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Posted by cutoff 16 hours ago

Playa Phone(playaphone.com)
584 points | 206 commentspage 4
kodai_tech 13 hours ago|
The live status dashboard at the bottom is a fantastic touch. Reminds me of the best kind of hacker projects that combine physical retro hardware with modern web telemetry.
non- 14 hours ago||
Phun and wholesome project. What service do you use for VoIP?
aaron42net 13 hours ago|
voip.ms. They were the cheapest I could find when I built this in 2013, and they’ve worked just fine since.
sikozu 11 hours ago||
How much does this project cost you to run? I always considered VoIP to be expensive but things might've changed.
aaron42net 11 hours ago||
It's ~$13/year to keep the same phone number, and <= $0.01/minute for all incoming calls and any outgoing calls to North America. Most of the cost comes from outgoing international calls, whose price varies (see https://voip.ms/pricing), but I do disable some of the most expensive destinations.

With paying for ~60 hours of calls for the week it runs, I think it's still usually well under $100, though.

chislobog 12 hours ago||
No phonebooks there. Just a map. Oper-a-tor?
HardwareLust 13 hours ago||
Dammit I left my acoustic coupler at home.
underlipton 12 hours ago||
What do you even talk about on a phone call like this?

I have both intense social anxiety and FOMO. Knowing that this thing exists for a week and then no more is torture.

aaron42net 11 hours ago|
Anything or nothing.

One of my favorites is to ask the person what's the most amazing thing they've seen that day, and you'll likely get widely varying answers given where they are.

But you could also call and try to sell someone an extended warranty for their couch without breaking. It doesn't matter as long as you (and hopefully they) have fun with it.

teh_infallible 13 hours ago||
I had an idea like this years ago, only my idea was to put two of these on the playa and have them only call each other. Do you could pick one up, the other would ring, and you could talk to a random person.
nandanadileep29 15 hours ago||
Would be fun to see how the calls went lol
kris-memoket 4 hours ago||
Dude this is a amazing idea...
Our_Benefactors 13 hours ago|
Fun! Just wished someone a happy burn.
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