Today is the first day of the start of our trip to London. Actually, we won't be there until tomorrow morning but we're still excited. Stay tunned, I hope to make an entry a day about the trip studded with a few pictures along the way.
Cheers!
DIY UHF Antenna
Ever since I gave Comcast the boot and FiOS the welcome, I've not been using the Miglia TV MiniHD receiver since FiOS doesn't use QAM modulation. The USB receiver does however tune ATSC if you have a good antenna and some nearby transmitters. The included antenna is mostly a joke unless you live very close to the transmitter. I needed something better– so I immediately think of DIY. I found a site that included some instructions on how to build a decent UHF antenna based on the design of ones available for purchase. It's really very simple, I didn't follow the directions, instead choosing to replicate what I saw in finished example of someone who made one.
The reception is quite good, scarily so in fact for something that cost me nothing. I can say it works because the digital signal basically either comes in clearly or not at all (no snowy picture!) The base of the antenna is a USPS Priority Mail box covered with aluminum foil, screws, washers and copper Romex leading to a matching 75 ohm transformer.
Dreamy Ambient Streaming Radio Station
Check out this great ambient streaming radio station called Bluemars.
Music for the Space Traveler.
It's great music to drift off to sleep with. There are two other stations from the same source, check those out too and let me know what you think.
Link. Thanks, Al!
Saturday Night Blog Dump
Some new and very interesting blogs for your consideration.
Shortwave music blog.
Asphalt Eden: Quiet Sounds Podcast
Yongbo Jiang's Photoblog
Blentwell: The people's mix click colletctive
After Halloween dose: Vampire IT products, part one
Congratulations. You probably think you got a bargain scoring that “free” printer from Apple when you bought your last computer. After all, they gave you a $99 MIR with the purchase– what could be wrong with that?
Well, first off, if you know me, you know that I think that printers are nothing but a money pit to begin with. I don't have a good report with printers, in both my personal and professional lives. Paper jams, junk faxes, dried ink, toner lines, network problems are only the beginning.
This little baby, the HP PSC 1610 All-In-One has a nasty little secret. The elephant sized power brick adapter it comes with has an appetite for AC power. After I got a Kill-A-Watt for my birthday, I've not been able to resist testing equipment around the house. I've always suspected this brick chewed power, even when it was off because of the dog-ear-curdling high-pitched tone it gave off and because it was warm (note: heat = power usage). So I plugged it in.
First off, what you are seeing is the printer amp usage while the printer is “off” (I use quotes here because obviously the printer isn't off, it's waiting for me to press the on button which should be relabeled wake up). While 0.12 A isn't a lot, imagine how many of these have been produced and purchased. How many of these are happily drawing their 0.12 A all over the world. That adds up to a lot of power and ultimately carbon emissions.
To be fair, I also tested it's power consumption while “on” but idle, not printing, just “ready.”
Yup, you guessed it. Consumption is the same if it's “on” or “off” and plugged in– a little counter-intuitive. So what does it consume while printing you ask?
Interesting, it draws double the standby power while printing (making a B&W copy, which coincidently revealed the black ink had dried up, see previous disdain for printers above).
The moral of the story is, don't believe your IT equipment when it claims to be off, it ain't. And there's never truly anything free.
Happy Halloween!
From Mario and Luigi.
Free audio plug-ins that work: compressor, expander/noise gate, de-esser
I've just installed a great set of audio plug-ins on my system and must say they work terrifically. Called blockfish, spitfish and floorfish from digitaldishphones.com, they will compress, de-ess and expand/gate you audio. And to sweeten the deal, they're extremely easy to use with easy minimal interfaces that make sense. I used it successfully to sweeten a voice recording I did this evening. Give it a try, the price is right.
Comes in Apple AU Units or VST flavors.
UDPATE 12/9/07: Doesn't seem to work on Intel Macs, maybe a universal version is on the way?
Businesses don’t have to take your dough
After reading that Apple now requires one to use a credit or debit card to buy an iPhone (to limit unlockers), Slashdot reminds us that Apple is not obligated to accept your hard earned cash, contrary to what you (and myself!) might think.
According to the U.S. Treasury FAQ:
There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise.
Dang! That surprises me. Think you're getting back at a business by paying a bill with all pennies? They don't have to accept it!
Link. Via Slashdot.
Perian: The missing Quicktime component
Quicktime is a both a great platform for video and a great playback engine since it supports a very wide range of video codecs. However, there is room for improvement. VLC can play even more video with winder codec support. Enter, Perian, the Quicktime Component you've been waiting for. Perian will play all types of DivX and MS-MPEG-4 codecs plus it also plays Flash Video. This is great because it makes it incredibly easy to transcode these formats into other standards-based codecs like H.264.
Make sure to remove some of your other components that Perian will now cover.
MAKE: Foxhole Radio
This weekend, Bre Pettis of MAKE: Weekend Project showed how to make a foxhole radio. This project was very approachable since it didn't require any specialized electronics, hard to find diodes, chips, resistors, latches, etc etc. It used simple wires, thumbtacks, safety pin, pencil, etc.
So what you see is my attempt at making one (click for a larger view). At first, it didn't work. I was using my headphones to listen in but heard nothing. I then switched to a very old telephone operator-style headset that was more sensitive. I could hear a static noise as I rubbed the wires on the end of the plug.
I then decided to amp things up a bit and use the M-Audio Microtrak to amplify and record the sound. It was working– I could hear radio static, which is what I would expect if it wasn't tuned to a station.
Jim suggested that I try reorienting the antenna (which is about 30 ft long). I took everything outside and tied it off to the top of a tree. I put the headphones and and huzzah! I could hear music, Christian music to be exact. I was also lucky enough to hear the station ID. Listen to a clip of the recording here in MP3 format.
The station ID said the transmitter is located in South Carolina, that's a bit away from Delaware. I decided to Google the station and I found them here along with all of the transmitter specs. They're using a freakin' huge curtain antenna that can cover the US AND South America. They also seem to change up the frequency during the day depending on the program. During the time that I heard it, it was broadcasting on 11.960Mhz.
This got me thinking. The coil of wire around the tube was wound 120 times, as per the instructions. Does a single turn equal .1 MHz? Changing the number of turns is supposed to change the tunning.
Make one, it's easy and fun– keeps your mind sharp.