If you’re sick of reading all this content on phonelosers.org for free then have I got a deal for you! Very soon you’ll be able to purchase your very own Phone Losers of America book that contains a tiny fraction of the amount of content you can find on this site and you’ll get to pay for it!

The PLA book has been finished for a while now and the finishing touches are going into it. Chapters are being proofread, pages formatted, covers designed and pictures added. If all goes well, the book should be available long before this year is over. The book will contain stories based on the original PLA issues, such as the Dino story, Fred Meyer, the Boulder News Frenzy, revenge and more. All of it has been rewritten for the book so you’ll only think you’re reading the same shit that you’ve been reading here for the past 16 years. There are also a few new items in the book that you hopefully haven’t heard of. For a somewhat complete chapter list, visit the PLA book page or to talk about the book project in the PLA Forums, click here.

Here’s the part where I need your help. At the beginning of each chapter, below the chapter title and before the chapter actually starts, there is a quote about the PLA. These quotes aren’t necessarily related to the content in the chapter, but they’re all about some aspect of what makes the PLA awesome or why a particular person loves the PLA. Like this one and this one. I have enough quotes for about 10 chapters, but I need about 10 more of them. Say something great or witty about the PLA and you just might make it into the book.

The first few quotes I used were from this thread on the PLA Forums, so reading that might give you an idea of what I’m looking for. You can post your quote there, or post it in the comments below. Or you can email them directly to me.

If there’s something you’d like to see in the book or you have any other ideas for it or maybe if you want to contribute some artwork or anything else, you can post your ideas here or email them to me and hopefully it won’t be too late. Keep an eye on this page, though, because the book will be here very soon. No really, I mean it this time!

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted an update about The Phone Show, so here it goes. There’s a show. It’s called The Phone Show. It’s on Cacti Radio once a week, each Tuesday, at 9pm PST. RBCP hosts along with whoever he can sucker into coming on the show with him, which most frequently includes Spessa and Linear.

Recently there have been a lot of in-studio guests, including old-school PLA’ersJammie and kcochran (and you too, Chad, I GUESS) where we talked about some PLA history, such as the birth of #rock, Spee’s lawsuit and death, the Fred Meyer pranks that kcochran just happened to hear while inside a Fred Meyer, Jim Bayless and more. The show ends with an on-air suicide. It’s a good show to listen to if you’re into all that PLA stuff. Here is a link to it.

A full archive of the show can be found at www.cactiradio.com/phoneshow/

Cacti Radio has recently been taken over by Carlito from Madhouse Live, which may or may not be a permanent situation. But the Phone Show still runs on Cacti Radio each Tuesday at 9pm PST, so start listening to us and calling in each week! Please?

UPDATE: Oh yeah…I guess I should have mentioned that the very week I make this update about The Phone Show, I’m taking a 3 week hiatus from the show because I’ll be out of town, jetting all over the planet. We’ll be back sometime in August. I was way too lazy to Tweet about my absence before last night’s show, so people were tuning in and wondering why they were hearing Madhouse Radio. Sorry, everyone!

 The Phone Show - June 15th, 2010 - PLA Alumni Jammie and kcochran [65:15m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (572)

The internet’s latest social media craze is known as Foursquare. Foursquare is an application designed for most smart phones and can be downloaded at foursquare.com. Whenever you arrive at a bar or restaurant or store, you press a button on your phone and you’re “checked in” to that location. Why would you do this? We don’t know, but apparently billions of people all over the world are really into broadcasting their locations to the public. Just look at all these check-ins below:

By going to search.twitter.com, you can type in 4sq.com and you’ll get a list of everyone on the planet that is currently checking in to someplace. You can even modify your search to include only local businesses. This is great for creepy stalkers who want to keep tabs on random pretty girls. A creepy stalker could jump in his car and speed to the pub for a chance to meet the girl of his dreams. Everywhere she goes.

Another use for Foursquare is for burglars to know when houses are empty. If @sexygirl535 is out having fun with her friends at a bar, then she’s not home, right? So quick, drive over there and break into her house! You know she doesn’t have roommates because she constantly tweets about how it sucks to live alone. A website called Please Rob Me has been set up for just this purpose.

And then there’s the PLA’s favorite pasttime – making prank calls to people. Foursquare is the perfect tool for this. In that search box up there, you click on the Twitter username which probably gives you the name of the person checking in. Then you click on the link in their post and you’ll have the phone number of the business they’re at. Now you can call the business, ask for that person and say something crazy to them. They’re almost always surprised that anyone could know that they’re there. It rarely occurs to them that just minutes ago they transmitted their location to the entire world. Listen to these:

Want to hear some more of the phone calls we’ve made to these people? Visit the PLA Forum’s latest discussion board, called Let’s Stalk People! You can listen to calls we’ve made, post your own calls, and find out how these people responded on their Twitter accounts. You’ll see links to hilarious Twitter and Facebook threads like this one:

Foursquare type applications are becoming more popular every day. Yelp.com and loopt.com have a similar service that lets you check in to places you’re visiting. A site called blippy.com lets people transmit what they’re purchasing on their credit cards in real time which could allow someone to know where they’re shopping at. You may notice other similar services showing up in your friends twitter and facebook feeds. When you see a friend check in on Foursquare, it is your duty to prank call them at that place.

The PLA is constantly raising awareness to the security and privacy issues of Foursquare by prank calling as many users as we can. Many users immediately stop using Foursquare after our calls. This is a public service to them since a simple prank call is harmless compared to what could happen to them. Help join the cause by pranking Foursquare users for the greater good! Don’t let the rapists and burglars get to them before we do!

Join us in the Let’s Stalk People! message board.

Listen to our Foursquare stalking podcast where we discuss Foursquare and play our stalking calls.

Visit www.phonelosers.org/stalker to hear even more stalking calls and view the responses of people we stalk.

The author of this post can be found on Twitter, Yelp and Foursquare.

 PLA Radio Episode #27 - Foursquare Stalking [26:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2377)

…

Trevelyn at WeakNet Labs has been busy lately, coding up lots of new programs for the Android platform. Included are blue box and red box programs, now available for free in the Android Market. If you’ve got an Android phone, be sure to use them to make free calls from your cell phone, which will probably cause a universe-exploding paradox of some sort.

Trevelyn is also doing a weekly show on Cacti Radio called Taming The Electron. Be sure to listen to it every Sunday!

For those that don’t know, WeakNet was destroyed by a fire about a month ago, so I’m sure Trevelyn would appreciate a small donation, using the PayPal link on the bottom of his page.

This January, here in Oregon, a new law passed which makes texting or talking on the phone while driving a crime. So now when I switch music tracks on my iPhone or tap the screen to view my GPS location or click on the “next” button for Google Map directions, I run the risk of being pulled over for texting. Apparently they’d prefer that I go back to the old-fashioned method of buying giant paper 4′ x 6′ maps of all the cities I drive in so I can unfold it in front of my face while doing 75 on the Interstate. Yes, an unlit map that covers the entire windshield is much safer. But I digress…

Texting is illegal. And talking on your cell phone without a hands-free contraption is illegal. But you know what isn’t illegal while driving? Eating breakfast. And putting on your makeup. And opening your mail. And changing music tracks on your car stereo. And…reading a book. I’m pretty sure there’s no specific law against reading a book while driving. So I came up with an an ingenious way to fool the police officers trying to enforce this new law. Hide my cell phone in a book! I call it The Phone Book.

I used a Dremel tool to cut a hole in this book, 130 pages deep, so that my cell phone fits snugly inside of it. Now when I pass an officer, nose buried in a book, he’ll just think I’m engrossed in a gripping horror story and not actually breaking any laws by texting my BFF Jill. Here are a few pictures of the construction of this amazing project.

Cell by Stephen King. Not a bad remake of all his other stories.	Looks like it’ll fit nicely inside this book.	A pencil line trace of my iPhone.

The only downside to this project is that it’s slightly harder to control my car when driving 75 MPH around town since I have to use one hand to hold the book and the other to actually type the messages to my friends and then mostly my knee to try and keep the steering wheel straight. I’ve nearly lost control a few times, but I think it’s very unlikely that I’ll be noticed by the police. And if they do pull me over for any other offenses, my cell phone will be hidden safely in my book where he won’t even notice it.

“Were you by any chance texting while swerving all over the place back there?” he’ll ask me.

“Why no officer. Do you see a cell phone in my car?” I’ll reply.

You can click here to find out if texting and/or talking on a cell phone is illegal in your state. If it is, you just may want to invest in a Dremel and make yourself a Phone Book too. As an added bonus, you’ll have a few pages of something to read while you’re impatiently waiting for that text message back from your friend while driving.

UPDATE AND DISCLAIMER: Joseph from Kansas City emailed me this morning and informed me that carving a secret compartment into your Amazon Kindle version of Cell does not work and should not be attempted. Apparently this will completely ruin your Kindle! I’m unsure if other brands of ebooks will have similar consequences, but it’s probably best not to try if you’re not familiar with electronics. It’s also unknown if this hack will work on other paper books besides Stephen King’s Cell. I’ve only tried it on Cell, so if you ruin your copy of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer with this, don’t blame me because I only guarantee that it works on the paperback version of Cell.

Several new shows have been added to the Cacti Radio schedule this week! Carlito from Madhouse Live will be doing a live prank call show on Tuesday nights for the 3 hours preceding The Phone Show. Visit www.madhouselive.com to learn more about Carlito’s show.

And Trevelyn from WeakNet Labs has started up a new show called Taming The Electron, where he plays music and talks about coding every Sunday at 4pm PST. You can view this weeks show at the Taming The Electron page, which is at weaknetlabs.com/tamingtheelectron.

linear is also premiering a new show this week, which will air immediately after The Phone Show on Tuesday, at 10pm PST. Be sure to listen for that. And don’t forget to listen to The Phone Show tomorrow night! Between Carlito, The Phone Show and linear’s new show, it’s going to be an action-packed 5 hours.

For a complete listing of shows on the Cacti Radio Network, visit cactiradio.com/schedule

SpaceBison made a cool/bizarre PLA video that I’m going to try and pass off as something Christmas-y since it has snowing cacti in it. It’s not as cool as the video in our previous post, but it’s pretty great.

12/24 UPDATE: He made another one that’s much better…

Here’s a new episode of PLA Radio, just in time for Christmas! In this episode we listen to a few more hotel phone calls, a phone mob and announce Cacti Radio. Show notes are below…

00:00 The new phone book’s here!
00:45 Intro
01:30 Pumpkin contest winners – Congrats Handler and Matt!
02:00 Hotel intercept phone calls – Telephreak – i-hacked
08:23 Radio auction phone mob
13:46 prehack.org
14:00 Cacti Radio
14:04 Read the Manic Radio story.
14:04 Listen to the Manic Radio episode that was broadcast on 11/10/2009.
14:23 Ask Mr. Biggs, PaulDotCom, Security Justice, Nate and Di.
14:48 Black Hat Life
15:57 Leave a voicemail at 505-796-4020 or phonelosers.org on Skype. Email radio AT phonelosers.org.
16:18 Earthbound – Da Black Market OC ReMix

If you listen to this episode of PLA Radio, be sure and watch the accompanying video below! It has footage of us pranking the hotel at Defcon, a 5 minute clip of the PLA forum members sitting around a table in a conference room while making the calls to the radio station auction and some clips of me recording this episode of PLA Radio. Plus an awesome surprise at the end!

 PLA Radio Episode #26 - Hotel Intercepts and A Phone Mob [21:09m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (5272)

There’s now a website for our 24-hour streaming station at www.cactiradio.com. You can visit it any time of day and listen to music, prank calls and reruns of PLA Radio and The Phone Show. Both Spessa and murd0c plan to do their own live shows soon. You can also request songs/pranks on the station and the automated system will play them for you. Go listen now! And click here to become a fan of Cacti Radio on Facebook.

And speaking of The Phone Show, it’s on tonight at 9:00pm Pacific. Listen to it on Cacti Radio.

And one last thing…Mr. Anderson has announced a phone mob for Wednesday at 9:00am Central Time. If you can drag yourself out of bed that early, tune into Cacti Radio or watch the PLA Twitter for instructions.

The Phone Show lasted only a single night on Manic Radio last week, then RBCP was “fired” 2 days later. Manic Radio didn’t appreciate our hilarious material at all and you can read a little about all that here. So this time, instead of moving to a new station, despite offers from klulz and Radio Xenu (thanks, guys!), we’re just going to set up our own streaming server which will feature nonstop PLA material 24 hours a day. Take a listen at the links below!

Several people on the PLA Forums have expressed interest in doing their own shows on our station, so keep an eye on it for new shows and material soon. We’ll be setting up a page or a domain for the station once we figure out what the hell to call it. This week The Phone Show will be on at 9pm Pacific, Tuesday night, on the new station. Join us on efnet’s #phonelosers by going to our new chat room page at phonelosers.org/chat/ during the show. Unlike Manic Radio’s chat, you’re much less likely to be kicked out for being clever or funny.