Stumbled upon a delightful exhibit at SFO Terminal 2: “Give Me a Ring: A Telephone Retrospective.” The collection, generously loaned from the JKL Museum of Telephony, traces the evolution of the telephone from the late 19th century through the 1990s.
The exhibit showcases everything from classic Art Deco designs to the iconic rotary phones that once graced every American home. Highlights for me were the Snoopy and Garfield phones (did anyone have that red Lips phone??), the flip phones, and a phone that is also a leather bag.
Liberating Google Voice: Placing and Receiving Calls from your Computer
I’m a big fan of Google Voice back from the days when they were called GrandCentral. Among the many niceties provided by the service are receiving voice messages as email, sending and receiving texts from your browser, and the ability to keep the same phone number forever.
One of my favorite Google Voice tricks is receiving and placing calls from the computer. The process used to be super simple using the now-defunct Gizmo5. Back in the day whenever someone called your Google Voice number the Gizmo app running on your computer you let you pick up the call. Placing calls from Gizmo was a snap and had the interesting side-effect of allowing for free calls from your computer. Google acquired Gizmo5 in 2009 and shut down the service in 2011, channeling the acquired technology into the current Google Voice Chat that allows you to place and receive free phone calls from Gmail.
Bespoke Dial: Old-Timey Automation
Software development affords a great deal of freedom that you won’t find in the physical sciences and engineering. Tolerances, non-ideal particles, and even the laws of physics fall away as you construct ever larger digital systems. As Hal Abelson noted in his seminal 6.001 lecture, “in building a large program there’s not that much difference between what [you] can build and what [you] can imagine.”
It is always refreshing, therefore, to escape the cerebral world of code and return to the reassuringly palpable realm of the physical. Hardware and electronics, although bound by the laws of Newton and Maxwell, are instantly accessible solely because they can be touched and held by the user.