Dialogic doohickey
So for the next couple weeks or so, I'm going to be out of my house. While I'm gone, I set up a machine with a Dialogic card in it to keep my phone line from feeling too unloved. If you're ever feeling bored, you're welcome to call it and dick around a little. This is a slightly modified version of the same box I brought to Toorcamp to run alongside the Definity we gave people phone service from. The main difference is the original version was developed in a huge rush, and was buggy as all hell. The Google Voice that forwards to it (let me know if you can think of a better forward, by the way; I'd rather just give out the damn number, but obviously, giving out a phone in your name on a forum isn't a great idea) is 434-406-4147. When it answers (if it doesn't and you get the Google voicemail, it's probably just busy), press *. With the Google Voice latency, you'll have to be a bit quick; if you wait too long, it'll think you're recording a message, and * will just make it hang up on you.
Anyway, when you press *, it'll respond with a 400 hertz tone. From here, you can press these things:
1110 - Category-based sound player. The valid categories on there right now are #, 1, 1#, 2, 247, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. If you want to record anything of your own, just specify another one and it'll create it for you. As the categories would suggest, # actually counts as a digit - it isn't used to confirm an entry right now. Once you're playing something, you can press 7/8/9 for lower/normal/higher volume, 4/5/6 for rewind/return to menu/fast forward, 1/3 to go between recordings. If you hit something wrong, it'll give you a help menu. There's some audiobooks on here, some Phonetrips, some Twilight Zone Radio, some random shit left over from some projects, and some even more random stuff the Toorcamp people stuck on there. Let me know how it sounds; I tried to make sure it all sounds great over the phone.
1111 - Early version of the above with no categories. There's a bunch of things on here, like Default Radio, that I never bothered sticking on the new version of the category player.
1112 - Gregory Evans robot. This is the result of an old joke about his notoriously long rants. I'd love to make another one of these, but nobody else gives out so much great source material.
1337 - News headlines. Updates at ~25 minutes after every hour. This is NPR at the moment, but I can change it/add another if anyone particularly cares.
On a technical note, the Dialogic card has a Freescale DSP chip, a time slot interchange, and a low power X86 along with the general line interface hardware. Everything on the Linux host machine is run in event-driven C code and exists entirely on a single thread. The resources it uses at this point are staggeringly low (~.3% CPU and 5 MB RAM on the 1.2 GHz Celeron machine I happened to have lying around. Most of that 5 MB are library functions); I tried compiling glib while it executed a call and it didn't skip a beat. Someday I'll have to see if I can get an embedded device that supports huge PCI cards like these.