My phone carrier gives me a use-it-or-lose-it monthly allowance of 1000 #SMS txts within #Belgium. I only use ~50 or so. Any ideas on how I can use them and be less wasteful?

I’m not really looking for a big project. Just numbers that give free services. E.g. there are probably numbers I can SMS and get back the weather. Or even better, I would love to be able to SMS a Belgian phone number that would forward my SMS to an international number. Not sure if gateways like that exist.

If I were looking for a project, I could probably sell a SMS service. So for example I could proxy SMS messages for people outside of Belgium for a fee. It would be interesting but more effort than I want.

#askFedi

    • activistPnk@slrpnk.netOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      It’s like you’re reading my mind. I almost posted: wouldn’t it be cool if I could SMS a URL and get back a lynx dump? That readme page even has a US phone number of a server. Unfortunately only a Belgian number would work for me. But glad to see the #TXTNet software project.

  • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
    3·
    1 year ago

    Here’s an idea for a not particularly useful way to use them (supposing for carrier allows SMS <-> Email):

    • Create an application that implements Conway’s Game of Life. And an API that controls ticks, resets, and renders the board in a 160 Unicode characters.
    • Setup a mailserver and email address to perform scripted interactions with the API when it receives messages from your number.
    • Setup IFTTT or similar to fire of an SMS to the mailserver every time that you should be taking a break, specifying a number of ticks and request for the game board.
    • Enjoy. You now have a way to remind yourself to take breaks and waste SMS quota at the same time!
    • activistPnk@slrpnk.netOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      Your SMS <-> Email arrow is bidirectional. I’m curious about that because I know it’s common to send an email to something like $bobsPhoneNum@sms.carrer.tld which then goes to his phone, but unfamiliar with the other direction. How can I send an SMS that gets proxied into an email?

      • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
        2·
        1 year ago

        It varies by carrier but some allow sending an SMS to an email address, instead of a phone number. Their system then proxies it and generally sends the message as an attachment.

    • activistPnk@slrpnk.netOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      That’s not the point. It’s to exploit missed opportunities; not to fill a quota. If there were a weather service, for example, I have no interest in asking for the weather 950 times and flooding my inbox.

      For a bit more context, it’s packaged with data which always runs out before the end of the month & sometimes I have a bit of downtime before buying more data. So the downtime could perhaps be less annoying if SMS can give some connection to the world (apart from the obvious use).

      The phone carrier itself has a somewhat sophisticated service with cascading menus all implemented in SMS, which then provides information about your account, options, and gives ways to place orders. So in principle anyone could implement that sort of thing. But the 2000s are over so maybe SMS has retracted back to just rare simple uses like buying bus fare.

  • ddh@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I have unlimited SMS, and think you should just carry on with what you’re doing now. It’s not a waste.

  • activistPnk@slrpnk.netOP
    1·
    1 year ago

    Considering how unreliable SMS is, I wonder if it would be useful to have some machinery on the user side of things to test the reliability. E.g.

    • Send an SMS every 6 hours containing a random number to a service that forwards the SMS back to you so you can keep stats on the rate of loss.
    • Perhaps every real-world SMS you send to friends should be sent twice, and the receiving side has some way of auto deleting dupes. This would increase your reliability. Although the overall network reliability might drop if everyone does this because the traffic load would double.