Payphone Go
walzr.com
walzr.com
Without even going and playing the game yet, it’s already let me understand more of the local geography. Lots of small nursing homes, behavioral institutions, and halfway houses have a payphone. Places that thankfully I haven’t had to think about and didn’t even know were there. I doubt most of these will be captured.
Many have lamented the demise of the payphone but it really bears repeating. If someone loses or is robbed of their phone, they have to rely on the trust of strangers (when they may be looking pretty rough themselves) or scrape up $20-40 for a prepaid phone at a store that’s open, rather than calling at a payphone that’s open 24/7 for 25 or 50 cents or even for free with a collect call.
Just block long distance calls right? If it was that simple it would not be a persistent issue.
The "love letter to a disappearing piece of infrastructure" bit makes me think of the payphone pictures that are published in each of 2600 magazine issues: https://www.2600.com/payphones
My personal contribution: https://confluence.org/confluence.php?visitid=3402
I don't know why but I find this person very cute with how excited they sound about the local library.
Will try to find some payphones myself.
My new favorite fishing story.
> Shout out to [...], I love you guys. Platonically.
In the recording on this one [1] the caller states that the payphone is on the caltrain station platform, but on the map it's about 1000 feet from there. Searching the address on google maps correctly shows it at the station, though.
eta: found it on street view! [2]
Unfortunately the state of payphone-related records is extremely poor, with many ostensibly-active PSPs having quietly gone out of business, other PSPs reorganized without reregistering, and states themselves keeping PSP records very poorly. Throw in small-scale COCOT operations and the result is that there really isn't any authoritative database of possible payphones, so this website's map is going to be missing some. It will also include many that are nonfunctional, as today's PSPs seem to do close to zero maintenance and out of service phones stay that way for years.
Some of the nation's largest PSPs have become ghosts, with the phones still operating and able to accept payment, but the PSP completely unresponsive to efforts to contact them. It's a very strange afterlife.
I’d play it if payphones from my state were included! I don’t know if they are licensed/registered here though.
Google auth still not hooked up, but otherwise good enough for now. And it's open source.
There are three other phones in my city, two in a hospital, one in potentially a corrections facility? I'll stop by on my way hope.
The next night we ate whale, the next night we ate whale.
https://walzr.com/payphone-go/?phone=592
Runner Up this one playing "Im at a payphone" song
[0] https://www.payphone-project.com/numbers/usa/ going through the state map feature only shows a subset compared to navigating through the links on this page.
Unfortunately I've never really taken advantage of my absurd luck to do something more useful, like retire early.
Which is kinda the reverse of this, reusing phones to play a text adventure.
Kudos for pulling all these into one database
Pulse dialing still works, and the automated voicemail system that the CO switch runs has zero perceptible latency (unfortunately, they won't give me the PIN to set it up)
Has anybody tried to win by spoofing the caller ID? For science, of course.
They are rare, but I have already spot some in the wild.
However we recently figured out how to do it in a way that won't bankrupt us, so keep your eyes peeled over the next few weeks...
My research says Japan has several prefixes, 0120, 0800, 0088, 0531, although not all phone numbers in these prefixes are available to all callers.
In the US, holders of a toll free number pay their carrier a per minute rate (sometimes with billing increments of 1 second), as well as a fee per call from payphones.
The per minute pricing is pretty reasonable typically one or two cents per minute; I think the per call cost from a payphone are more significant, although I don't see this listed by most providers; I seem to recall it being pretty hefty (and some toll free numbers would not accept calls from payphones as a result), but maybe changes in the network and intercarrier billing have resulted in a smaller fee or it's just not relevant to most people because payphones are hard to find.
wonder what the benefits could be of the game. one is that we now know which phones are tested ok.
also it can be like a local public radio where anyone could come in and voice something...
enjoyed playing with this.
The nerd in me is just always curious about the backend :)