There are multiple apps and services out there that you can use as a dog cam. However, most of these apps and services require you to pay for new devices or a subscription (or both!). When I recently adopted a puppy, I used Twilio Video and an old phone to create my own free dog cam.

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to build your own dog cam using:

1. a Twilio account – sign up for free
2. Python 3.x
3. the micro web framework Flask
4. the Twilio Python helper library
5. ngrok - sign up for free
6. An old phone or tablet

Features

For the Dog Cam, there were a few features I wanted:

Free or low cost solution

Existing dog cameras mostly require you to spend money on a subscription or new hardware. What I wanted was a free or low cost solution that can run on any internet-connected …

Due to understandable reasons, Eurovision was cancelled last year. I don't know about you, but I kept hoping that someone somewhere would make online voting for it happen. But it didn't happen... until today.

Announcing: The Lost Eurovision Song Contest - unofficially hosted by Twilio

How do I vote?

Text '2020' to one of the following numbers to get the list of all the 2020 participants and their youtube videos. Once you have picked a winner, text “2020 Country” to the same number (e.g. 2020 Germany).

What about the other years... Could we maybe vote for those too?

You can text any year from 1956 to 2021 to any of the above numbers and then vote for your favourite song.

How do I see the results?

You can see the results for 2020 …

What would you do if you could have a dedicated phone number for anything you wanted? This blog post will show you how to create a phone number that hides your private phone number and acts as an intermediary between your phone number and other phone numbers. The use cases are many:

• separate work and private numbers
• international numbers while traveling (without buying a local sim)
• an event hotline for Code of Conduct violations
• an alias number for a Tinder date, which you can delete if things go badly...

Let’s assume we need a number for an event Code of Conduct hotline because we would prefer not to give attendees our private number. In this post, we will build just such a phone number proxy using:

• a Twilio account – sign up for free
• a Twilio phone number with calling and texting capability
• Python 3.x
• the micro web framework Flask …

Landlines – an antiquated telephone that is often unused but kept around for legacy reasons.

I cannot remember the last time I used a landline telephone. It was probably more than three years ago. Growing up with a mobile connection has made landlines a thing of the past for younger generations.

Throughout university the only thing a student uses is a cell phone. However, once a student moves into their first place where they need to set up internet, this long-forgotten option suddenly reappears. As it did for me when I recently moved to an apartment in London. When setting up our internet we didn’t consider getting a landline. Really, why would we?

Then, after living at our new place for a few days, it hit us. We couldn’t figure out how the doorbell worked. There was no built-in intercom, so there was nothing that would make a sound when …