Bell's Mind

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!

If you don’t know who decoder is then this article is probably not for you. However if you remember all the press he received in 2004 this may show you just how much the media can twist things in unconventional ways. Usually they twist things to make things more sensational but this time it looks like things got twisted due to a translation from English to Japanese and then back again. The content below is amusing while the situation at hand is definitely not.

First, take a look at a post by rEph linking to the original story:















Then, the haiku version by Tokachu (just reformatted):




























And finally the updated article that is still on their site as of today. Note that they removed the “Free-King specialty” and replaced with other absurd translational mishaps:

I’ve been toying around with GWT a little more lately and I was trying to think of what kind of AJAXy stuff I could add to the site that might interest other phone phreaks. My first attempt is the NPA-NXX search watching widget. You’ll see this on the NPA-NXX search page hovering in the right hand corner. It’ll show you at a glance what searches other people have performed. It looks like this:



This is first screen capture of it after it was put onto the production site.

Let me know if the feature is interesting and what other features you’d like to see.

On Sunday, December 9th, 2007 I was rummaging through the Bell’s Mind configuration files removing some cruft from the system when I realized that the default iax.conf I had was using the option bandwidth=low. For phone people this is horribly unacceptable. I have since remedied the problem and changed it to bandwidth=high. Everyone should be running on uLaw now instead of GSM or, even worse, ILBC.

Sorry for the mixup! Give the conferences another try since the codec update and see how much better they sound.