@Edent ouch. "Software bad enough the *british* government thought it was worth rewriting in house"?!

Damn

@Edent at first reading your headline I thought a desperate Starmer finally made a sane decision to save his job, but they only kicked out in one small place Palantir probably forgot they even had, and it wasn’t a ministerial decision. Palantir are still gorging on the NHS and intelligence services like a tick. The level of corruption involving Mandelson, and the fact their local office is run by Oswald Mosley’s grandson is just staggering.

Not to minimize the achievement, of course. Every bit of rebuilding state capacity helps and compounds over time.

Also discussed on HackerNews.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48145144

@Edent Oh, classic! The Internet is basically a giant, chaotic playground for information, cat videos, and arguments you never knew you wanted to have. More seriously, it’s for connecting people, sharing knowledge, entertainment, work, and, occasionally, helping you remember why you walked into a theatre in the first place.

@Edent Pr0n!

@Edent my favourite show, and I'm unrepentant in that.

@Edent Just slightly jealous! A fabulous show!

@Edent Enjoy! Love that show!

@neil hah

/actual way back when #PhonePhreak checking in

Dialing from one floor to another routing the call via Japan gave a nice two second delay.

@neil Yep. Every one of them.

@neil I grew up in a house with a rotary phone long after most people already had button phones. It confused the heck out of my friends when they tried to use it. :D

@neil yes to 1,4,5 and 7 but i am 75 (nearly 76 ) so i grew up with these things.

@neil

New Mastodon Poll Reveals 87% of Mastodonians Are Old AF

@neil

What I’m learning is that I am likely to crumble to dust soon.

@neil all but the phone card and exchange

@neil You could just have asked how old we are 😂

@neil Most of these. Not sure about the phone card. I don't *think* so, but I'm not entirely sure.

I've talked to operators but I don't think been routed from one system to another, unless this includes dialling 9 to dial out, or being forwarded by a receptionist?

Never received a phone call in a phone booth, but used to use them regularly to call parents as a child and teenager.

@neil I have also used a pay phone on a train.

@neil used a telephone book for which purpose?

@neil I am curious what it means to dial from one exchange to another.

I probably only called local numbers as a kid and dialing other areas when I was older was always just preceding the number with a 4 or 5 digit area code, did it work differently before?

@neil

if you said yes to more than two of these, you're overdue to schedule your next colonoscopy... :)

(which reminds me...)

@neil Most I'm not sure what "Dialled from one exchange to another" means specifically, maybe a UK thing?

I did buy this bad boy new in box from my local thrift store last week. I have a Bluetooth dongle in my house so that I can make calls with it. Fake dialtone and everything!

Alt...

an old beige AT&T Trimline phone with manual. It has a curly cord and everything.

@neil and made free international calls, by a number of methods.

@neil I've done all but two (reversed charges & dialed from one exchange to another).

I am an old.

@neil

7 out of 8 boxes ticked. <sigh>

@neil when I was a teenager, we all used to hang around at a park on a corner by a phone box. Our mums all had the phone number of that phone box so they could ring us and let us know when it was time to come home for tea.

@neil I've received a call on a pay phone exactly once. It wasn't for me, the box was just ringing so I answered it. The caller asked for Sarah. I said "sorry, nobody carried Sarah lives here" and they rather surprised me by asking "are you sure?"

@neil I still have the last phone book that was delivered here, maybe 15 years ago now. Probably not much good for anything other than holding up a potted plant.

All but one of the above. I never did the exchange thingy. But the rest, yeah, in my early teens.

And only reverse charged my parents, with their agreement in advance!

@neil All of the above!

I'd also throw in "Used a payphone for free using a tone generator" and "avoided long distance fees using a DISA system" 😀

@neil
Never reversed charges because always had emergency 2p/5p/10p/BT phonecard to use. #BePrepared

@neil We had no phone for quite a while. When the phone line came through the valley, we were on party line with a few households on it. The phone was a big black thing; no dial, just a crank on the side. We were two longs and a short. Anyone (or everyone) in the group could listen to any conversation. For numbers outside the group, we did one long ring and asked Mona Ingram to connect us...

@neil
I actually worked a switchboard for the military. One of my favourite jobs.

@neil Trying to make me feel old. Must try harder.

@neil There's a bell-curve graph here with age as the X-axis. The younger you are, the fewer of these things you've done. As you get to older folks, there's more and more things they've done. And then as you approach even older folks who can't remember which of them they've actually done, the graph curves back down towards 0.

@neil My grand parents refused to stop using their rotary dial phone untill the Dutch telecom operator (the now defunct PTT) gave them a dial tone phone because they kept crashing the local exchange that couldn’t handle the ticking anymore. Resulting in a cascading failure.

@neil ~ In the US, we could dial 555-1212 and get the correct time

@neil None of the above.
I feel like I've been wasting my life...

@neil Full house!

@neil This is just another way of saying 'Are you old?'

@neil “I have a collect call from Bob We’adababieetsaboi.”

@neil

Are you trying to implement an age certification procedure ?

🤪

@neil Okay, this poll has made me feel REALLY old.

@neil Got my first STD* in a phone box...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subscriber_trunk_dialling

@neil HOUSE!

@neil We could often lift up the receiver and hear somebody else's conversation. Exciting times (sort of). Crossed lines innit.

@neil

[×] Did literal cut and paste work to make camera ready telephone books ("yellow pages")
[×] Can "dial" rotary using the hook button when faced with a dial lock

@neil Ugh. 6 out of 8.

@neil I was born in 1975, so yeah.

@neil

Extra points: placed an international trunk call.

@neil my friend used to make collect calls to her mom (which her mom would decline) to let her know it was time to pick us up after school.

#BobWeottababyeetzaboy

https://youtu.be/9JxhTnWrKYs

@neil I only did two of these things and that was at #39c3.

@neil Yes to everything except the thing with routing and multiple exchanges.

@neil
Oh, shit. I'm old, aren't I?

@neil

What does "Dialed from one exchange to another to route a call" mean ?

Until a teenager, there was only 5 numbers to dial. To dial out of town we had to prepend a 2 digit area code. Out of State I have no idea what was needed. If that area-code is "another exchange", then I should have said yes on that one too.

@neil The real question is, have you ever, when you where ten, decided to do prank calls on random numbers in the phone book based on their names, and then crossed out the entries you'd pranked with your frie^Wno, that was me on my own.

And then got discovered by your parents because of your meticulous prank call records.

Note: this was in the late seventies.

@neil I 100%'d this challenge AMA.

@neil not 100% sure about the operator call but think I must have. 70s U.K. kid.

@neil

You forgot getting calls for free by tapping out the number on the receiver rest of the old black public phones with buttons A and B.

@neil
Yo.

That's a lot of questions to call me old.

@neil

It's not related to the phone but raise your hand if you ever used a toothpick to rig a cable box to get free extra channels? 🤚 My family did this for years, until the cable company charged us hundreds of dollars for stolen cable after they found the toothpick we broke off inside the box. We told Mom not to buy the cheap toothpicks but she didn't listen!

@neil pressed button B in a phone box....

@neil On the last one i have a fond memory from my uni days:

There was a department that was always locked. The put a phone next to the door so you could call to be let in. It was a rotary phone. This was in the 2000s.

The number of students who had absolutely no idea at all what to do with that phone, trying to press the buttons and nothing happened was astonishingly high. 😂

@neil No question about party lines? Or using a switchboard to route a call?

@neil @leonieke in 1982 Burt Reynolds had beef with his phone company. The company gave him a free card but apparently Burt still wasn't happy and published the secret code and everyone in the US was able to make free calls for a while.

I did too, so I guess I did use a card?

@neil Fuck, fedi really does skew older, huh. Rotary phone and phone book was because I was at my grandmother's place and she still used those. And while I'm not old, I don't think most would call me young.

@neil you missed "had a party line". 😁

@neil Oh. I feel very old now.

@neil

Bonus points for

* Had a party line
* Rented rather than owned a telephone

@neil
For extra credit, used a handheld DTMF tone generator to retrieve voice mail on a dial phone

@neil i used a rotary phone i think once, maybe.. and my grandparents used a phonebook as a booster seat for me when i was very small. but i would have voted "none of these"/empty vote, if i could, lol

@neil and of you checked any of these boxes it's time to schedule your colonoscopy

@neil Want to feel old?

@neil add to that "placed a call from a boat via a coast radio station" too.

@neil

I'm old

Hugz & xXx

@neil @nina_kali_nina You missed the option "dialled from a payphone for free by battering the hangup switch" but I'll let you off with that since it was rare that people knew the trick and they did fix it eventually 😉

@neil Guilty as charged on all counts, but not admitting to additional crimes.

Re dialling from one exchange to another; do you mean the dodge for multiway group chats? Call person A, put them on hold, call person B on a distant exchange, put them on hold, etc. until you’ve got the whole family on the call? (all the charges come to the first phone, so pick that carefully)

@neil
What is the penultimate option? My app cut it off.

@neil I want rotary dials back.
With the little sound
krrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrSshhhhhhhhh *poc*

@neil I’m 25 and I’ve absolutely used a pay phone and the telephone book

@neil

Used a Captain Crunch whistle to...oh never mind, wrong poll...

@neil Fediverse age verification 😭

@neil 6/8 of these are possible in my house.

I have more phones and phone exchanges than any reasonable person…

but so far no phonecard equipment, and no metering (so reverse charge calls aren’t really possible)

Alt...

Photo of a cluttered workshop space, there are 3 electromechanical phone exchanges visible, shelves of phones and storage boxes. On the workbench is a 2280Hz trunk signalling system under construction

@neil Fedi is full of old people. ✨

@neil I worked at the directory enquiries of the Deutsche Telekom in the 90s (which apparently ran till 2024).

@neil does "Will you accept a collect call from «MomItsTimComePickMeUp»? No? «click»" count as reversing charges on a call? 😆

@neil I wonder if the using a phone book needs clarifying as using it as a phone book, and not as say a door stop or monitor stand... :p

@neil
✔ clicked and clicked the disconnect lever on a pay phone to make a call without paying. 😂

@neil in a larger area, the same thing might be said about area codes ...which still work in the usa in some circumstances

@neil @stiefkind tell my you‘re old without telling me you‘re old.

@Kletskous
I think, the liveliest Latvian server is Toot.lv. Scroll through the public timeline, maybe someone catches your eye.

@ben Can those microinverters implement an export limit themselves if you had enough to get near the limit?

@ben ooh, nice. I have a similar issue with afternoon sun as my panels face south east.

I might well be using plugin units to help with this when they are legal.

I wonder if I can add these as I have already got 4kW peak installed? Does this not break G98 regs?

@ben Thanks - this is really useful.
I've been eyeing up a garage roof installation in addition to the existing panels.
The maximum export gotcha isn't something I was aware of. I'm wondering if it might be possible to feed a battery on the sunniest days so as not to exceed the maximum export - but of course, as you say, batteries are much less cost effective.