I spotted this LinkNYC kiosk dialing numbers on its own. Sure wish I knew what numbers it dialed, or if they had any meaning. No real intrigue here, though. I suspect it's just more Smart City Fail®.
New York City is the City of the Presen(DERF!)
The recent spate of vandalism directed at LinkNYC kiosks might have a solution. Surround the kiosks with street vendor tables.
Ads and 3rd grade poetry must be served.
You think no one uses payphones anymore? You are wrong.
Someone out there really hates the LinkNYC kiosks. Dozens of the kiosks' 55" advertising screens along 6th Avenue between 12th Street and 28th Street were smashed, some even destroyed, over the Easter weekend.
So what if it's a longshot? If this actually connects it would be pretty cool. Anyone in the vicinity of Winnsboro, South Carolina, is welcome to take away a couple of old payphones, at no charge, so long as you have the ability to remove them. Click for details and contact info.
How do calls made from LinkNYC machines compare to the payphones they will replace? Not so well in this example. I think the payphone wins hands down, although the location of the devices makes it a tough test for LinkNYC's fully exposed microphone and loudspeaker.
At Rockefeller Center today, a payphone handset that looked like it was covered in fœces might have in fact been caked with some kind of chocolate ice cream/vanilla swirl tar. I did not conduct a taste test.
InLinkUK says its algorithm can now detect and prevent drug-related phone calls from its kiosks. Could something similar have contained LinkNYC's Summer of Softee?
I found evidence of the day this website was born. It appears to have occurred either after midnight on December 5, 1995, or else on December 6. This posting from one of my earliest websites makes it look like I started writing the night of December 4, then kept on writing until after midnight. The filename…
If a payphone like this can make outgoing calls, what possible scenario could arise where someone would have legitimate reason to do that?
I simply do not understand why CityBridge's "LinkNYC Kiosk Status" dataset exists, but I will continue to develop my "by the numbers" pages with a hope that its accuracy will improve.
Where does grade school poetry fit in the context of seemingly useful content such as AP headlines, bus arrival times, and weather snapshots?
By today's standards the short-lived iSpectrum looks like a toy. But the ingenuity of actually upgrading existing payphone hardware instead of throwing it away is something the Smart City Could have given more consideration when it "reinvented" the payphone.
I remember as the last Gothamist piece made its way through the pipeline I kept expressing apologies to anyone who might have encountered my noise broadcasts in a disruptive way. I thought in particular of dining establishments with outdoor seating, where people sitting right next to these kiosks, pleasantly enjoying their Sunday brunch, all of…
It looks like CityBridge did what everyone should have expected: They blocked access to the MTA transit update website from their LinkNYC tablets. I tried from over a dozen kiosks yesterday and today, finding access to the new MYmta website unavailable from every machine. Other network-connected functions worked as expected. MTA.info now joins social media sites,…
I picked up a payphone and let it listen to the sweet sounds of Shogo Kubo, whose guitar stylings frequently grace New York's Penn Station.
This rotary dial payphone at Veronica's Bar (née Mike's Place, née St. Mark's) disappeared to a storage closet years ago.
Remembering a couple of strange incidents from when I gathered audio recordings using LinkNYC's curbside microphones. In one case it felt like I was spying on myself.
Kicking off my crunching of numbers provided by CityBridge with regard to its LinkNYC kiosks functional status. I find the numbers impossible to believe.
People make fun of me for my otaku-like fixation but when I found these old beauties last week I felt like a kid in a candy shop.
A woman saw me putting coins into a payphone and offered me use of her cell phone. I declined, resisting a faint impulse to explain myself.
Checked in on an old favorite today: The rotting, festering phone booths at the 79th Street Boat Basin. This is the green-colored style of booth seen in "Panic In Needle Park", "Midnight Cowboy", and other 1970s-era films made in New York. I don't know of any other booths like this in the wild today.
TO DESIRE IMMORTALITY IS TO DESIRE THE ETERNAL PERPETUATION OF A GREAT MISTAKE... Wait, what?
There is a distinct tongue motif in this film. Look for it at 2:50 & 2:57 in this clip.
A new "patent-pending" app from Intersection lets you blast customizable messages onto LinkNYC's 55" advertising screens. Reviews are good but usage so far stays pretty low.
Putting all the LinkNYC machines under the same CallerID, as opposed to assigning unique numbers to each machine, increases the likelihood that all calls from the entire network will be flagged as spam.