I'm one of the few Instagram users who connects solely through the Unix 'talk' gateway.

This is inspired by a tweet by a friend, detailing a voicemail fail. He’s a little embarrassed by it, so I’m not going to use Ben’s name here.

I think we all can admit that telephony is dead. I do much more pocket-dials than intentional calls, and the calls to me from numbers I don’t know tend very much to end up with nobody on the other end. The only people I regularly call are my parents, who, being older than me, are on a far different place on the tech curve. I can barely handle pop-up instead of twist-off toothpaste, so I’m okay with that.

If you call me and leave a voice mail, I use Google Voice and get told via email and text message. This means two things: First, voice recognition is getting better. It isn’t done, but it is getting much better than it used to. Second, of course, is that it is functionally the same as email or text, which is probably how you should communicate with me.

Text meaning SMS or whatever chat app. I default to Google Hangouts, which worked for me because I could connect it with Google Voice and have access to SMS (to the number I give out) in the sub-basement where I work. I also use Facebook Messenger so I can play Words With Friends against my wife and her sister. I am open to using other services, but they do not include people I know and want to talk to. Or at least, to my knowledge they don’t.

I am active on Twitter, and I often interact with friends via Twitter DMs. I do not keep open DMs, so we must both follow each other for that to work.

I am of the generation that’s hardcore into email, but I do not do Inbox Zero nor do I turn on notifications. I wrote my own thing that checks for mail via IMAP and sends notifications via either Ubuntu’s Notify OSD to my desktop or to my phone via Pushover. If you don’t pay me, work with me, or share the name “Jacoby”, I will get to your email when I get to it.

If you want to talk to me through other means, tell me first. Probably via email.

If you have any questions or comments, I would be glad to hear it. Ask me on Twitter or make an issue on my blog repo.