Loads of streaming electrons, oscillating on one frequency, and jumping up and down in amplitude to be broadcasted on a really wide area and get received by an AM radio - what's not to like? The shear simplicity of AM radio is just astonishing and it's ability to jump up off the ionosphere and reach much farther than it usually should is only a bonus.
Inspired by the Conet project, I found an old AM/LW Russian transistor radio that was lying around, attached 3 AA bateries to it (yes, TO it, because the battery leads inside it were corroded really badly), and got cracking!
It's interesting to see, uhm... hear that AM radio broadcasters still play radio talk shows, educational stories and radio dramas, even though probably very few people listen to them. In comparison FM stations are usually crammed with music, and nothing else. (which is pure crap, in my opinion, since local stations can and should do more than just broadcast music)
What's even more interesting is that I found some weird stations on both AM and LW bandwidths that emmit morse code signals. I placed the transistors near a 80m long wire that's hanging from my window over to my neighbors window, and maybe that's why I picked up more stations than usual.
One broadcaster was present on the ~620KHz frequency and was sending out ".- .-. -.." ("ARD" in Morse code) and the second one was present on ~300KHz and was sending out a long beep, followed by ".--. ...-" ("PV" in Morse code) and then a long beep again. I have absolotely no idea what these stations do or what they may be used for, so I'll just keep on checking.
Be sure to check out the "Conet" project that I mentioned earlier! You can download the whole CD pack for free, and if you are a radio nut, you will enjoy hearing all sorts of different number stations (most likely used by spies on foreign territory) which give out a warm "cold war" feeling
Attached: A quick walkthrough from the 600-1600KHz bandwidth, and the recordings of the weird stations that I caught.
Got a bluetooth dongle today... Small - black - cheap. Hooked it up to my usual USB port out back and inserted the mini CD that came bundled with it... imiddiately the autorun.ini launched setup.exe and installed all the needed drivers for my device. The software driver is called "BlueSoleil". And why the hell is this the only type of software that comes bundled with any bluetooth device?! It's slow, buggy and crashes so frequently that you have to launch the task manager while transferring a simple file accross the air! Fortunately, version 6 of BlueSoleil is allot more user friendly and integrateable with Windows Vista. Unfortunately - it costs money and imposes a 5MB limit on data transfer. Damn.
Just for the sake of it, I launched MacOSX to see if it will at least try to recognize my Bluetooth device. Needless to say - it did. And the simplicity of the built-in solution for MacOS was so astonishing that it made me cry when I went back to that piece of crap that BlueSoleil is! It creates a Bluetooth icon next to the volume section on the title bar and contains a few basic options - Send, Browse, Options + some additional features... but certainly NO functionless bloat that BlueSoleil carries!
Why can't every hardware manufacturer create a software driver for their device that does not introduce 5 links on your desktop, a background service with so much bloat that it gobbles up tens of megabytes of RAM, at least 1 system tray application to advertise it's presence and all the instability, crashes and even bluescreens that you can imagine?
I needed to install a Linux distro on a server machine for (currently) testing purposes, and it's quite weird to not be able to find any install CDs when dozens of them are just lying around - either it's a prehistoric version of Ubuntu, or SuSe 9.x, or Ubuntu for PPC (how the hell did that get there?) or the fist two CDs of SuSe 10.1 (the remaining 3 probably ened up being somebody elses beer coaster).
So, I managed to grab a Slackware 12 install DVD and slipped it in the server's drive bay. The greeting I got was certainly not as graphically pleasing as one might expect it to be with Fedora, Mandriva, SuSe etc. Only text based dialogs were letting me choose a font, keyboard map etc. The setup is started by running a command called (obviously) - "setup". Although the setup procedure it's pretty ugly (non-graphical), it's quick to do and is quick to finish (but I can't stand the fact that there is no progress bar while installing).
Eventually, the setup finished - telling me to reboot... After the first startup, a text-based login was waiting for me. Every successful login spits out a "message of the day" which are usually some quotes. So, how to go graphical? "startx" didn't do the trick, so I ended up running "xorgsetup" which got me going. KDE quickly popped up without the unnecessary bloat that most other distros put in - it was quite refreshing to see. But, I needed fluxbox, so I changed the default window manager to that and logged in again.
To give a hint about the ease of use for Fluxbox - here's how to change the default desktop wallpaper:
The conclusion? When using "KISS" distros, such as Slackware, allot of effort is needed to get things going, but once it's done, don't touch ANYTHING else! To be honest, although I feel a bit proud for configuring such a disasterous user-unfriendly (yet stable) Linux distro, I would trade it for OpenSuSe or Fedora any time! (if anyone asks, the server is a test HTTP server... it works.)
It's kind of interesting to see retromercials now and then, but today I found some that were really something! Cereal boxes that look like a half drawn cartoon intro, cars that are freakin' long and scream "women can't drive me", and space food sticks (proof that you can even sell horse**it if you say it's what the astronauts use), yup, it's all there. The very beginnings of using cartoon characters and prize toys for grabbing the attention of youngsters and your typical household women presenting almost products for every "man in the house" in the USA are kind of funny to look at after all these years. But, since the average person in those days thought that everything you see on TV is true, a bunch of propaganda movies were also introduced to schools, such as "Are you popular?" or "Homosexuality - the silent disease" (?) which molded the youth to become what it is today - a hard working and respecful society (yeech... I'm a bad lier).
What really intrigues me is the relative calmness and total blissfull ignorance that cigarette commercials used to employ - it's very weird to see a whole industry get banned from the public today, but that's reality that no one was aware of back then - smoking kills... There's one thing though, I'm pretty sure that most people did not smoke as much as they do now - cigarettes were usually reserved for the end of the workday, or during a coffee break, not for making you lose hair over finding a smoker friendly area because you can't hold on much longer without one.
Nah... 'nuff bitchin'... Just watch:
Alright kids... Settle down, we're gonna watch a movie:
Back in the days where I would beg on my knees all day - every day in front of my dad to buy me a Sega - Mega Drive 2 game console, it would be quite a weird thing to hear that today I would be able to play that very same game console on a computer that has a great screen and huge processing power (along with everything else that comes along with owning a x86 PC ). Even though I have hundreds of great advanced 3D games to choose from, there's something really special when playing Sonic in all it's glory... To achieve this, I use Gens, but there are many others to choose from. Sadly, Aero and Windows Vista DreamScene get broken when running it, but still, it's pretty much worth the hassle...
Since I'm working on a new PHP based project, I wanted to make a nice switch from the old methods I used to use... To cut the story short - it's OOP and CSS. "Object oriented programming" - not that high tech as one might imagine, but it doesn't let my PHP files turn into dusty code buckets, and it sure makes every piece of my hard written code reusable! In PHP - this basically means that you can create one class.php file that you will use to host your respectable code, and later on, you can call it on any page you find fit in a snap! Quite better than using plain libraries, since you can create multiple instances with your class and you don't have to worry about conflicting with any global variables or built-in PHP functions. Neat-o!
And as for CSS... Phew! It was a long way ahead! I'm glad it's over! For the first time CSS coder, the temptation to throw everything away and turn back to using plain old tables is very, very strong! And why wouldn't it be? Every WYSIWYG web design program let's you create tables in a jiffy, and organize them in any way you want, and with CSS, you have to ditch the GUI and work your way through <div>s and CSS properties. But, once you get past the first "position:absolute" line, you will see why this method of creating websites is really the most natural thing to do! You can position your DIV anywhere you want it to be! Tables are for data - that's it. They can't be moved properly and constrain your website to be nothing more than just plain flat, and once you start experiencing cross browser pains with tables (sure, they do exist for CSS, but in most cases, they are fairly resolvable) you will run back screaming. (trust me, the same table doesn't always look like it should in IE, Firefox or Opera, and there's nothing you can do about it)
Oh, and did I mention the feeling that most people get when they write something down in a PHP/HTML + CSS file and it works beautifully the way it should? Magical...
Well, there you have it... If I didn't make these switches, I'd be stuck with Cobol right now
Loads of streaming electrons, oscillating on one frequency, and jumping up and down in amplitude to be broadcasted on a really wide area and get received by an AM radio - what's not to like? The shear simplicity of AM radio is just astonishing and it's ability to jump up off the ionosphere and reach much farther than it usually should is only a bonus.
