cell phone

Tuesday, July 25, 2000, at 09:36AM

By Eric Richardson

I'm about to start working on one of the biggest kludges I've ever dreamed up. Sometimes I wonder about my sanity...

So the cell provider I want to go with (VoiceStream) has coverage in my area, but they won't give me a local Muskegon number. Yet, since I won't be here too long and I REALLY want a GSM phone, I'm going to go ahead and get it.

What's that you say? Won't that alienate my Muskegon friends? Of course, but that's where the hack comes in.

Right now my thought is to have a land-line with my home network proxy listening on it. When a call comes in, the computer will spit a pre-recorded audio file out the modem, asking the caller to type in their number. It will then take the number they type (by decoding DTMF tones) and email it to my phone.

I'll probably complement this system with a JWZ'esque caller-id hack. If there's a caller id number given, I can spit back a message saying "your number has been gathered via caller-id. if this is the number you want called back, hang up now. Otherwise, enter the call-back number." That way people won't even have to type anything.

There's probably a couple minute lag on the email gateway stuff, but that's acceptable for my purposes. Most of my calls are outgoing, anyway.

I'll post more as I figure all this out.