Rotary Un-Smartphone Kit
skysedge.com
skysedge.com
> Previously, phones with physical keys required a clamshell (flip) form-factor to prevent unintended dialing. Rotary dials are naturally resistant to butt dialing.
You can solve butt dialing with a number of ways, like another hardware switch. This solution seems much more cumbersome, and I can't believe this is not done simply out of novelty.
It's an extremely cool project and I can't wait to get one!
https://www.ebay.com/sch/182098/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=rotary...
Someday I'd like to try to use them as an intercom/hotline between the house and workshop, but I haven't figured out how to power the circuit and (especially) the ring signal. (Grandpa always did his own phone wiring and told me you really didn't want to be touching the terminal when a call came through, something like 100V AC!)
Source: I am rotary-telephone-era Telecommunication Engineer.
For just a hotline/intercom setup, I think a telephone line simulator might do the job, but those seem stupidly expensive!
EDIT: The other reply seems a lot more knowledgeable, ignore this one
I thought about setting something up with an old PBX from work, but they're too new for pulse dialing. I was trying to figure out if I could build something with old modems but never got anywhere with that.
But, HN needs to add emojis to the upvote so I can say that you made me smile without the effort of actually writing a comment!
I consider carrying something like this (I carry an AT&T Flip IV at the moment if I remember the thing) to serve as a reminder to other people that not everyone has, nor wants, smartphone-type capabilities. At the local farmer's market last weekend, a number of various political booths (on all sides of the spectrum) had "Sign our petition!" type signs - as QR codes only. My device doesn't decode QR codes easily, nor will the browser handle a standard website very well. I typically carry a laptop, but they don't print the URLs...
Of course, then there's the problem of being on the fringe and the absurdity of "And therefore follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and a bunch of other big tech platforms!" - I point that one out often enough too.
I'm at a position in my life where there's really no downside to carrying "the weird alternative" and showing people that, yes, I do in fact continue to exist, can have phone calls, SMS text, and basic maps, while not feeding into the horribly human-toxic ecosystem that modern smartphones have become. I mean, I can even use Bluetooth to the car for making phone calls, or play music from my SD card to a Bluetooth speaker! But I don't have email on it, I don't have any social medias, the games are crap and I don't bother with them, etc. It's a minimally functional device that I end up leaving home a lot because I just forget about it - and that, coming from the smartphone world, is a huge improvement.
I get a lot of positive reactions, too - most people simply haven't thought about the fact that the smartphone is really only 10-15 years old for most people. We lived before it. We will live after it. And life is objectively better without one now.
Your post seems a bit "I couldn't use my phone responsibly so I got rid of it", which is fine (I can't have sweets in the house, as I'll eat them too often), but you shouldn't generalize your lack of self-control to everyone. Some people have a perfectly fine relationship with their smartphone.
Further, are you sure that "entertains me when I'm bored" represents a benefit? I think boredom serves a useful purpose, and quelling it with empty activity might defeat that purpose.
I took that as a generalization, but maybe they did mean in their specific life, rather than every human's life.
> Further, are you sure that "entertains me when I'm bored" represents a benefit?
I do, sometimes I'm bored and want to be productive, sometimes I want to be unproductive. The phone is for the latter. If I didn't have it, I wouldn't be productive, I'd just be feeling bad.
Yes, it's something I can do in my life specifically. I recognize not everyone is able to do it depending on work (I couldn't drive for Uber/Lyft/[insert food delivery service of the week here] with a KaiOS device, but neither am I trying to do that), and there are some downsides in terms of having to carry separate devices for other functions (typically a pocket camera for photos, and CDs in the car for audiobooks), but they're nothing I find particularly objectionable.
The reality is that I'm just dropping back to a 1990s or early 2000s way of doing things, which I lived through, and find a better way of handling things than a smartphone-mediated-always-on world that's become the default - not because people have thought through it and want it, but because it's the most profitable set of defaults to the tech companies and app vendors involved.
> The phone is for the latter. If I didn't have it, I wouldn't be productive, I'd just be feeling bad.
I find boredom quite useful. I typically have a paper notebook and pencil in my pocket anymore for those times.
I was perfectly fine with my smartphone, I had it greyscale, heavily restricted in terms of what was installed, etc. It wasn't a particular problem... but at that point, neither was it a particular benefit. Battery life was "a few days at best," it was large and expensive, and I tend to enjoy playing in the weeds of "What's possible?" vs "What's the default?"
As I didn't know anyone who was carrying a feature phone instead of a smartphone, I set out to figure out what that looks like, with the constraints of "I don't want to annoy other people too badly with my choices" - so the first attempt, a Bananaphone, went out quickly because it couldn't do MMS based group texting. The Flip IV handles that, if not well, then "in a way that doesn't irritate other people, mostly." It doesn't render any emojis, but I'm fine with that.
By "point in my life where I can do this," I mean that people around me simply expect me to have oddly broken or limited computer systems and communications systems, so if I'm off in some weeds or another, it's no particular surprise. I don't need 100% reliably daily comms, people don't expect me to respond instantly, and everyone knows that if something's on fire, use the phone feature of the cell system and I'll pick up. Assuming my phone is nearby.
I've written up more on the experiments here: https://www.sevarg.net/2022/01/22/kaios-bananaphone-flip-iv-...
I hate what modern smartphones have become, and I'm fairly vocal about that. I think that they've turned into expensive, human-toxic bits of ewaste looking for a place to happen, and that they've been the primary enablers of the always-on surveillance capitalism systems we see today, to such great harm to humanity. To then continue using them, despite "Well, yeah, but I turned off notifications...", is a form of hypocrisy I try to avoid in life as much as I can. I can be as right as the day is long about the benefits of a vegetarian, low meat, or vegan diet, but if I'm talking to people about it while chowing down on a bacon double cheeseburger, I can reasonably expect nobody to listen to me. The same goes for tech habits. I can't rail against smartphones and social media, on smartphones and social media, and expect much beyond a well deserved eye roll.
I at least try to live out my convictions regarding technology, which means that things like the blog post I linked above are hosted on a server I own and have colo'd locally.
And I'll entirely admit that there exist a small number of features I've not found ways to replace a smartphone for, so I use my legacy device for those and only carry it with me when I need access to a particular building that has smartphone based locks (I don't like them, but I didn't install them, other people like them, and they don't have an easily usable key backup), or if I'm doing Part 107 drone operations for some reason or another.
I would've assumed something like "Ostentatiously" would've been the word; but I've seen "obstreperously" couple of times in this thread now, and had to look it up (it's a new word to me:) - seems to be "noisy and difficult to control", and that gives it a whole different, perhaps more negative slant?
P.S. FWIW, in my limited experience, it is typically the most technologically savvy amongst us that go through incredible effort to discover, purchase, setup, own, operate and integrate retro/Luddite devices in their lives :-)
Oh, absolutely! Part of it is the enjoyment and skill to make something like that work (it's a non-trivial bit of programming to interface modern electronics with a rotary dialer, cell modem, audio codec, etc, and to have it all more or less work reliably).
The other part, though, I think is that people in those spaces see just how wrong everything has gone - the piles of complexity that never quite work, the constant data leaks, the invasion of privacy for surveillance profits, the fight for attention based on what's good for the company and not good for the users, etc. And a lot of us, myself included, want no part of that.
My wife and I spent last night on the couch listening through a wonderful recording of Handel's Messiah, on 4 quite heavy vinyl LPs. It was a great evening!
I found a quote a while back - don't know the source - which sums up how many IT experts view IT:
"Non-magic users: collect crystals, call their pet a familiar, draw pentagrams.
Magic users:the most magical things I keep in my house are rocks, and I keep a hammer next to them in case they act up"
Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is Bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via Alexa! I love the future!
Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
I'm definitely on the second half. We still have a Nest, but only because I've not convinced myself that the HestiaPi will actually run our system properly... and I can't get parts for it.
Aw man, typing an sms on a rotary dial would be fun :D It would take half an hour to respond, but still fun a first few times :)
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
Hide your kids, check under the bed, in the closet, because bloatware is real and it's coming for you.
No thanks Microsoft, I really don't need ads in my task bar.
I might have a hack now after seeing this.
It’s cool, but idk anyone who just has Spare SIM cards.
Why doesn’t Apple make its voice isolation available in the phone dialer as well?
there's various oldschool bell system type desk rotary phones on ebay for $35-60
and then add a pulse dial/rotary compatible ATA ($25-55) to speak SIP to asterisk or other standards-compliant voip systems. typically this will have a 100BaseTX ethernet interface.
the rest is just ordinary voip phone setup, assuming you have an asterisk or similar system to talk to, main limitation is the rotary phone obviously can't send DTMF tones.
http://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/index.php?topic=203...
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=pulse+d...
If this was tongue-in-cheek, you got me! I would never go back to holding a physical phone up to my ear after using wireless airpods or equivalent.
Edit: it’s also part of a general desire to be more untethered from the phone. I wish I could have a classic phone + ringer experience that integrates with my smart phone, so I can just plug the phone in and forget about it once I’m home unless I get a call (for whatever reason my phone’s ringer is not loud enough to be heard throughout the house, and I feel like having something to dock it to would make it easier psychologically to not feel like I have to carry it around with me all the time).
For 400$ I would rather have a dongle/cord/app that would allow me to plug an actual oldschool phone into my cellphone.
If your threat model includes the firmware on the baseband processor, best not to use a smartphone at all. Or leave your cave in the mountains of Pakistan.
There are some mitigations in place: They claim to have a physical cut-off switch for the microphone. They also say that the power switch is an actual slide switch. If these are correctly implemented you can be certain when is the phone able to listen to you, and when is it properly off.
Also it is much more likely that the AtMega2560 acting as the application processor is properly isolated from the baseband processor. (If for no other reason that the developers would have to go out of their way to program/wire it in such a manner to be half as vulnerable as most other phone's application processors are.)
That being said the text of the product page focuses on the usability of the phone not on the privacy or security aspects. Out of the 9 positives they list, only 1 talks about privacy/security. This would indicate the focus of the people who built it.
Just to be clear on this: There is nothing wrong with focusing on UX. Not every product has to be laser focused on privacy/security. It is clearly made by a small team. (Perhaps only by a single person?) They wanted to make a phone which causes less distractions to the phone's users. All the power to them.
Unfortunately having smartphone is kinda mandatory around here for internet banking and commute tickets. Signal is also important for me personally.
I wonder if there is a vibrate mode?