brainwagon

Testing the Smart Youtube plugin for wordpress: httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdtOAOe1-qU

Jeff KE9V, over at KE9V.net is once again falling victim to pessimism about amateur radio. I can’t help but shake my head at the effort that we as hams seem to put into lamenting the impending death of our hobby. It’s very strange. I can’t think of another hobby that spends as much time as [...]

I just head that Endeavor will eject a small picosatellite (5x5x10 inches) that will test two different types of solar cells in the environment of space before it begins its deorbit maneuvers. I was interested in seeing if I could find any downlink frequencies for it, but haven’t managed to do so. I did find [...]

While my blog has been dominated by radio related stuff lately, I do continue to be interested in lots of different subjects, including various topics related to computer security and codes. While scanning my feeds today, I found reference to this work, which I hadn’t seen before, but which I find interesting both for its [...]

Tonight I took my wife, son and future daughter-in-law out to see Bolt, Disney’s newest animated feature. For extra bonus points, we went to go see it in 3D (yep, with the Real D glasses and everything). I am somewhat skeptical about the long term viability of 3D. People seem to be highly variable in [...]

I’ve been playing around a little bit with the Arduino microcontroller board that I bought a while ago. It’s a nice little board, but there are some alternatives that are also interesting, like the following board from Futurelec. It’s got more I/O pins (lots more) than the Arduino, and is based on the ATMEGA128, with [...]

My WordPress “theme” seems to need a little maintenence. Don’t be alarmed if the look of my website changes a bit over the next couple of days. I haven’t upgraded it in a long time, and I’m trying to make sure it works with all the upgraded versions of WordPress that I’ve installed recently.

In my house, we celebrated the holiday yesterday, to give my son a chance to go and have Thanksgiving dinner with his in-laws. So I made a turkey, a ham, two pumpkin cheesecakes, potatoes, stuffing, a ratatouille, some gravy and a bunch of veggie appetizers. My future daughter-in-law made some green bean casserole. My wife [...]

When you get an amateur radio license, you are issued a callsign. Mine was KF6KYI. This was a “2×3″ call, which means it had two digits, followed by a single region digit, followed by three letters. These are issued sequentially, which means they aren’t particularly aesthetic or short. If you want to spend a grand [...]

My blog indicates that I was decoding my first NOAA weather sat images about a year ago. I have made some progress on improving the images that I get out, but not alot. Witness this morning’s image, recorded beginning around 10:05 PST of NOAA 17 on 137.62 Mhz: It seems pretty good, except for one [...]

Today I had a few minutes to finally put together this pair of small Morse paddles that I got from American Morse. They have a very nice “milled aluminum” aesthetic that I like a lot. By themselves, they are a little light, and tend to float around a bit, but they include a tapped hole [...]

I was bored. I had five minutes. I wrote some C code. A few minutes later, I had this movie. YouTube – Simple Mandelbrot Movie This is also the first time that I have tried to use the Youtube “annotation” functionality. Works pretty well. Wish I could overlay even a static, transparent image, similar to [...]

I’m really, really tired of watching the economy implode.

I ran across a reference to “grid beam construction”. I didn’t know what it was. Now I do, and it’s kind of neat. Like a kind of Erector set technology for grownups. Grid Beam Building System (Heard about it from The Citizen Scientist)

I needed something to read on a plane trip this last weekend, and a quick stop at Ham Radio Outlet had me leaving with a copy of Hands-On Radio Experiments by Ward Silver, N0AX. Ward writes the “Hands-On” column each month in QST, and this book is nothing more than five years of his columns [...]