[HN Gopher] I converted a rotary phone into a meeting handset
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I converted a rotary phone into a meeting handset
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 149 points
Date : 2025-11-12 09:37 UTC (9 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.stavros.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.stavros.io)
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| If you use such a thing on a regular kind of meeting that happens
| over zoom or similar, your arm will atrophy and fall off from
| having to hold that thing for the duration.
|
| The only remedy I see is to give everyone such a contraption and
| make it mandatory.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| This would be an excellent way to make sure the standup stays
| terse, we could even put lead weights in the handsets to
| further increase this virtue.
| sokoloff wrote:
| NB: Many of these older phones already came with metal
| weights insides to give a feeling of more substance to them.
| Not always in the handset, though it wouldn't surprise me if
| some did have them.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Usually, the base of the phone itself was a sturdy metal
| plate. So while not the handset itself, the phone unit was
| usually a pretty decent self defense weapon candidate as
| was widely displayed in many a fight scene in movies from
| the time.
| wffurr wrote:
| https://www.etsy.com/listing/631698424/vintage-rest-a-phone-...
| phantasmish wrote:
| They make those shoulder-rest addons for phone handsets. Not
| too bad to use for extended periods with one of those, with
| both hands free.
| jon-wood wrote:
| Back in the day when phones of this style were the only ones
| available we learned to hold the handset between our shoulder
| and our ear, leaving both hands free for other things.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Cue neck pain
| bluGill wrote:
| That was one of the things they considered when they designed
| phones. A lot of money was spent on ergonomics getting this
| "right". Of course we now know a lot more about ergonomics
| today, but they did the best they could and did a great job
| considering.
| pimlottc wrote:
| That's why you'd get the big foamy cushion you could stick on
| the back so you could rest it on your shoulder
| nkrisc wrote:
| There were countless products available when I was a kid that
| were meant to make holding a handset between your ear and
| shoulder comfortable.
| stavros wrote:
| These young people don't know what the nineties were like.
| dylan604 wrote:
| They must think the little things people stick on the back
| of their phones meant to make holding the device easier for
| longer periods such a novelty.
| villgax wrote:
| Someone please make a Moto Razr form factor and snap bluetooth
| device so I can keep my big and costly device in my bag and use
| it only when I actually need to.
| pvtmert wrote:
| love the hangup part. so, i can finally "rage quit" the meeting
| that discusses 99th revision of a doc where a comma should be
| added here or there.
| 6c696e7578 wrote:
| pkill -9 -f '(chrome|firefox)' is my rage quit, it's like
| hanging up but hitting the keys on the keyboard as hard as
| you'd throw the phone down
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| You can quit anyway, just say "I've given you write permission,
| I trust you"
| ipython wrote:
| I enjoyed the llm generated rotary phone image which had no "3"
| position but two "8"'s
| thih9 wrote:
| The author did too:
|
| > Rest assured, though, the image is almost exactly what the
| phone looks like, except with a bit more 8 and a bit less 3.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I enjoy how this article shows the issues with both image
| generation models and language models
| mrexroad wrote:
| > "Rest assured, though, the image is almost exactly what the
| phone looks like, except with a bit more 8 and a bit less 3."
|
| :)
| egorfine wrote:
| I like this guy's optimism of letting AI create a USB sound card
| out of a microcontroller from scratch.
| abound wrote:
| Probably not a bad litmus test for current and future
| generations of LLMs though, I'd be curious to try it out on the
| latest crop.
| bluGill wrote:
| Only so long as nobody knows you are using it. Soon as
| anything becomes a metric people with game it.
| stavros wrote:
| It got really close! Audio played, it was just crackly/poppy.
| The microphone didn't work, though.
| thih9 wrote:
| > Half an hour and fifty dollars later, I realized I had spent
| fifty dollars on this, and that this was not sustainable because,
| if anything, the code was getting more and more buggy the more
| Claude fixed it.
|
| Off topic, this has been my experience with AI so often that it
| prevents me from exploring AI uses more.
|
| I liked Cursor's "auto" plan but that now seems gone. I'd happily
| switch to a provider that offers a similarly "unlimited" usage.
| wongarsu wrote:
| It's difficult to offer unlimited usage of something that's so
| expensive to run. OP could have used a $20/month Claude or
| Cursor plan for "unlimited" usage within their quota had they
| been willing to use a different model than the $75/Million
| Token Opus 4
| stavros wrote:
| I would have, had I realized how much it would cost.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Well if cost is an object, there's always the quick & easy
| way :)
|
| >Vintage Retro 3.5Mm Telephone Handset
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Telephone-Receiver-Radiation-
| Micropho...
| stavros wrote:
| For an update, Codex has been massively better for me. I should
| probably give it another go, especially now with Codex Max, as
| it has been much better at not getting stuck like this. Give it
| a go if you get the chance, although with the general caveat
| that people have massively different experiences with LLMs, for
| some reason.
|
| I think maybe it has to do something with the prompting style,
| my hypothesis is that some people's prompting styles fit
| certain LLMs better. I don't know how else to explain the fact
| that my very experienced friends prefer Sonnet to Codex, for
| example, whereas I had the opposite experience.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| It is possible to radically increase your chances of success.
| You have to speak the LLM's language, just like you write Java
| or Rust. But it doesn't come with a language spec, so you get
| to figure it out by trial and error. And a model change means
| revisiting what works.
|
| Lots of tips on how to do this out there but one thing I do is
| have it try, throw away everything it it did, and try again
| with a completely restated question based on the good bits in
| what it was able to produce.
|
| E.g., if you ask for a web app that does X and it produces a
| working web app that doesn't do X, throw that away and just ask
| for the web app scaffolding. You've still come out ahead even
| if you take over fully.
| tenacious_tuna wrote:
| > Lots of tips on how to do this out there but one thing I do
| is have it try, throw away everything it it did, and try
| again with a completely restated question
|
| This is the thing that worries me about AI/LLMs and how
| people "profess they're actually really useful when you use
| them right": the cliff to figuring out if they're useful is
| vertical.
|
| "You've still come out ahead even if you take over fully."
|
| I just finished a weeklong saga of redoing a bunch of
| Claude's work because instead of figuring out how to properly
| codegen some files it just manually updated them and ignored
| a bunch of failing tests.
|
| With another human I can ask, "Hey, wtf were you thinking
| when you did [x]?" and peer into their mind-state. With
| Claude, it's time to stir the linear algebra again. How can I
| tell when I'm near a local or global maxima when all the
| prevailing advice is "I dunno man, just `git reset --hard
| origin/master` and start again but like, with different words
| I guess."
|
| We have studies that show people feel like they're more
| productive using AI while they're actually getting less done
| [1], and "throw away everything it did and try again" based
| on :sparkle: vibes :sparkle: is the state of the art on how
| to "actually" use this stuff, I just feel more and more
| skeptical.
|
| [1]: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-
| experienced-o...
| Medox wrote:
| > Since I didn't want to make any permanent changes to the phone,
| I didn't want to remove these tabs, or to solder anything onto
| them. I just wanted to connect a cable to them in the easiest way
| possible.
|
| Same here but I want to go for a xilink bluetooth adapter and
| maybe even sacrifice and old smartphone with a separate sim. Not
| sure if the AI stuff will work but it seems possible....
| stavros wrote:
| I've got you: https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-saga/
| a022311 wrote:
| Interesting how 10 years later we saw an actual cellphone
| with this color...
| stavros wrote:
| Did we? Which one?
| toast0 wrote:
| I had a Blu Win HD in basically that color: https://www.m
| eetgadget.com/gadget/71500/BLU+Win+HD/photos/im...
|
| Although, that's contemporaneous with your post.
| stavros wrote:
| Interesting, I didn't know of this!
| hobinjk wrote:
| It's a good approach! I used an xlink for my super hacky (but
| very easy) bluetooth rotary phone project:
| https://hobinjk.github.io//hardware/bluetooth/hackery/2024/0...
| eniac111 wrote:
| https://petrovs.info/post/2023-01-12-shaiba/ This is my USB
| rotary dial. It's always fun with the young people when I bring
| it to IT conferences.
| nirav72 wrote:
| I bet the reaction was similar to what my teenage kids had when
| I showed them some VHS tapes I found in storage.
| dxdm wrote:
| What was their reaction like, for those of us who don't have
| teenagers at home to repeat the experiment on?
| dfxm12 wrote:
| It might have been similar to your reaction when you saw
| (depending on your age):
|
| a floppy disk (3.5")
|
| a floppy disk (5.25")
|
| a floppy disk (8")
| dxdm wrote:
| I'm flattered, but you're only speculating, and at least
| for me this is not helpful.
|
| It does not tell me what their reaction was, which is a
| little sad, because I am curious what happens when
| somebody for whom Facebook is ancient tech encounters
| video cassettes.
|
| FWIW, I thought 8 inch floppies were weirdly big, but
| that's just a different form factor. It was normal to use
| floppies, tape or vinyl records for data and media
| storage. These days things are magically beamed through
| the sky in the most normal fashion. I think video tapes
| may seem a little weirder than just a larger box.
| dxdm wrote:
| (The person I asked originally replied while I was typing
| the above. Their reply is in a sibling comment to my
| original question.)
| stavros wrote:
| It's generally "how do I dial?", followed by them trying to
| press the holes in the dial, and, when told to rotate it,
| they rotate it to dial before picking up the handset.
| nirav72 wrote:
| The initial reaction was - What is that? How do you play the
| video? I happen to have a old VCR in storage and a USB 2.0
| capture dongle. Hooked it up and showed them some old family
| videos. So their final comment was - why is the video quality
| so bad?
| H1BCurryChef wrote:
| Toll.... so worth the effort.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Interesting - summer 2024 I picked-up an old rotary, my plan is
| to make it ring when a "insert-corporate-instant-
| messaging/voip/meeting" application call comes in... But time, no
| time...
| shermantanktop wrote:
| There's almost always time, as in wall clock time. It's usually
| energy and attention that is in limited supply.
| stavros wrote:
| I like to say that everyone has the same 24 hours a day, it's a
| matter of priorities.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| The feeling of the hang up is so satisfying. An important piece
| of UX.
| stavros wrote:
| Plus the sound through the handset sounds like nostalgia!
| foobarian wrote:
| Since you didn't modify the original phone, I wonder if the
| oldschool dialing way of digit-banging would work. For each digit
| N, you hit the hangup button N times, pause, then go to next
| digit. Used to do that on our family's Pupin that looks like this
| one [1]
|
| [1] https://in.pinterest.com/pin/rare-vintage-pupin-bakelite-
| rot...
| stavros wrote:
| No, the hangup rocker goes to another GPIO than the dialing
| rocker in the rework.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| >For each digit N, you hit the hangup button N times, pause,
| then go to next digit
|
| N+1 times for each digit N. The digit 1 was two clicks of the
| hookswitch, and the digit 0 was eleven.
| stavros wrote:
| Was it? I've dialed like that a few times and I always
| clicked N times.
|
| Here's the code for the phone, BTW, as I forgot to include it
| in the article:
|
| https://github.com/skorokithakis/dialogue/blob/master/src/ma.
| ..
| foobarian wrote:
| I remember it being N at least in ex-Yu. But now that I
| think about it I forget if it was a reverse-click i.e. the
| pulse was created by releasing the pressure plate briefly.
| In that case we'd have a fencepost thing and there would be
| N+1 physical presses maybe
| jtwaleson wrote:
| Very cool but I think my wireless bluetooth one is even cooler ;)
|
| https://blog.waleson.com/2024/10/bakelite-to-future-1950s-ro...
|
| It actually supports using the rotary dial to call phone numbers
| on your smartphone.
| stavros wrote:
| I think my full-blown mobile rotary phone is EVEN cooler:
|
| https://www.stavros.io/posts/irotary-saga/
|
| It actually makes calls itself and has a SIM.
| jtwaleson wrote:
| ok you win
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Someone should make a Bluetooth box that outputs to a standard
| phone connector so any standard phone would work. Has anyone
| done that?
| stavros wrote:
| I think I've seen it, I was thinking of making a USB one. I
| might!
| ebsebs wrote:
| Someone does - the Cell2Jack is only $36 USD:
|
| https://www.cell2jack.com/
|
| I use one with a 1970's vintage rotary desk phone and it
| works well.
| kleiba wrote:
| Relevant Seinfeld bit:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvTYSnIxb-k&t=54s
| freedomben wrote:
| Neat! On a mostly serious note, I went looking to buy a handset
| that just plugs in via USB and is a normal speaker/microphone,
| and I was quite surprised there wasn't anything like that out
| there, at least not that I could find.
|
| Am I the only one that wants something like this? Does anybody
| know where to get one?
| syUchs wrote:
| there is accually a marketing guy (founded competeitor to redbull
| in germany) who mad this comercially.
|
| https://herbworld.com/en/products/retro-telephone-red
| neilv wrote:
| Some of those old phones are nicely slammable.
|
| What's even more bulletproof are vintage street payphones.
|
| Nothing keeps a daily standup call on track like a payphone
| atmosphere of being on the run. ("Quick, what's sprint status and
| blockers?! We've got 60 seconds before they complete the trace!")
|
| Add an accelerometer, and you can detect when the handset is
| hanging from the armored payphone cable, because they dropped it
| as they ran away. Trigger dial tone sound, to mark end of
| meeting.
|
| A variation on this theme is using a "burner" flip phone for
| meetings, so that you can end each one by snapping the phone in
| half, and stomping the pieces on the ground. Which is cathartic,
| but less environmentally sustainable.
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(page generated 2025-11-21 23:01 UTC)