Bell's Mind

We toy with this idea every once in a while but it never gets any traction. Recently Lunar e-mailed and reminded me that it has been four years since Phreak Phactor originally went live. He is now running a few polls (Phone Losers and BinRev) to see how interested people are in seeing it come back.

Go over there and voice your opinion and if we get enough positive votes (and maybe some beer) we'll start planning on a new episode and give you guys a hard deadline on when it will happen.

The PBX isn't up again but at least we have a single conference online. We're using SIP Broker for our PSTN connectivity. It's a lot like what we used to have with Free World Dialup and Libretel several years ago. In addition to this we plan on publishing SIP URIs so that everyone can connect if they have a SIP client or a softswitch.

We'll post on the blog as we add more features. For now we only have a single conference running. To connect you need to dial an access number, then dial our network code *9098, followed by the desired internal extension. The extension for our single conference is 666 so the full code is *9098666.

Try it out and let us know if there are any bumps in the road. In particular we've noticed that +1-360 codes have trouble passing DTMF. Avoid those numbers for now and post which ones work best for you. We'll be putting our preferred DID list online as we learn the new system.

The Bell's Mind conference lives again and will get a lot more exciting soon.

We received several complaints about the login being broken and submissions not working. Things appear to work properly now so let us know ASAP if anything doesn't work. I'm chipping away at modernizing things and making the site's interface a lot less kludgy so from time to time things could break but there shouldn't be any extended outages.

Today linc232 let me know that the search watcher is transparent and switch RCs can end up showing through it if the screen is too narrow. I'll try to work on this soon.

Any other formatting issues I should be aware of that you've seen?

Greetings to everyone who just finished dual's article in 2600 magazine about BMML (Bell's Mind Markup Language). Please register for an account through the frontend and e-mail me if anything doesn't work.

I'm always trying to keep the site fresh and new so I'm glad it's getting some attention in 2600 this issue.

After many hours of wrangling and remembering what I was thinking when I wrote this code several years ago we are up again. Our URLs may be changing to remove some cruft so stay tuned for updates regarding that. Our frontend will always be accessible by the links in the blog (rigt now via the frontend link) so make sure you always go there for the most up-to-date address if something doesn't work.

I didn't have enough time to get the site back up last night (too busy seeing a GWAR concert). Tonight it shouldn't be so bad. Everything in the backend database is working. Now the frontend needs to be ported and tuned to work on the new server. I'll post again when we're ready for business.

If you want faster updates to what's going on with Bell's Mind check out Bell's Mind on Twitter. There's a Phreak Phactor on Twitter too...

Sorry for any frustration this is causing. I promise there's a reason for all of this.

BTW, now is the time if you have any questions/suggestions to e-mail them to me.

Yup, I dumped iWeb for nanoblogger. Just converted my old articles last night. Look for more updates soon.

According to NANPA NPA 500 as of January 1st had only 77 assignable NXXs left. They expect to have exhausted all NXXs in six months and have determined that NPA 533 will be used to “relieve” it.

If you’ve never heard of NPA 500 check out a VOIP Info.org article about it. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of that article since I’ve never used NPA 500. If you have any information about NPA 500 that isn’t on VOIP Info.org (or if they’re completely wrong) please let me know!