radio
- My old friend Lee Hart scratchbuilt a marvelous model of the Galileo spacecraft, including an operating COSMAC processor that blinks out the Arecibo message on an LED.
- The COSMAC 1802 was a good choice for spacecraft, because it drew almost no power and could be radiation-hardened. It was all static CMOS, so the system clock could be slowed arbitrarily, down to audio rates, or just stopped. Alas, the contention (which I’ve shared) that there was an 1802 on the Viking spacecraft isn’t true. Bummer.
- Here’s an essentially bottomless collection of old radio literature, including magazines, technical books and articles, and ephemera. The PDFs are of excellent quality, though I wonder how legal some of the items are. Worth a look, for the Deco artwork in the 20s and 30s magazines, if nothing else.
- And if you’re interested in toilet paper on a total lifestyle basis, Toilet Paper World is just the thing. I’m not sure I even noticed that tinted toilet paper existed before they told me. And now it’s gone. I guess it’s true that 80% of the world is always below our radar.
- We’ve had air rifles since…1779. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- I’d heard about how the Soviets repaired their ailing Salyut 7 space station, but not in anywhere close to this kind of detail.
- Paris used to use (and may still; the article is unclear) a sort of Indiana Jones mechanism for clearing blockages in its extra large economy-sized sewer pipes: Rolling a 9-foot iron ball through them.
- If you’re watching sea ice levels in the Antarctic (as I am) this site puts up very nice graphs on an almost daily basis.
- Is there anything that hipsters can’t ruin? (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- Murder comes naturally to Chimpanzees. The sad part is, it comes naturally to us, too. I suspect it came so naturally to the Neanderthals that they didn’t need Sap to extinctify them.
- Somehow I managed to see the first Hobbit flick four times and never noticed that Bifur had an axe stuck in his head. I thought it was some sort of ornamment.
- Oh, and predictably, Buzzfeed has a stack rank of Peter Jackson’s dwarves by, um, hotness. They should have asked some Dwarf women; the hottest dwarves are also the ones that look the least like dwarves. Several times I was asking myself if Fili and Kili had been left in a basket on some dwarf’s front porch.
- One more and I’ll let the dwarf thing go. Separated at birth: Bofur the Dwarf and…Sister Bertrille.
- I survived the 60s. I had all the Beatles albums. I am not and have never been a Communist. I guess this means that hypnotism is impossible.
- Yet another take on the Amazon vs. Hachette dust-up: The publishers contributed to Amazon’s monopsony power by demanding platform lock-in via Kindle DRM. And now they’re surprised that Amazon controls the ebook market. (Thanks to Eric Bowersox for the link.)
- Pete Albrecht sent word that some guys at the University of Rochester have figured out how to trap light in very small spaces for very long times, on the order of several nanoseconds. (This is a long, long time to be stuck in one place if you’re a photon.) It’s done with evolvable nanocavities–and that gives me an idea for a tech gimmick in my long-planned novel The Molten Flesh. So many novels, so little time…
- Related to the above: The reason I stopped working on The Molten Flesh three or four years back is that I ordered a used copy of the canonical biography of Oscar Wilde (who is a character in the story) and the book stank so badly of mold and mildew that I threw it out after sitting in a chair with it for about five minutes. Time to get another copy.
- Yet another reason not to bother with The Weather Chanel: WGN’s weather website is hugely better, doesn’t require Flash, and works nationally, not only in Chicago.
- Lazarus 1.2.4 has been released. Go get it.
- OMG! STORMY, have you been messing around in Nebraska again?
- Over at Fourmilab we have a superb scan of the 1930 Allied Radio catalog, which carried not only radios and parts but waffle irons, home movie projectors, coffee percolators, toasters, copper bowl heaters, electric hair curlers, and much else for the newly minted upper middle class. (Thanks to Baron Waste for the link.)
- One interesting thing about the radios in the Allied catalog above is that they’re shouting about screen grid tubes. Tetrodes were invented in 1919 and weren’t in mass production until the late 1920s. I’m guessing that tetrodes were what separated the extremely fussy triode-based radios of the 1920s from the turnkey appliance radios of the 1930s and beyond. What the tetrode began the pentode completed, of course, but the watershed year in appliance radio seems to have been 1930.
- Our current Pope has abandoned the bullet-proof Popemobile. It’s one step closer to the end of the Imperial Papacy.
- What dogs think of dog impersonators. Hey, man, the lack of a tail gives it all away…
- It’s not cinder blocks, but something altogether more boggling: a pair of quadricopters tossing a pole to one another, catching it, and balancing it like I used to do with rakes, only way better. (Thanks to Bill Higgins for the link. )
- Salon can’t seem to decide if self-publishing makes sense, or if it doesn’t.
- 10 thoroughly obscure terms, of which I knew 7–which makes me a bit of a language geek. I knew everything but “pataphor,” “isograms,” and “capitonym.” I suspect those are relatively recent coinages, compared to “zeugma.” (Thanks to Bill Cherepy for the link.”
- NPR: Kids who drink whole milk are thinner than kids who drink skim milk. Fat makes you thin. Carbs make you fat. The evidence just keeps on a-pilin’.
- It gets worse: Life extension by calorie restriction doesn’t work. Starving yourself doesn’t make you thin, doesn’t make you live longer, and beyond the continuous suffering it entails, may make you so unpleasant to be around that people will run when they see you coming.
- Related: From the Terms I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: The second meal effect : The glycemic index of the food eaten at any given meal will affect blood glucose levels at subsequent meals as well. Eating low-GI all the time may be necessary to keep your blood sugar in line.
- And while I’m being a party pooper: Why restaurants make you fat. Carol and I make a point of not eating out more than once a week. In a lot of months, we have a sit-down restaurant meal maybe twice.
- People think that food labeled “organic” tastes better. It’s supposed to, therefore it must, I guess. (I drink organic dairy products to avoid hormones; beyond that, it’s case by case.)
- As if we didn’t have enough to worry about these days, H7N9 may get airborne.
- Web publishing favors cats. Print publishing favors dogs.
- The latest Nuts & Volts (April 2013) has a cover story on a modern reconception of the classic AM low-power broadcaster, using a 12K5 space charge tube. The twist is that the broadcaster is fed by an Arduino board called VoiceShield, which can generate all sorts of audio signals.
- From Kent Kotal: Behold the 20 richest musicians of all time. Note that the richest one is not a rock star.
- Also from Kent: Chicago radio legend Clark Weber will be doing on-the-air commentaries on WIND-AM. Clark is also a ham radio op (W9FFB) and I contacted him a few times back in the late 70s while I still lived in Chicago.
- For a trifling $44M, you can live in the fortress of Roman Emperor Tiberius. My only concern: If it’s haunted, it’s gonna be way haunted. (See Tacitus, Annals V1.) Thanks to Steve Sayre for the link.
- Here’s a great site on older toy and hobbyist robots; if you’re a collector or just a nostalgist, it’s a must-see. (Maybe some here have never seen my late 70s robot Cosmo Klein.) Alas, the link came from an old email sent by the late George M. Ewing WA8WTE, who suggested it as an Odd Lot. Better late than never.
- We used to giggle at the name in the mid-60s, but the founder of Blonder-Tongue Labs is still alive, and maintains a site full of interesting tech information about crystal sets and old radios, as well as the firm’s patents and products from long ago. (Thanks to Michael Covington for the link; again, set aside more than a year ago and never used.)
- No tablet here yet (waiting to see what if anything pops up at CES 2012) but I’m tempted to get a Nook Color so I can at least quit reading ebooks on my dinosaur of an X41. My friend Erbo has learned a lot about rooting it and running CyanogenMod, and has much good to say about the combo.
- If you’re considering that step, consider the peculiar nature of the Android OS itself, which may not exist in precisely the same way that Windows exists. This is still good, but you need to understand it, as it’s a newish thing in the computing universe.
- I’ll never buy one of these, but I admire the concept: An off-the-shelf smartphone-controlled video-equipped RC helicopter. And I admit: If it weren’t for OWS I wouldn’t have heard of them at all.
- Henry Law called my attention to the fact that County Down in Northern Ireland is often called “Drumlin Country” because of its landforms. Odd then that “The Star of County Down” is one of my favorite Irish folk songs, and has been since I first heard it circa 2000–which is precisely when I wrote “Drumlin Boiler,” the first tale in the Drumlins Saga.
- And of course, when the starship Origen is marooned in the Drumlins system, it is the mere handful of collectible print books on board that allow the castaways to gradually re-create a modern society on an alien world. The cheap consumer-grade tablet PCs in every passenger pocket were all dead inside of fifteen years (most far sooner than that) and nobody thought to create printing presses before they were gone. No wonder that the cult of the printed book rises as the age of the printed book fades. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- Talk partisan political hatred all the time, and prepare to reap the wind.
- Can we please add “Google is your friend,” “denier,” and “talking points” to this list? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- And with that, the curtain falls on 2011. May the impact of the curtain give it multiple broken bones, concussions, contusions, internal bleeding, hemorrhoids, the heartbreak of psoriasis, and whatever else it might take to keep this year from darkening our doorsteps ever again.
- Have been reading copyedits and catching up on any number of things after five weeks away from home. We’re going to have real books out of the bindery on or about October 1. For the time being, I’ll be glad to just Not Be Doing Book anymore. (And that should be on or about June 30.)
- Some twit (maybe twits) wrote Twitter apps that store unique tweet ID numbers in signed 32-bit integers. The tweet count since startup is approaching the magic number 2,147,483,647. After that, tweet IDs become negative, and hilarity reliably ensues. Should be tomorrow; let’s watch.
- In other recent software fails, Ubuntu 9.04 broke Skype out here, and made sound support work a little weirdly generally. The Mute button gets checked all by itself for no apparent reason. This is evidently not a problem I’m having all by my lonesome, but time to fix it has been scarce.
- A 14-year-old boy got hit by a meteorite, albeit a smallish one. He got a 3-inch scar on the back of his hand, which (once the bandanges come off) will be the most interesting conversation piece he is ever likely to own, since he evidently had to give up the meteorite itself.
- Building this must have been a picnic. (But I’ll bet the view’s to die for.) It’s a tourist thing, like the tchochke shop atop Pike’s Peak, but way cooler. And yet another reason I have to get back to France someday.
- If everything goes well and the IC-729 still works, I may be out in the (pacified) woods somewhere working Field Day on June 27-28. (I hate to haul my IC-736 into the wilds, but I will if I have to.) I have an RV with a generator, an AH-3 antenna tuner, and an obscene amount of wire. I know I can’t use an RV park’s electricity, but can I use their water pipes for an RF ground?
