brainwagon

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

My cat woke me up before 6:00AM this morning to remind me that today was the Apple 3G iPhone release date. Buying a new phone isn’t in the cards right now, but I suspected that there might be the 2.0 firmware update for my old phone. Sure enough, I powered up the laptop and got […]

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. YouTube – Dramatic Chipmunk

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 […]

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 ———————————————————– […]

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