While tuning around below the 30m band on my FT-817, I heard a rather loud and clear weather broadcast on 10.051Mhz. It turned out to be a “VOLMET” broadcast from New York. These broadcasts are apparently provided for aviation purposes. Here is a page which lists the various broadcasts:

HF Volmet Broadcasts

I went down to 8.858Mhz to see if I could hear the broadcasts from Honolulu that covered the west coast of the United States. I could!

VOLMET broadcast from Honolulu on 8.858Mhz

Ironically, just before this I was listening to the aviation warnings for Alaska, and heard a volcanic ash warning from the Aleutian volcano, Mount Cleveland. I thought it was cool enough to fire up Google Earth and see where that was. It’s pretty cool actually.

On this day in 2002, I made my first posting to this blog. If any of you have hung around since then, you will see that it’s gone through a number of twists and turns, just as my own interests have twisted and turned throughout the last six years. I wonder what people have learned about me in the 2,730 posts that I have made here in that time. Sure, you know a bit about what interests me, but my blog isn’t really about my private life so much. Still, I wonder how much of that is revealed from what I type here.

Ever since I added the “on this date” section to the right, each morning I’m reminded of something that I did, or learned, or thought was interesting on the same date in previous years. It’s an oddly comforting and useful thing, to be forced to return to the past for just a few seconds each day, to recall what was going on in one’s head.

Today? I’m worried about my trip to San Antonio to go visit my son who will be finishing up basic training in the Air Force. My car battery seemed to be completely dead yesterday, but after charging seems fine today. Carmen is still looking for a job. Will any of this still be relevent a year from now when this anniversary comes around again?

Probably not.

39 years ago today.

YouTube – First Moon Landing 1969

Well, I suppose I should have seen this as coming. Our adopted feral friend Scrappy has been fighting off a skin infection, and we have had him on antibiotics for the last two weeks, and he went back in for testing, where they test for, among other things, FIV antibodies.

Scrappy tested positive.

It makes me sad. He’s a wonderful cat.

As I’m sitting here with my iPhone, eagerly (and as yet vainly) waiting for it to be reactivated via the iTunes store, I was trying to figure out what the failure mode was that allowed this kind of (by appearances on the iPhone support forum, and news from various bloggers who are in line to buy new 3g iPhone) serious problem to occur.

Here’s the deal: preceding each and every iPhone upgrade, there would appear to be a needed iTunes 7.7 upgrade. This upgrade itself was sizeable (to be honest, didn’t mark down the size). Then, the iPhone 2.0 firmware update had to be downloaded, which was 218Mb additional. These downloads were accomplished without incident. But then you go to activate the phone… and… problems.

Let’s say just consider the firmware update. 218Mbytes let’s say takes… one minute. That’s about what it took for me via comcast. Whatever the rate of new customers getting this update are, they are able to keep up with this load. But they are not able to process the load of (presumably) getting a small amount of information back and forth to your phone to activate it in the same one minute time frame.

In a way, I guess that it isn’t too surprising: after all, web servers which are optimized to serve up static content are very, very fast. Back when I used to run thttpd, it could saturate 10Mb ethernet links running on a 486. But it also suggests that Apple should have realized the assymetry, and throttled downloads to allow their downstream processes to keep pace. It would have avoided a lot of frustration.

Me? My iPhone is still bricked into emergency only mode, and now I’m getting -4 errors from the iTunes store. Patience is a virtue. My phone lives again!

Very cool. I want one.

This came across one of my mailing lists: a complete description of the mechanical computer used to solve torpedo targeting problems during WWII. It’s really very cool, and could serve as a great intoroduction to how mechanical computers work. Very neat.

Torpedo Data Computer Mark 3

Courtesy of Lifehacker, here are some neat pictures of a guy who added an office to his home by using a pre-fab 8×15 shed which was wired, insulated and dry-walled. Very nice. Wonder what the zoning issues surrounding this kind of installation are.

I blogged about “Dramatic Chipmunk” one year ago today. My, how time flies.

Here’s a link to a scan of the page which actually defines the Hellschreiber font that was used on real Hellschrieber machines. It’s not in the most useful form the way it is, but it should be pretty easy to convert it to a real font definition of some sort. I’ll do that when I’m bored sometime.

hell.jpg (JPEG Image, 556×772 pixels)

A while ago, I used my FM ht to decode telemetry from LO-19. So, I decided to give it a try again (getting bored with SEEDS). Here’s the result:

E LUSAT HI HI AO AVA AB6 AAB ADB AAA AB4 A4B AE6
                 131 176 117 187 111 174 147 156

-----------------------------------------------------------
Channel                 Formula                 Value
-----------------------------------------------------------
CH 1: +5 volts          (639/x)                 +4.88 volts
CH 2: +10 volts         (0.064*x)               +11.26 volts
CH 3: Cw xmtr. temp.    0.353*(134.7-x)         6.25 deg. C
CH 4: Output power TX   ((10.9+x)^2)/40.1       976 mw
CH 5: Box temp #4.      0.356*(136-x)           8.9 deg. C
CH 6: +10 v current     0.7*x                   122 ma
CH 7: +Z voltage panel  0.15*x                  22.1 volts
CH 8: +8.5 voltage      0.056*x                 +8.74 volts
-----------------------------------------------------------

Just a quick snapshot I got using my little Panasonic point-n-shoot camera:

I’m back from my vacation cruise to Mexico aboard the Carnival Elation to Los Cabos. Needed relaxation, and the cruise provided. Snapped lots of pictures.

Link to an interesting paper that I encountered while looking for something else:

Dynamical Bias in the Coin Toss