ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
*****************************************************************************

You might look into Asterisk (http://www.asterisk.org/), a fairly
lightweight open-source PBX that can be configured to just about anything,
including playing sound files based on the system date.  We use it here for
our main PBX and for PA paging, both on really, really old hardware (~10
years old) on Linux.  It is fairly easy to learn if you're familiar with
Linux applications--we were up and running in 2 days when our previous main
PBX suddenly, and unexpectedly, died and we couldn't afford to shell out a
ton of money for a new one.  A couple of really helpful resources:

http://www.asteriskdocs.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=11
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/index.php?page=Asterisk
http://www.asteriskguru.com/tutorials/

Best regards!

-Joe

-----------------------
Joe Moretti
Director of Center Operations
Sci-Quest, Hands-on Science Center
256.837.0606 v
256.837.4536 f
[log in to unmask]
-----------------------






On 5/16/07 11:27 AM, "Wayne Watson" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
> *****************************************************************************
> 
> Maybe someone has an idea where I can get the gadget I describe here.
> Perhaps it doesn't exist. I do a lot of support of our small local
> science museum. I would like the museum to sponsor Star Date. You may
> have heard of it. It's a daily one minute broadcast on many radio
> stations of a relevant astronomy event to the date--eclipse, comet,
> asteroid collision(!), etc. It would be very good if a gadget like a
> phone answering machine exists that will play a CD of this program
> daily. We can purchase a monthly subscription of CDs from the University
> of Texas (the sponsor of Star Date) that have the daily programs.
> 
> The trick here is to have a phone at the museum which has the daily
> broadcast on it. It would be good if a gadget/device exists that queues
> up the next 1 minute program each day from the CD for a month and plays
> it whenever someone calls the phone that day. It may be that a PC/Apple
> plus such a gadget is required. I checked on this about 3 years ago, but
> no such device exists. Anyone aware of such a device coming on to the
> market with all the new gadgets hitting the market?

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