I was having a conversation last night with a friend about Twilio. This was somewhat inspired by Austin’s RC Project. Twilio is an api/service for sending and receiving text messages. It is very well designed and easy to use.  For a while mobile commerce was really popular, and there were a bunch of services that sent you text messages about things you may like to purchase. I was actually going to start a business like this with my friend Juliet around children’s books recommendations but we never got it together.  I subscribe to a service that sends me daily album recommendations via text but I use it for discovery. I think I may have purchased one album from them in 4 years.  They probably use Twilio.

I vaguely remember using Asterix for telephony work a long time a go. It looks like they got a rebranding. Also many many years ago, before smart phones, I built a collection of robots controlled by playing and listening to DTMF, that  is the touch tone sounds. Phones used to communicate analog (via sound) – hence phone phreaking.

But this got me thinking about phones.  Phones are a total black box to me.  I have built computers but I have never built a phone.  I would love to be able to control everything on my phone the way I control everything on my computer (Depending on the computer).

I remembered on zulip there was a thread about zero phone and that this could satisfy my desire for an open source phone. I love the idea that the UI is in python – what is it Qt?Is anyone selling a preassembled zero phone??

Apparently my son told his friend that I would build him a computer for his birthday (the friend not my son). I am NOT going to do that, I am not sure where my son got that idea from. But I could build a phone – its cheaper.