Daily Archives: 2/4/2010

A Great Ham Radio Podcast: ICQ Podcast

Allright, I’m probably the last ham on the planet who doesn’t know about this one, but just in case there is one other out there, I thought I’d give a plug to the ICQ Podcast. I found this while trying to find other podcasts for people trying to learn Morse Code. It is a terrific combination of new and just general conversation about ham radio, done by a group of UK hams. Well worth listening too, I got hooked on the latest episode, but am now downloading the entire catalog of back issues for my boring commute hours. Thanks alot to all the contributers, it’s really awesome.

ICQ Podcast – Home.

A New Weight Loss Experiment: Twittering My Weight

Well, I’m about to embark upon a new experiment. My weight has crept back up to where it was when I first joined Weight Watchers six years ago. I peaked probably near 325 or even higher, but was around 307 when I started with Weight Watchers. I eventually trimmed down to a little over 260, but lost movitation as my efforts to go lower stalled, and of course, once you feel like you stalled, my weight slowly has crept back up to higher levels, and this morning I’m nudging in at around 303 lbs.

Yes, I’m unflinchingly telling you those numbers. Okay, I’m flinching a tiny bit. Many people gasp when they hear that number. Hey, I’m 6’4″ tall too, so it isn’t as bad as it could be. Still, I cringe a bit inside when I see that “3” at the beginning of my weight, largely because I know that it probably means that my blood pressure and cholesterol levels could use some work too.

Anywhere, there’s the setup. Here’s the new experiment: I’ve acquired a wifi enabled scale from withings.com. I blame Leo Laporte, because he mentioned he got one, and I decided that I would give it a shot. One of the interesting things about this scale is that you can set it up to echo your weight to both their own site, to Google Health, or to (gasp!) Twitter.

So, I’ve created a new twitter login called marks_mass to serve as the output for this device. Each morning I’m going to hop on the scale and get a weight + BMI reading, which will get echoed onto my twitter account (right now it seems to just be sending my weight, I’ll see if I can change that, I’m still getting acquainted with the device). And, all of my followers will be able to see what I weigh.

Here’s where you come in: if you have a reaction, positive, negative, doesn’t really matter, go ahead and respond to marks_mass. Send encouragement. Send disappointment. Send advice. I’m opening this up to harness the power of my peers to help me change my own attitudes and behavior.

Welcome to my grand experiment.

Click here if you want to see marks_mass, and if you like, you can become a follower.

Addendum:
balancePerspectiveI should also give a brief mention to the device. It’s a really nice little gadget, much nicer than any other bathroom scale I’ve had before. It’s got a very sleek black finish and a bright display that I can read easily when you stop on it. If you step on it with bare feet, it will weigh you, and if you continue to stand, will give you a progress bar as it determines your BMI. Setup for the WiFi was similarly simple. You go to their website, download an installer for PC/Mac. You then do a one time configuration by plugging it into your PC, which pairs it to your wireless access point and gets it registered. You can then create a profile, and use it to start monitoring your weight. (All future configurations are done over the Internet.) I’m quite pleased with the device thusfar.

Addendum2: Oh, and there’s an iPhone app too.

Diana Eng demonstrates dipole and Yagi antennas…

This morning greeted me with this nice little video, where Diana Eng demonstrates the pattern generated by dipole and Yagi antennas by a simple detector consisting of a dipole antenna with a small flashlight bulb wired across the feed point:


httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lslHtCUSfN4

It does actually uncover one of my pet peeves: in describing the action of the reflector element of the Yagi, Diane claims that the reflector “reflects”, but when she added a director, she claimed that the director “focuses”. But if you are a clever person who maybe doesn’t understand much about how antennas work, you might reasonably ask how that actually works. After all, the elements are identical in composition, and are essentially placed the same distance from the antenna. Why does the director direct, but the reflector reflect?

If you can actually answer this question, you’ve begun to understand how antennas really work.

A little evening programming project…

Well, there wasn’t anything terrific on TV tonight, and I’ve had a little program kicking around in my head for a while, so I decided to set down and see if I could make some headway on it in a single evening of programming.

I used to have some Morse code practice cassette tapes a while ago. It used the Koch method, and was progressive. They began with just two letters, say K and M that were sent using Koch spacing (the space between letters were sent as if they were 5wpm, but the letters themselves were sent at 13wpm.) The tapes themselves were thus the combination of regular speech (giving you instructions) and Morse code. But I can’t find the tapes anymore, and even if I did have the tapes, I don’t have a cassette player, so they wouldn’t be of any immediate use. I went to HRO to see if they had any such thing on CD so that I could listen to them in my car, but ironically, the bottom seems to have fallen out of the Morse Code CD market, and they didn’t have any in stock.

So, I thought to myself, what would it take to make my own?

I’ve written programs to generate Morse code before. And most of the computers I use have some kind of speech synthesis capability (either the “say” command on Mac OS, or the festival speech synthesizer on Linux) so generating some reasonable if not exactly pleasing speech wouldn’t be that hard.

So, I tossed together a simple scripting language to wire the two together. It takes a simple script which consists of text which it translates directly into Morse code. The exception is any text which appears in double quotes. It gathers that text up, and passes it to the system speech synthesizer, and generates a sound file, which it then reopens, resamples to the same output rate as the rest of the morse code, and then returns to Morse mode. This isn’t all that hard because of the excellent libsndfile and libsamplerate libraries. There is some work left to be done, but the basics work. Here is the contents of a simple test script that I wrote:


"This is a test of the emergency broadcast system."
If this had been an actual emergency,
you would not have been using Morse code.

And here is the resulting .mp3 file, synthesized on my Macbook:

Morse synthesized by my “mscript” program (MP3)

The basics all work, but there are some additions to be made, to insert arbitrary wav files perhaps, to adjust timing, to implement Koch spacing and flexibility in changing the speed of Morse code inside a single document, and just other bits of cleanliness. Oh, and the Morse doesn’t have any shaping at all, so the transitions are a bit clicky. I can fix that pretty easily. Still, not bad for a couple of hours of tinkering with C, yacc, and lex.