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How Do I Filter Phone Calls on a Land Line?
An anonymous reader asks: "I have a telephone on a plain old land-line, with the option of subscribing to caller-id.
I would like to filter incoming phone calls, diverting them to either the handset or answering machine, based on whether the caller-id matches a list of trusted phone numbers.
Considering that many of today's land-line telephone handsets can display caller-id and store a list of favourite phone numbers, I don't think this is technologically difficult.
AI am not interested in: subscribing to a service provided by my telephone company. I would prefer the filtering occurred on my side of the phone line, or implementing a software solution on my PC. Frankly, that is overkill, and I don't want my PC turned on permanently. I would prefer something like a small, solid-state hardware device. Is there any such thing available?"
I beleive it's called a "wife". However, it's very very hard to pick these things up at a hardware store, and you can't get them off the internet (or at least the internet versions don't handle english language filtering all that well). I'd suggest that looking for more information on wives from slashdot is probably a waste of time.
what kind of nerd are you? You turn your PC off? Get off this site.
Hook it up to a Linux box, and..... Yeah, that's all I've got.... It's probably possible though with the right kind of modem hardware and drivers.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
What you want is to convert your home line to ISDN and use an old motorola BitSurfr device. You hand the calls over to the POTS ports on the device, and you can program it with AT commands. I think you can only set a small number of blacklist caller-id, or whitelist caller-id (i think 10) but it will serve as a nice filter. This will do what you want, and they can get dumped or a busy before the phone even rings.
It is EXACTLY what the poster asked for.
If it's a little overpriced then maybe you can get your techi friends togather form a startup, get some venture capital and produce a competing product at $50 that would just sweap the market.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
1 sound muffled box containing
phone with answering machine
digital camera
laptop with OCR and RDBMS software
microphone
robotic hand
have the laptop listen to the microphone for noise (phone ring), the robotic hand should then hit the button on the camera which takes a picture of the LCD display on the phone showing the number, the image is transferred to the OCR software which returns the number, lookup the number in the RDBMS, if it's ok the robotic hand pushes open the lid on the sound muffled box "letting the ring out", if it's somebody you really don't want anything to do with the robotic hand lifts the phone and hangs up, in all other cases the phone is left to ring in the sound muffled box until the answering machine picks up.
Problem solved.
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And judging from your attitude, you're probably the reason they screen their calls like that, so I doubt they want to talk to you. You're happy, they're happy, the world just became a better place.
Well, did you have a ready-made speech for the occasion where I actually pick up the phone? No? Damn, how do you intend to convey me your message? What? Improvise, you say? Well, what's so hard about improvising to a machine? "Hey, it's me, John. I just wanted to tell you Jeff couldn't make it to our D&D session tonight, so we could either reshedule for tomorrow if that's OK with everyone, or just skip this week and meet again next week. Let me know if tomorrow is OK with you or not, k? Bye man." Whoah, that was *HARD*!
It's not as if you could call back later and change whatever you said in our first conversation either. However, you could call back, and tell me you made a mistake and correct it. You can do the same with the answering machine by leaving a second message. And if it's important for you to know if your message has been received, you just say "call me back as soon as you get this" at the end of the message, and guess what... As soon as I get your message, I will call you back.
You would be paying long distance charges regardless of who's picking up the phone: me, or the machine. If it's me, chances are you'll be talking a lot longer than to the machine, and pay more to get your message accross. If the machine picks up, I'll have to call you back, and you can talk to me for free. I don't see your problem.
Really? You're so amusing when you lie, you know that? If you really had better things to do, or nicer and friendlier people to talk to, why did you just call me?
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?
Just to beat this dead horse into an ass:
"Hey, I'm hungry. I'd prefer not to eat at home. Probably takeout to the park or sitdown. Frankly, sitdown is too much like home, and I don't want to be inside. I'd prefer to go to the park."
If you said "let's go sit down at the burger joint", though the park is open and right next door, you'd be eating alone. I'd go to the park with someone else.
You're a sorry Anonymous retard Coward. You should eat alone for the rest of your life.
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Only on Slashdot must nouveaux-luddite people be instructed how to leave messages on answering machines. It's not 1965, people.
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