AI Bot pranks Telemarketers

“Hanging up on annoying telemarketers is the easiest way to deal with them, but that just sends their autodialers onto the next unfortunate victim. Roger Anderson decided that telemarketers deserved a crueler fate, so he programmed an artificially intelligent bot that keeps them on the line for as long as possible.

Anderson, who works in the telecom industry and has a better understanding of how telemarketing call-in techniques work than most, first created a call-answering robot that tricked autodialers into thinking there was an actual person answering the phone. So instead of the machine automatically hanging up after ten seconds, a simple pre-recorded “hello?, hello?” message would have the call sent to a telemarketer who would waste a few precious moments until they realized there really wasn’t anyone there.”

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Print your own headphones

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If you’re going to wear a pair of big, over-the-ear headphones, why not choose…or better yet, make a pair that reflects your color preferences and fashion sense. Print+ – an offshoot of Norwegian small product design studio form + function – has developed a DIY audio headphone kit which allows customers to customize their audio hear much like a pair of Nike iD sneakers, except the end user is responsible for printing out and assembling the components together.

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Pop-Up Book Features a Working Camera

After months of development, artist Kelli Anderson has created a new pop-up book titled “This Book is a Camera.” As you can probably guess from the title, the book contains a pop-up camera that can actually be used as a real camera.

“I wanted to make a working camera within an educational pop-up book—one that connects the dots between design and science/structure and function,” Anderson writes. This book does just that — it both explains and demonstrates how a camera uses light to produce a photograph.

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Cabins the New American Dream

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NOBILITY OF SOUL and humble dwellings have long been linked in American mythology. Abe Lincoln was born in a frontier cabin, which set him up for a life of austere virtue; Thoreau stole away to a similar abode to discover his true place in the cosmos; and the family of Laura Ingalls Wilder perfected the art of endurance in its little house on the prairie. In more recent times, revolutionary innovators have repaired to obscure garages to chase their dreams and bring forth marvels of personal computing. Bigger may be better in America, but smaller is purer and more inspiring.

According to legend, the cabin and the shack are ideal launchpads for remarkable lives, but lately they’ve become homes to aspire to — particularly for overburdened types whose acquisitive binging has made them want to purge. Beginning in the late 1990s and tracking, approximately, the rise of the Internet, the so-called Tiny House movement has promoted the bracing, old romance of scaled-down living in miniature spaces.

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