Continuing from previous posting, which I cut off because I did not want to be at that coffee shop anymore…
I lose count of how many times I see people recording video of the kiosks after I turn them on. In the past I would check social media or the searchies, assuming that the people I saw making these videos would post them online somewhere, somehow. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone recording video and subsequently saw that they posted it anywhere, even when it was abundantly clear that they were sharing the video somewhere. But if they don’t tag it with the kiosk name spelled exactly right then it’s unlikely I would be able to find it. This is fine with me, since the social media connections are only part of the satisfaction in doing all this. It increases my invisibility, which is the most exhilarating thing of all with this. For however many people actually do post video to social media there must be hundreds if not thousands more who share just among their friends or who collect such things for whatever reason. Social media does what it does, though, by making this look like a widespread epidemic of noise blasting out of devices everywhere when, for now at least, it is far from that.
I am not going to put a lot of time or effort into this but I tried a couple of approaches to making the calls stay connected without human intervention. As part of the company’s tit-for-tat retaliation they cut all calls off after ten minutes unless the person using the phone taps the screen. This is actually Kiosk 101, and something they should have done years ago, but the plain truth is that it makes no difference to my pursuit, and by my logic the 10-minute cutoff even conforms to the ephemeral æsthetic of this project. The ephemeral nature of this pursuit has always dictated that the calls be short. That’s because people are not stupid, as much as the Smart City seems to think we are. When someone hears noise coming out of those things it doesn’t matter if they know what the hell is going on, if they think it’s a phone call or something else. Peoples’ instincts are to start hitting buttons and make the noise go away. If I compared call duration from before the 10-minute limit to now I think they’d probably be about the same.
To keep calls going beyond 10 minutes I thought of a few ways to imitate the gesture of tapping the screen, such as somehow training or luring live animals into crawling on the screen without ever leaving. If it was possible to blast noise from the loudspeakers that magically attracted woodpeckers that would be excellent but that is most certainly impossible, and of course I’m weeding through my ludicrous ideas hoping to crystallize my thinking and get to realistic ones, like sticking leeches on the screen.
I did make a somewhat interesting find today, which is that affixing some kind of sticky substance to one of the buttons on the physical keypad does, in fact, keep the button fully depressed, and this did keep the phone app open indefinitely. But it does not do what I thought it might, which is trick the tablet into thinking someone was pressing that button when the prompt to tap the screen to stay connected appeared. That’s unfortunate, but on the other hand that technique of sticking gunk on one of the buttons was rather crude.
Another approach might be to spray water onto and into the screen and see if that has the same effect on the device as rainwater. Rainwater gets into the tablet and causes the screen to spaz out a little, and my hunch is that the force of the rain hitting the screen is enough to trick the device into thinking a human was tapping at it. So in a thunderstorm the call might stay connected longer than usual, but I can’t be expected to work around the weather. But if water or some other liquid getting under the tablet screen can cause it to temporarily freak out, as seemed to happen when I was at a kiosk during a thunderstorm a couple of weeks ago, then it might be worth a try as long as the damage is not permanent. I don’t have confidence in that approach and will likely never even try it.
A logistical nuisance for me had been caused by my incorrect assumption that I could only have about an hour worth of audio on the broadcast console. Today I upped that to 8 hours. No tablet will ever play for that long but that’s not the point. Under the current setup I had to restart the audio at the end of every hour it played, since there is no auto-repeat function in the web-based platform. Since I don’t always remember to do that in time I’ve turned on a few kiosks where nothing should have played. When I ran audio from the desktop I could loop infinitely but not from this platform. But I don’t want this new PC to be the command bunker for this project, as remotely connecting to it so frequently adds an inefficiency. I compressed the audio from 256 to 32 and that made it ridiculously small by comparison. 8 hours is a enough for a good day’s work, right? I have to hear how it sounds in the wilds, of course, since it needs to be as loud as before even when compressed.
If I have any motivation to work on extending the 10-minute cutoff thing it is being piqued by the way the company is brandishing that scabbard with such apparent confidence, when to me it looks inane. The fact that (as far as I know) no one at the company and no outside observers fully understand exactly how and why this works is to my benefit, and possibly the most satisfying aspect of it all after so much planning and legwork. But it also makes me the only one out here who can call out the company’s ineffectual response for what it is. I don’t want anyone getting fired over any of this but at some point it should be known how foolish I think they look.
I also know they are lying, or at least posturing themselves to make it seem like they’ve been swift in their actions to deal with this. That is simply not true. They have known about this, at some level or other, since I started doing it in 2016, and they have to have received non-public complaints about this noise in March or April, when the first of my numbers was blocked. I think they’ve blocked 6 or 7 numbers, some of those well before the first Gothamist story.
OK, I’m done chewing this cud for now.
Funny, someone posted on FB saying to look up your first name followed by “meme”. Most of mine were Zuckerberg related but this was the first one. This could be my nightmare for the next week.
Mark Meme
