends who also have the app, and you know their identity. The phone app updates the device with the friend's keys, th…

You just reinvented the IM-ME, a device famous for being used aftermarket to hack garage doors (in the days before Flipper Zero).

Lol. That's cool, I've never heard of that!

Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

#166

Post by deltoidmaximus »

TMWNN wrote: post #11
gnabgib wrote: post #5

Discussion (197 points, 8 months ago, 132 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44587018

Thanks for linking to it. Folks, before you rush to offer your genius ACKSHUALLY ideas about how Google Voice will let you do "the same thing as Tin Can for free", please, please, think about what GV does and, more importantly, does not (Hint: Whitelist).

Can you even attach a POTS or POTS like device to Google Voice anymore? I was looking into this last month and it seemed like they had removed that feature and the devices people were using (they had stopped selling them some years ago) to do it stopped working recently.

I have an Ooma phone now and I just plugged my existing phones into the Ooma box which then works the same as an old landline for the most part.

Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

#167

Post by cortesoft »

casey2 wrote: post #148
cortesoft wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I also pause when I read articles like this. The parent in this story is trying to go "full 90s", like that was when kids were raised the best... which just happens to be the time when they were kids. Except, when I was a kid in the 90s, the parents at that time thought the 90s things were horrible and longed for the best time to raise kids... which of course was when they were children.

The entire point of parenthood is to validate your narcissism, you can't talk reason into parents they can only be socially programmed.

I am a dad of two kids, I am doing my best to use reason.

Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

#168

Post by venusenvy47 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #34

For the nerdy who might want to set up their own similar system for their kids, and let their kids pick any landline phone they want, you can get an ATA (Analog Telephone Adapter) on eBay for cheap, then connect it to a Raspberry Pi with Asterisk, and any VOIP provider, to make your own PBX. ( https://www.littlebytesofpi.com/raspberrypihomephone/ )

Can I use Google Voice as the VOIP provider? I read that article and couldn't tell if Voice is used in addition to another VOIP service, like Ooma.

Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

#169

Post by thrance »

mrweasel wrote: post #141

Off-topic, but I hate sites like this. All links in the article are for other pages on businessinsider.com, but there's no link to Tin Can, not that I can find at least. It's getting more and more normal that sites won't link out of their own "property".

Yeah, and that's especially egregious when they're presenting a product, or a scientific result without linking to it.

Re: Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids

#170

Post by deltoidmaximus »

mrweasel wrote: post #140
pqs wrote: post #117

Why not using the actual land line? I still have one. My 13 year old son, who has no phone, uses it and it works. I'm just curious.

Depends on the country, but landlines are no long available for new customers and the cables are actively being removed.

There are still VoIP services that function essentially the same. I switched to that recently because the real POTS service had been jacked up in price a crazy amount, probably because we were grandfathered into even having it since the company website didn't even seem to offer it anymore.
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