Die Autodialer!

I was born an evil person, and so being, peace with the dark side can come in handy. Recently I moved and was issued a new telephone number. The young lady who had my number before me, as I quickly discovered, owed money to people who only had one phone number to contact her. What followed was a series of predictable calls from all manner of collection agents. My machine was instantly full of misdirected calls to a Maria Ga-something, urging her to get in touch with some greasy guy who was prepared to ruin her credit forever, et cetera. 

This was a minor annoyance, since an autodialer left a prerecorded message, which I simply deleted. It wasn't until the real people started calling that things got really... interesting. The first call that I got was from "Patrick" who was very polite at first. He wanted desperately to speak with Maria because her credit rating was in imminent danger of being spoiled like so much milk left on the counter while you go off to work. I replied that he was mistaken, I lived alone and knew no one by that name, that I had inherited her phone number and all her angry creditors. He agreed that was quite a pickle for us both, but could I supply her whereabouts - since that real world scenario was too plausible and therefore too fantastic to believe. The conversation went downhill from there. I have made several bad career choices in my life and needless to say, I know the very thing to say at the right time in just the right way to make someone very, very upset. Its an art form that surprises even me sometimes. To my dismay, my request to "take me off their list" went unheeded. 

The phone rang many more times after that and I had similar conversations with many staff members, I even employed the rare drastic measure of dialing *57 and filing a police report after a young lady called me three times in one night. She blamed the autodialer for constantly connecting us, and this having been said I had an idea.

Asterisk, as it is known, is a powerful PBX system that is free to run on any beige box computer. Its memory and processor needs are so few it literally runs on garbage computers that people throw away. I planned to configure the PBX with a whitelist of friends that would ring through, a greylist of unknown numbers that could leave a message and a blacklist of  1-877 numbers that were the hallmark of these collection agents. The blacklist calls would be answered and patiently wait for a human voice at which time it would play any number of incredibly loud, incredibly unpleasant MP3's from my collection of terrifyingly awful music.

No, I never did it. I did set up asterisk, but I never unleashed its awful purpose because, why? True that I was dubious about how legal such a thing was, but really, what would I possibly gain from this? Did I really want to set up a computer to run continuously as an answering machine so that I could deafen someone with a shitty job who had the wrong number? Vengeance is a fine subject for cinema, but in real life it is utterly impractical. I was ashamed of my conduct and embarrassed that I had actually exhausted my technical skill and creative energy realizing this ridiculous plan, when all along there was an alternative.

I submit this tawdry tale for a reason. We are approaching an election, and as you all know, the phone banks will be working overtime to solicit funds, motivate the enlightened or just poll inanely. If you are like me and enjoy privacy I recommend this solution from lifehacker. Simply put, record the "number out of service" tone before your message. a human will leave a message, but an automated system will report your number out of service. Had I done this from the beginning the autodialers at the collection agency would never had pierced my fortress of solitude. I can vouch for this elegantly simple solution, I did it and it works.

Moral: Why be a bigger asshole than is necessary?

RepRap

This is a Reprap. Its a 3D printer under construction by the open source community. Printer jets lay down a polycarbonate goo in layers from digital templates, meaning that it can print out 3 dimensional plastic shapes. 3D printers are not new, they are employed largely for prototyping or making casts for large scale production and cost a great deal of money. This device, however, can be built for less then a thousand dollars using off the shelf components and the plans are available for free download from their website. The prototypes are in use refining and printing the components of the reprap itself, so in its own modest way the device is in use creating itself. 

The possibilities of this device are enormous. The ability to make things without need for factories or shipping would greatly improve the quality of human life globally. It would have the same effect that inkjet printers had on displacing the photographic lab industry. Plans for anything could be downloaded from the internet and printed as is required. Not everyone will have one in their homes, but there will probably be one available for public use at a local hardware store. Since it makes many things from one recyclable plastic the supply chain would be streamlined instantly. Inventors, educators and artists are the most immediate beneficiaries that come to mind, but medical devices like hearing aid housings or eyeglass frames could be made cheaply where they are badly needed.

Moral: open source is awesome.

Movie

Tonight I saw the Counterfeiters. Best movie so far this year. If you get the chance, go see it. 

R.I.P. Rude Girl

Loyal friend and international punk rock icon Rudy "Rudegirl" Kitty has passed on to the next thing. Even though she went #1 on my jacket and scratched up all my records, she was rockin' and I loved her. It'd been a while since she slept on my head or pestered me to watch her eat frisky's, proud kitty that she was, she lived an exemplary life and I will always remember her fondly. Rest in Peace Rudegirl.

Better Fridge

Buying a refrigerator was no easy task. There were options and features like ice makers, shelves that contained spills and slid out for easy access to the hard to reach places. Like any choice that requires a fair amount of thinking I reverted to the old stand by solution "Which one comes in black?" and I was on my merry way. There were very few that touted real energy savings. Some had the energy star stickers with their ambiguous yellow savings formula, informing you how many pennies you would save a month compared to an older and unidentified model, but none were very ambitious about saving energy on the only really important appliance in the home. Well, lucky for us, someone has thought of it. Still not in production, but the fridge of the future will likely look like this.