Phone booth

WTF?

The Telefonzelle is the heraldic figure for the Metalab - a iconic symbol of open infrastructure. Phone booths often have important functions in literature and movies: sometimes they are bigger on the inside like in Dr. Who, letting Trinity exit The Matrix, are used by Superman as changing room and or give shelter in Hitchcock's The Birds.

The Telefonzelle in front of an atomic planetary model is the central symbol of the Metalab corporate identity, which was created by c3o during an early logo brain storming. Having the Berlin c-base as a role model in mind the founding members thought that sort of a story behind could help to tighten the community spirit.

We tried to get an outdated, original telephone booth from Telekom Austria (successor of the former state-owned, monopolized telco) but TA declined our inquiry at this time. We were told that they had bad experience with selling the old boxes. Competitors bought it and installed it on the streets again. When the alternative telco services made problems their angry customers called the wrongly addressed TA despite the new color and labels. So TA decided to scrap all retired boxes.

Some month later Enki got in contact with TA company spokesman Martin Bredl who kindly made it possible that the Metalab could pick up a donated, quite well-preserved booth that has been used also as a movie prop.

The booth is currently installed at the Metalab main room. Although quite heavy we took it to the LeiwandVille at the Chaos Computer Camp 2007 at Finowfurt near Berlin and to the HAR•2009 camp in the Netherlands.

Tech

Inside of the ruggedized phone, cables lead down to a VOIP phone, connecting the handset and display. A SIP ATA connects it with the VoiP account of the lab. (+43 720 00 23 23) Outbound calls are also available. (thanks to telgo.cc).

A motion detector turns on the light from about thirty seconds up to a few minutes. Can also be set to continuous mode. A cheap battery operated sensor light has been modified and complemented with a MOSFET and a relay to switch the fluorescent lamps of the booth. Light stops 30 sec after the last detected movement.

Temporary SIP Servers (during parties, etc)

We plan to use a temporary SIP server running an entertaining PBX during ZeitmaschinenParty and made the following changes to switch from its normal VOIP account - see above - to an account on our server. Just revert server and outbound proxy servers, reset active states and set the default account to account #1 after your party.

SIP Settings

• Change Registrar Server & Outbound Proxy Server: "sip.at.telgo.cc" (normal mode) to the ip of your temporary SIP server.

SIP Account Settings

• Default Account: Account 2
• Account 1 Setting -> Active: disabled
• Account 2 Setting -> Active: enabled
• Account 2 Setting -> Display name: MetaLab Phonebooth
• Account 2 Setting -> SIP user: [your-user]
• Account 2 Setting -> Auth user: [your-user]
• Account 2 Setting -> Auth pass: [your-pass]