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You've Dropped Your Landline — Now What?
smurphmeister writes "My wife and I recently moved up to the world of cell phones, after taking our sweet time to make sure this whole newfangled technology was going to stick around. We moved the old landline phone number to her phone, so we're disconnected from the pole. Now the question is, what to do with the copper already in our house? My first thought was an intercom system, but that just seems so old school! So what ideas do you all have for what to do with the 4 little wires running to every room of my house?"
Use it as a guide line for ethernet.
Morse code communication system.
Connect it to your computer for music everywhere.
Now a real thought. Do you have, or are you going to have kids. At some point you will have to let the communicate, and a cell phone may not be a good option. If this is the case you may wish in just a few years that you had left the phone lines alone.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
DO NOT remove the wire. In this economy, it's hard enough selling your house as it is... If your nerd level is high enough, I recommend interfacing it all with a nerdkit... alarm clock in every room, irritating beeper that goes off every 15 minutes, lights that flash when you get a new email, maybe even "backup lighting" (preferably red) for when your main power goes down...
Can you grab the few volts of electricity off of the line that the phone company is sending you for free?
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
When the blackouts come only the landlines keep working. When the cell tower batteries run down, after 4 hours or so, there goes your phone.
Here in NYC we get a major blackout every decade or so, even if the larger region does not, so I always keep a landline at the cheapest rate.
Redundancy isn't just for hard drives.
The closer you are to the code, the happier you are. - Ancient Geek Proverb
I've never heard Chomsky or Mother Jones on the AM radio. I also wouldn't consider your examples "fringe".
Moveon is solidly pro-Democratic party, that's probably to the right of the American people. Democrats support corporate bailouts, drug wars, terror wars, etc. The American people do not.
Chomsky and Mother Jones might be a little to the left of the American mainstream, but would fit right with moderate European social democrats. I'd hardly call that fringe.
If you want to give examples of the radical left, check out crimethinc, bash back, or infoshop.org.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Turn your home into a giant wi-fi antenna. You could then either open it up to other to use, or keep it locked down, and brag to your friends that you can connect to the net from halfway accross the city. Or both.
In New Zealand it is standard practice to use cat5e or cat6 when wiring new houses for phone. Some sparkies daisy chain but when I wire houses I star it from a central point.
Since 100baseT ethernet only uses pairs 2 and 3 (orange/white and green/white), you could punch down pairs 2 and 3 on an RJ45 jack and pair 1 (blue/white) on a phone jack.
Better would be to just run 2 cat6 cables to each location, then you can use GigE.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
That's for sure. I use those "ancient" jacks to access high-speed internet. Although not having telephone jacks would not stop me from buying a house, it would drop my offer a few thousand dollars since I have to deal with the hassle of re-installing the lines.
Also I like having old-fashioned phones in my house, because in an electrical outage, they are the only things that still work.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall