New Workshop and Hacked Payphones

As projects grow in size, so too must the workshop to accommodate them. It's taken a while and a great deal of effort but things are finally starting to take shape. The previous owner left a few nice tools and containers that housed every nail, screw, hook and bracket you could ever want. It's like a hardware store now, with everything in one place.

Apart from the odd bump and scratch, most builds survived the move, including the phone hacking project. This is one project that is taking pride of place at the moment as interest continues to grow. Just through Facebook alone, I have been able to verify hundreds of active telephone numbers thanks to the kind people all around the country who ventured out to track down the single-use endangered high street furniture and report the numbers back to me. I have recently been able to push a huge update to the new telephone network and it's incredible. You can read the previous project update here.

I am now ready to properly put it to good use and I've already been in discussion with various community organisations about getting on board with the plan to phone every payphone at once at time when we know people are at their most vulnerable, as well as installing the first public #RecodeThePhone for anyone and everyone to use - an idea that makes me both nervous but proud at the same time, proud that the AI chatbot I've created and been talking to all this time is about to meet so many more interesting people.

I've also made a small zine that contains information about the project as well as a small selection of numbers from boxes situated in the more busier or interesting locations. This will allow others to phone a few boxes too in the hope of creating random conversations. The plan is to carry these around to hand out as and when but maybe leave a few on the payphones when I go telephone box hunting. You can download and make your own by clicking here.

So now that the workshop is looking nice and I'm getting it to a place where I'm happy with it, it is almost time to start live streaming from within it as I demonstrate the new phone network and start demoing its many features including the ringing of payphones around the country to see who answers.