#phone modem

[mushtoons]

my Internet has been down for HOURS i just wanna play on my computer 😭

[lumashoes]

i hate wireless earbuds they piss me off so bad

[luci-cunt]

I must not be mean to the customer service person. being mean to the customer service person is the mind-killer. Being mean to the customer service person is the little-death that brings total obliteration

[kittaykattz]

just so yall know. i'm moving into my college dorm in a few days ✌️

[simonghostrileys]

semi hiatus

so i won't be online much often these upcoming days bc the apartment i'm staying in due to my job being in another city doesn't have a modem connected to the internet and I don't want to use that much of my phone data in case something happens idk so if you tag me in sets it might take me a while to reblog them

[asshuka]

I ACCIDENTALLY DELOETED THE OG POST heres m-my take on neru append (trying to not cry)

kofi | patreon | commissions | more linkz

[doriansbutt]

It finally happened to me.

I tried to say ‘you’re welcome’ and ‘no problem’ and the same time and told a client ‘your problem’ today.

[mylittleredgirl]

now that polls exist i’m unsure where that leaves the genre of “hey i have a random small annoyance, is it me or are y’all suffering too” posts, but i have a random small annoyance

[lebrickster]

Emulating an old Phone System is Hard

For a moment in time there, I really wanted to get into emulating an old Phone system. Why? Because I wanted to, and I thought it was cool. Being able to use a vintage phone, and use dial up over a serial modem? Sounds awesome! But it's sadly not so simple. My god is it not...

So, I started off with what phone did I want? It was pretty quick to decide for me, as I wanted a phone with ringing bells, that classic look, and a touch tone pad. I went with a Black Model 2500, refurbished, from OldPhoneWorks. This ended up being expensive, but I wanted to sure it was in good shape. I don't regret this purchase, and think it looks great on my desk!

Well, with the phone situation settled, it was time for the modem. I decided to go for a new in the box U.S. Robotics, to ensure I had working drivers and the correct Power Adapter. It does it's job, and is the sort of look I know Modems for. Though the construction isn't great, since I can lift the top back part of it easily, since it doesn't seem to be held down by snaps, or screws.

I then wanted to get something else to go alongside all of this! If you know anything about the history of Club Penguin, you'll know some of it's earliest music came from an Indie band, known as TAS 1000, named after an answering machine they sampled messages from, and made music around. I got a lucky break and managed to find a unit on eBay, which I was so excited about. Keyword being was, but I'll go into that, later. (Too lazy to get it out of the closet for a fresh pic. Cry about it)

To make this all work I needed a way to connect all of it. No service in my area offers standard POTS Copper lines anymore, so I had to look into a VoIP ATA. After talking with someone in a Preservation Discord, they said they had good experience with a Cisco SPA112 VoIP ATA, saying it worked good for faxing, which is similar to internet via a modem. I bought one brand new, to ensure it was unlocked

With the hardware in-place, it was time to select a VoIP service provider. The best one hands down, price and feature wise, is VoIP_MS. They even have a super helpful Wiki with specific instructions on how to setup the SPA112 I chose, which I found super useful!

It was time to assemble it all, and in theory, all was good! But wait! No it wasn't my first snag with with the damn Modem. It would just not install for some reason, and that was down to me being stupid. I had bought this Serial cable because it was cheap. But I failed to notice the part that says Null Modem. This allows computers to talk to each other, but cannot be used to have a computer talk to a serial modem. D'oh.

OK, no problem, buy a new cable, and all is well! And, it was! ...Until it wasn't. I quickly learned that the SPA112 was not at all good for Dial Up, being super unstable. I was kinda warned of this before I had it in, too, but I bought the SPA112 AFTER that was all sent. So, that was one part of the package I wasted my time on, which bummed me out greatly. Sadly, the problems don't end here. The next problem was that the phone would not ring. It can receive calls and make calls fine, but it just won't ring. It turns out those bells demand a ton of power to work right, and the SPA112 just doesn't send enough juice. To fix this problem, I need a Ring Voltage Booster II, which sadly costs 125$, which is super expensive. I will get one eventually, but the cost of this component, and failures outlined so far has driven me to put this on hold for a long time.

And finally, there was the Answering Machine, the part I was most excited about. It was listed as used but working on the listing, which is partially right, but not entirely. You're supposed to be able to record an outgoing message, but do you see how this button is caved in? Sure, I can press it, but it doesn't do anything, strongly indicating it's broken. I can playback tapes, but what use is that if it can't record the outgoing message?

All of these failures broke me, and just made me depressed, tbh. As a result, this setup has gone more or less unused, with the TAS 1000 going into the closest, and me sometimes only calling my mobile phone with the Model 2500 phone, out of boredom. The modem has gone unused, since I don't trust the flaky connection the SPA112 has with it. What am I going to do from here? Well, down the line, I want to replace the SPA112 with a Obihai OBI302. I've been told this unit is a lot more stable for Fax, so it might be what I need to get for a stable modem experience.

I already mentioned the Ring Voltage booster of course, but in terms of the TAS 1000, if I can find another one, I'll jump on it, but chances are, I'll probably jump on a TAS 3000, since those units seem to be a bit more common, and not as much of a pain to find.

Well, that's about all I have to say here. I will revisit this one day, since I don't want it all to entirely go to waste, but the whole situation did frankly break my heart with how it headed, for now.

[rapha-reads]

My laptop likes to remind me to "go to bed, you unhinged bitch, it's almost 4am, why are you still up listening to the entire discography of Poets of The Fall when you have work at 10" by suddenly turning off the wifi without warning and shutting off my music, brutally taking me out of the perfect vibe I'd gotten into reading my gay little fics and blasting my emo music.

Gah. Guess I'll shut it off, put down the fics and go to bed, then. *rolls my eyes so hard they fall off my head*

[whirling-fangs]

[[ I'm stuck working doing fuckall at home because I'm waiting for someone to come set up the internet at home, so please bear with me as I lurk more often than usual :') ]]

[cyphyra]

my internet has completely gone out and i think our modem is shot-- it isnt turning back on :/

[brood-mother]

people who send voice notes instead of just texting are so incredibly fucked up

[fozmeadows]

the older I get, the more the technological changes I've lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn't even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents' house and our wall-connected landline; my mother's first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend's house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend's massive CRT monitor wouldn't fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room's dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist's in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that's a decade's worth of pictures I'd have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can't ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don't have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they're obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there's a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven't had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?

[dialup-brain]

when you're so chronically online that YouTube has to call an intervention for you:

[boredtechnologist]

Telephone Interface II for the TRS-80 - still working...