scott_sanford: (Default)
After finding a power supply at Rickreall, as related here, I didn’t have much excuse to not get the old Kenwood working. So this morning I drove down to Ham Radio Outlet for the antenna and base that I’d picked out online. (I’d worked out a scenic route to Rickreall that took me past Ham Radio Outlet, but I missed that exit on the way down. I didn’t need to go there anyhow.) I’d been dithering a week or so about this but realized having the radio not working but very close would bug me until I did something about it.
Read more... )
scott_sanford: (Default)
This two-meter houseplant has emerged from winter hibernation and is waking up. It seems to be doing well in the living room. It's not quite in bloom because it is not yet antenna season.

Kenwood in LR
scott_sanford: (lemur)
As some may know, there was a ham radio event in Rickreall on Saturday the 15th.

Getting down there was interesting, as my whim to drive down via McMinnville did not take me by the fastest possible route, but I saw parts of rural Oregon I’d never seen before and drove past the Evergreen Air Museum.

This is basically a large garage sale or flea market, only pretty much everything in the building is obsolete specialty electronics. Want vacuum tubes? They got those. Want back issues of QST? They got those. Want a gigantic radio that the seller assures you worked when his grandfather bought it off some other ham? You have come to the right place.

Among other things I was after a power supply of specific parameters, and I found many that were too small and a few too powerful. (Frustratingly, I was hardly in the door when I spotted a box with the right amp and volt ratings - but it was a battery charger.) There was a lot of other junk. I did find something that I’m pretty sure will work, literally as the dealers were packing up their table to go; they were willing to knock off five dollars to avoid hauling another heavy thing home with them, so lucky me. This was near the end of the event, so by the time I realized that I had everything I needed to get on the air except an antenna it was too late to cruise around for a two meter antenna that would let me test the radio I could now power.

Along with the junk dealers were some Girl Scouts with cookies; this was a good cause and I bought some Thin Mints. I also dropped five dollars into the prize drawing, for the heck of it.

That gave me reason to hang around until the drawing, so I was nearby when they had trouble with the ticket rolling barrel. One got on the PA to announce, “Does anyone here have a Leatherman tool or a pair of pliers?” He started to explain the problem but by then I was at the table with my Swisschamp out, unfolding the pliers. It turned out they just needed to pull out a wooden dowel that locked the barrel rotation.

For the drawing itself tickets were pulled out by the most obviously trustworthy people in the building, a pair of Girl Scouts.

And then something happened that I’d made no plans to handle: I actually won something! I now have a Yaesu VX-6R triple band handy-talkie. Honestly, I have no idea yet what I’ll do with it; my collection of radios is expanding past any plausible need for radios. (I am aware this happens a lot.) I am looking forward to trying it out; my cheap Baofeng often loses reception even in town and I suspect that it’s not all the fault of the tiny rubber duckie antenna.
scott_sanford: (Default)
Saturday I went down to Rickreall for the Swaptoberfest event. (There is no other reason to go to Rickreall.) It’s a rare thing when I pull into a parking lot and am hit with the feeling that my car doesn’t have enough antennas.

Read more... )

OMG SWR

Sep. 4th, 2019 08:52 pm
scott_sanford: (lemur)
While I have a CB radio in my car I almost never transmit, only rarely having anything to say. So it came as a shock when I tapped the push to talk key and watched the SWR meter light up to about 3.5 - yikes!

I wasn’t going to let that continue without trying to fix it and over the next few days considered various things that could cause a bad SWR reading. So I started with the simplest option; I found the manual and read up on recalibrating the radio. Once I got that far it took, oh, sixty seconds to run through the recalibration routine. The new SWR? About 1.2, a fine number!

I’m guessing some control got tapped at some point, and since I transmit so rarely it might have happened some time back.

(I'm posting this story to DreamWidth for a friend who's temporarily out of touch via phone.)
scott_sanford: (Sanford)
...but useless? Verily, I have done ART!

Since html and css are markup languages that pertain to documents, they're not that useful for making pictures. Poking at code for the heck of it, I did so anyway. I drew a slide rule. There are plenty of javascript slide rule emulators, such as this one, but this is a no-code nonfunctional picture, the equivalent of ascii art. Like most such art, it's mostly for the accomplishment of doing something despite the limitations of the medium. It was also a good excuse to learn a little more CSS code - and I discovered that direction: rtl is poorly documented.



A 1..............2........3.....4....5...6..7..8..9.1..............2........3.....4....5...6..7..8..9.1

B 1..............2........3.....4....5...6..7..8..9.1..............2........3.....4....5...6..7..8..9.1

CI1...9....8.....7......6.......5.........4.........π.3.......i.........2...........i.................1

C 1...,...,..,...,..i...........2.........i.......3.π...i.....4....i....5.......6......7.....8....9...1

D 1...,...,..,...,..i...........2.........i.......3.π...i.....4....i....5.......6......7.....8....9...1

L 0....|....1....|....2....|....3....|....4....|....5....|....6....|....7....|....8....|....9....|....0



Also, DreamWidth has different assumptions about formatting than web browsers, requiring some editing of the code. What you're seeing, basically v0.2.7a, hasn't yet been coded to allow for all possible sizes of fixed-width fonts; that can be another project.

I haz radio

Oct. 9th, 2017 01:33 pm
scott_sanford: (lemur)
My car has a radio. Neepery below...Read more... )

Brave

Oct. 15th, 2012 04:16 am
scott_sanford: (Default)
After a convention committee meeting Sunday I stopped at the Bagdad on the way home and saw the movie Brave. It's a good parable about why the song is Scotland the Brave. Not Scotland the Wise, Scotland the Smart, Scotland the Reasonable, or Scotland the 'I Planned Ahead.' Brave.
scott_sanford: (Default)
A while back I noted here that a company called Neuroware (in Japan, naturally) had come out with brainwave controlled cat ears. Now I discover that an American hobbyist has made his own. Apparently there's a real demand for this, at least among some people. I am aware that I know some of these people.

Among other things, this tells me that some SF authors have been much too conservative about what people will get up to as soon as easy cybernetics and/or genetic modifications become available. Once we have a technology, we'll play with it.
scott_sanford: (Default)
Just a few minutes ago I went into the kitchen and discovered that my back window gave me a view of a raccoon...no, TWO raccoons! This is a bit of a surprise when you're only a meter away from them. It seems a mother raccoon and her child have set up base camp under my garden shed, as after getting a good grip on the youngster's scruff she dragged the little fellow underneath it and has not emerged. She could stay down there all summer if she had water and an internet connection.
Of course there's more! )
scott_sanford: (Default)
So I happen to be re-reading Charles Stross's Halting State at the moment; no big deal, except that this was brought to my attention.

Most of you can skip the URL; it's a proposal to expand the old Multi-User Dungeon text based virtual reality concept onto a multi-platform multi-world system. Among other things, that would let player avatars move from one world to another, and move objects between various servers. It would be modular and expandable. Open source code so anyone with a net connection could run a server. Clients would not need to be desktop computers but would run on celphones – gaming anywhere, any time, connecting to any world.

Aside from the absolutely crappy keyboards of celphones these days, a MUD is absolutely perfect for the smartphone environment; the database size, CPU load, and bandwidth requirements are all tiny by today's standards. (I played on and wrote content for MUCKs on a dumb terminal and a 300 baud modem; I speak from experience.) So what? Two points.

It's really just nerds wanking at each other about software that doesn't even exist yet. But...

It's also the multi-node dynamic VR concept Charles Stross described in Halting State - and instead of a bazillion-euro megacorp doing it, these hobbyists want to write it for kicks.
scott_sanford: (Default)
Back in my first post on this subject I said I hoped to try this again the next day, and I have been asked to write up what happened on the second day of sign holding. Okay.

More after the cut! )
scott_sanford: (Default)
In my city shabbily dressed people can often be seen standing at street corners holding carboard signs, apparently as an alternative to panhandling from pedestrians. For a long time my friends and I have wondered how practical this really is. So I finally ran the experiment.

Read more... )
scott_sanford: (Default)
Lost secrets? Check. Mysterious underground passages? Check. Danger? Well, a little. Not a D&D campaign, but the London Post Office Railway, an underground mail delivery system that moved letters between London's post offices for about a century and has been shut down since 2002. Some determined explorers managed to gain access to this buried treasure of hidden London and report back their adventure.

Let me say in passing that I'm impressed not only with London's urban spelunkers but also the history nerds who equipped the team with background lore and maps. (It's a clear demonstration that our hobbies are only mostly useless.) Well done, gentlemen!
scott_sanford: (Default)
A friend of mine pointed out that in Japan you can now buy cat ears. No, not just costume pieces (nor real cat's ears, yuck), but robotic brainwave-reading ears.

Apparently the headband electronics picks up something it can interpret and moves the ears in response. The company, Neurowear claims this is just the first in a line of, um, something. Their website also has this lovely quote:

"People think that our body has limitation, however just imagine if we have organs that doesn’t exist, moreover we can control that new body?"

Is this not the prelude to SF-nal body upgrades?

Acting out

Apr. 14th, 2011 11:05 pm
scott_sanford: (Default)
Belatedly, some notes on my part in the non-Hollywood non-extravaganza of They're Here!, as written and directed by my friend Amanda "Penguin" Adams.

Everyone involved trickled in to the film set (Penguin's friend Mona's apartment) Sunday afternoon, and we blocked out filming angles and costuming. The gigantic tutu was admired.

The premise of the short is that aliens are coming to Earth and various nutjobs crawl out of the woodwork to react to the upcoming Close Encounter.

My primary part was the flamingly gay KKK leader. Has anyone mentioned it's hard to see out of those hoods? They're hot, too; I'm glad I didn't have to wear one in a Southern summer.

Since we had more parts than actors, I also became a microphone-pointing arm at a NASA press conference; 'Captain Ivey' was about as convincing a public figure as we could ask. It turns out I had brought a tie and could borrow a suit jacket; this let me be a Secret Service agent in some other scenes, where I got stand stiffly in the background and clear my throat meaningfully at the Veep. So much for show business.

All of the footage is now shot (except one not-very-special effect which will be added later) and it's in production. I haven't seen the final product yet, but I'm optimistic that it will turn out funny and silly.
scott_sanford: (Default)
For a friend (she knows who she is): a trip to HAARP! Read more... )

iCat

Feb. 5th, 2011 08:02 pm
scott_sanford: (Default)
I cannot believe that this video shows an approved app for the iPad. If nothing else, the level of screen protection required must be formidable.

On the other hand, it's right up there with the laser pointer as a cat toy.
scott_sanford: (Default)
Apparently this is an actual object.

Read more... )
scott_sanford: (Default)
Last Friday I attended a party and did some file swapping, returning home with 55 gigabytes of anime...all in Japanese without subtitles. *sigh* Oh, well; I have titles and torrenting software.

So I've been going through a few things since Saturday.

Angel Beats! was first and I lucked out with a winner. I would not have expected Purgatory to look like a high school, but it makes a twisted kind of sense. Not quite as bad as Hell, far from Heaven, seems to go on forever...yeah, that's high school. The student council president claims she is not an angel, and a few people believe her; another kid claims to be God, and no one believes him. There are really only two good ways to end a group-in-Purgatory story and I was unsure until the very end which one the series would use.

Moyas[h]imon: Tales of Agriculture is up now; it follows students at an agricultural college, one of whom has the bizarre power to see and talk to microbes. Microbiology infodumps are included reasonably painlessly, with kawaii microbe characters getting speaking parts. (Say, [livejournal.com profile] travelswithkuma, would you mention this to Lisa? She might be amused.) So far so good.

Arakawa Under the Bridge is in the queue now, and apparently crazy homeless Japanese people are more amusing than crazy homeless American people. We'll see.

Profile

scott_sanford: (Default)
scott_sanford

May 2025

S M T W T F S
    123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
2526272829 3031

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 18th, 2025 05:28 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios