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?
Although Microsoft Surface looks tempting, Touchlight is the bleeding edge when it comes to user interaction! Grabbing touch commands from a simple projection just looks too good to be true and brings memories about the "old" technology you could see in pre Y2K movies... Indeed - this device will eventually create the ultimate user-PC for everyone to use without a single hour of getting used to, by emulating the usual desktop environment you would experience at your typical office setting. The video says it all.
I got a Pentium 4 Dual Core based PC from a friend who needed it fixed up and brought on it's feet. It was a custom built PC - therefore - no OS. Obviously, the BIOS was not so much fun to use, so I proceeded with installing Vista... After a successful boot-up from the installation DVD, I quickly reached the end of the quick "next, next, next" based wizard, and was all set to watch my washing machine do it's thing while Windows was installing.
However, I wouldn't be writing this if something didn't go wrong... It did. Windows setup reported that it couldn't make the partition bootable, so setup was canceled. That was the first time I actually saw that kind of error message... strange... Luckily, a quick reach towards my trusty GParted live CD solved the problem by letting me flag the only partition available as "Boot" (why was it not flagged after I used the built in partitioner in the first place!?). At least I thought the missery was over, but when Windows went on to boot for the first time, it died on me. A black screen - basically nothing there to inform me about what happened. Next step: safe mode - didn't help - the boot process froze when loading crcdisk.sys (hm... a clue? See title...)
To make the long story short, I booted the Vista installation DVD again and used the command prompt to start "chkdsk"... Needless to say, hundreds and hundreds of bad sectors popped up. Oh, goody... How typical is this? I could have saved about 4-5 hours by just using a disk check routeine to diagnose the problem! But, wait, aren't hard disks supposed to be reliable these days? How about S.M.A.R.T.? Nope - no reports about a dying disk. So, while I'm typing this, the LOW level formatting bar is at 95%. Very slowly, it will reach 100% (I hope, gulp), and I won't have to horse around with making Vista work. But, the main rule is - if a hard disk gets any bad sectors, the situation will eventually get worse - allot worse, posing a threat to every piece of data on it, and putting me in jeopardy of having to fix the mess a few months later! The funny thing is, I am now actually hoping to see a few bad sectors so that I can return it as broken... Although, I'm not laughing. Actually, I'm hoping to see some god damn SSDs soon! Why oh why must we have such fragile rapid moving parts inside storage devices...? Oh, and, here's one for Microsoft: I know it's not your fault for the busted hard disk drive, but how 'bout a warning? Something like... Oh, I dunno... "Bad sectors detected", perhaps? Or maybe a blue dot on a red screen... Anything! Just cut the users some slack - no black screens.
Edit: It turns out that the HDD was faulty as a wooden leg caught on fire... I got it replaced fairly quickly, and everything is just peechy. Thanks goes out to Asus for notifying me about the failing HDD even though I have S.M.A.R.T. monitoring turned on... (pause)... NOT!
Argh! You may have won this round Mr. Murphy, but I will triumph sooner or later! After several attempts, I still can't natively run Kalyway OSX Leopard on my PC, even without using FireWire kexts which make my motherboard reset itself, and with using only one CPU core (the "cpus=1" switch)! I managed to boot to the installation wizard, and after successfully installing everything on my SATA HDD drive (one PATA drive I have is not detected at all), the dreaded thing won't boot, dieing on me with a "Still waiting for root device error" (translation: "No, I can't access your HDD, now stop staring at me"). Wonderful... The obvious problem is that my motherboard doesn't support AHCI mode (the advanced SATA mode that OSX works with perfectly), as the MSI customer service has informed me: "P35 Neo doesn't support AHCI mode.". Yeah, my motherboard is an MSI P35Neo - the one of the few rare Intel P35 based motherboards that don't support RAID or AHCI. How lucky am I, right? Now, as a last resort, I will try to get my hands on a 4GB USB thumbdrive so that I can install a copy of MacOSX on that. However, I would suggest on NOT using the journalled HFS+ file system to format it because of the major number of writes that occur during normal operation in this mode, which wears down the flash memory inside the USB drive fairly quickly. It's wise just to stick to plain HFS+, without journalling enabled.
If this works, I'm gonna replace my Recycle Bin icon in Windows with a picture of Steve Jobs... If not, at least I'm gonna have a neat porn transfer device.
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.
