Philosopher king, homephone, Detroit

Thought leadership

Jake Vaughn with a scathing and hilarious take down of one the tech industry’s unnecessarily influential people, Mark Andreessen. This is one of those pieces that is thoughtful and deep, but also extremely silly and irreverent.

“Landline”

Copper-based POTS has been slated for retirement since around 2014 (FCC pdf). That said, the need for a communication device that isn’t a cell phone in the house still exists in many cases. For instance, when there are young children in the home. Many parents don’t want their children to have cell phones, but still want to be able to reach them. This way, the children can have a way to dial emergency services, as well as stay in touch with family and friends on their own. Tin Can is an entire business established on this premise. They actually seem to be doing quite well.

For my use case, the price was a bit high, and so I wondered more broadly about the state of VoIP in the year 2026. The reasonable choice would be to order a line from our ISP, but luckily for my tinkering tendencies, our ISP doesn’t even offer landline services!

After pondering some far-fetched schemes, I decided to avoid the complications of running my own my own PBX, or even purchasing an ATA, in order to run an old device we have.

Nostalgia was not enough of a motivation to overcome practicality, and so I did some research and landed on:

• A simple Grandstream cordless VoIP phone
• voip.ms as the SIP provider.

Each of these had their setup and configuration quirks, and it took a few hours clicking on web interfaces, following somewhat maintained documentation, and arguing with LLMs, to get it to work properly.

Knowing that I never wanted to go through that process again, I created homephone. An over-engineered, highly specific set of tools tailor made to be able to recreate this exact setup. It will likely serve no one but myself, however, if the phone goes kaput, or if I switch acounts with this provider, I’ll have a way to restore service without the headache I already endured once.

The code was pretty much entirely generated by LLMs, and it felt like an excellent use case for them. Low stakes, esoteric domain in which I am not an expert, poorly documented APIs, etc. A few prompts and bingo bango, a repo exists, batteries included. I even went the extra mile for best practices and store sensitive information securely, fetched dynamically at runtime from 1Password. This way it was easy to sanitize and share the project publicly.

The phone was about $70 USD, and the package I got from voip.ms is extremely affordable, so I’m pretty happy with how it all turned out!

Detroit

• Müjin is a creator I follow, and his video on pouring a concrete floor in his basement is an all time classic. I enjoy the aesthetic of the work he produces, as well as his straightforward and humble approach.
• Another source of inspiration from “Paris of the Midwest” is Andy Didorosi. He is building something extraordinary with Mutiny Motors, and documenting the journey in a most compelling way. I love seeing the project evolve and come to life.