Thank you for linking this! I'm a big fan of Egan but had never read this particular short story. I feel like Egan is perhaps the only contemporary author who actually _gets_ consciousness.
Relatedly, I am seriously considering getting a landline again so that I (and my young children) can once again live in a world where the barrier to a "quick chat" with friends or family is lowered.
I'd love for my daughter to be able to just pick up the phone, call her friend, and schedule a hangout for that afternoon. (Or for me to be able to do the same with her friend's parents).
And having a dedicated landline for this means none of this needs to involve the mobile phone intruding on our home life.
If you've got it working then obviously it must be possible, but I'm a touch confused because the ErsatzTV documentation says "A Plex Pass is required for ErsatzTV to work with Plex." (https://ersatztv.org/docs/user-guide/configure-clients)
Is it possible that you had this working in the past but Plex has since removed the functionality from their free tier?
Thanks for this - I need to solve exactly this problem on a toy project I've been working on; you've saved me the time to hunt down the appropriate algorithm!