I just started working on a project (I know, shamless plug) a month or so ago. Have not publicized it but in just one place, and am amazed at the number of positive emails and the number of downloads so far.
That said, the emails I like the most are the ones with either code or suggestions. So far one person has sent in a code snippet and three have sent in some really killer ideas - that is the kind of stuff I like! I mean, I am writing the program for me, but I am not the only one using it.
So send in those attaboy emails. Ask if there is something you can do to help. I personally don't care if you are a programmer or not - there are a ton of things you can do to help, mainly in the realm of minutia; that stuff can really be a drag to do but it needs to be done and in some cases those small little things are the biggest part of a project.
Late last week I got a letter in the mail from my SDSL provider, DSL.net stating that they were switching us over to Covad in the next few weeks. DSL.net has been having problems (according to FuckedCompany.com). Wonder if that is gonna happen now?
Oh well, at least I am not the one that made the decision to use this outfit...
"Any deficiencies or faults in the quality of the defendant's goods are likely to reflect negatively upon, tarnish and seriously injure the reputation which Lucasfilm has established for goods and services marketed..."
And this is from the company that brought us Jar Jar Binks and Howard the Duck...
How right you are. Look at Dish as an example.
on
The Joys of HDTV
·
· Score: 2
In 1998 I purchased a Dish Network receiver - the JVC DVHS unit (DVHS and Dish 5000 receiver all in one) with the expectation that I would be able to use the unit for a while and easily hook it up to my future HDTV.
Lotta good that thought pattern did.
Dish dumped the HDTV upgrade for the DVHS unit. Then they said the DVHS did not work with HDTV (even though the unit is able to record a 19Mbps bitstream). Then the stupidity started....
On one of the Charile Chats with Dish CEO Charlie Ergen, the HBO guy was on talking about the HDTV upgrades and how HBO was fully behind HDTV. He was right - they were fully behind HDTV but were doing other things back there instead of supporting it. What were they gonna do with their brand spankin new HDTV feed? They were gonna send down the movies in 4:3 aspect ratio at 480 lines. Huh????
That is when I pretty much made up my mind that HDTV was a joke. We ain't gonna see it any time soon.
There is not a lot of engineering in one of these things. Most of the parts can be had at a good sized hardware store for a lot less than the hundreds of bucks that "real racks" cost. Granted, they won't look all shiny beige, but who cares?
I am slowly converting my house to be 100% PV. Cost does not even enter my mind, and there are a lot of others who feel the same way.
Yes, I consider myself to be "green". No, I am not a tree hugging hippy. However, I am getting tired of polluting and reqiring mega-corp to furnish me with whatever it is I need.
Fuel cells require some sort of fuel for them to work - in the case of most of the ones I have seen for home use, that fuel is natural gas. That is all fine and good, but that means I have to pay a utility to get it to me. Last winter natural gas prices shot through the roof here in Missouri.
PV, on the other hand, does not require that. You set it up, do some regular maintenance on it, and for at least the next 30 years those panels are going to be generating power. There are quite a few of the very first panels still pumping out the electrons.
Sure, it is going to take me a hell of a long time to pay off any panels I buy. I don't care. However, when the local grid goes down, who's house it still going to have power? Better still, after some sort of a natural disaster, who is going to still have power when the natural gas lines go kablooie?
then no, it is not all that hard. Tricky and difficult at times? Maybe. It IS harder than plugging card A into slot B, which any trained monkey can do.
I don't just slap a board together and consider it finished, though. There are modifications that can be made along the way. Although I have not made any to my Elecraft rig yet, I have heavily modified some other kits with my own designs.
That is true, Craig. But there are plenty of rag chewers out there. I am one. I am also a contester. But when I do FD I always aim to do two things: have fun for myself and try to make it fun for everyone else.
For example, I can't begin to tell you the number of young ops I heard. I am guessing they were just kids that were either harmonics or kids who happened to walk by some public field day and were invited to make a few contacts. I went straight for those.
Worked a number of them - you could hear the fear in their voices of talking to someone over the radio. It was quite funny in that "I have been there myself" sort of way.
As the day progressed and the youngsters went away I then started to listen for the guys who sounded like they were having fun and the guys who sounded like they had never worked a contest before (the ones who would stumble through the exchange) - those were the rag chewers. Had a number of nice two or three minute QSOs. It is also good to listen for people in your section. I was in KS this year, but just barely. So, I listened for KS and MO stations. Worked most of the stuff around the KC area, I think. All those resulted in some decent QSOs and as we heard each other as time progressed, we invariably would end up having yet another short QSO just to find out how things were.
If you don't like how your club does FD, you might want to think about heading out with another club next year, or, better yet, head on out with some of your friends! That's what I have done in years past and never had a bad field day yet.
That is what I did with my K2. Don't remember the actual parts count, but I think it was close to 1,000,000.:) Actually, I believe it was somewhere around 600. It took me a week to build the K2. The first night (a Thursday) was devoted to inventory. I soldered the first part in on Friday night, and worked every minute I was able to in order to finish the radio - so, that ended up being like 6 hours Friday, 25 hours spread over Sat and Sun, and 6 hours each night from Monday to Thursday... so pretty much right around 55 hours build time.
There is no comparisson between building a PC and building a radio. You don't have to have any knowledge or talent to put a PC together.
We are running radio stations. They have the ability to do great harm if operated incorrectly - not just to "messing up someone's TV" (99% of the time it is the TV that is fault, btw) but also medical equipment, police and fire communications, aircraft communications and navigation.... THAT is why this information is publicly available - so the owner of said station can be contacted quickly and the problem fixed.
It is also a way for public service departments to get in touch with us during real emergencies.
Also, for the past 75+ years, the American Radio Relay League has been publishing QST magazine. It contains lots and lots of, gasp!, call signs in it! Ohhh! and there is CQ magazine too! And I bet one issue of CQ can potentially have more calls posted in it than an entire year of QST when the contest results get published.
I decided pretty much at the last minute that I should go on FD this year. So, I packed the car then headed out to my mom's house on the other side of town where she has plenty of land to put up big wire antennas. I ran class 1B-Battery this year, and was 100% solar powered for the duration.
Setup was not much of a problem. I did blow a fuse in the PV combiner box (one of the wires to one of the solar panels came loose and shorted everything). Then the Rippoff Shack cable I bought was screwed up - the idiots did not strip the center conductor of the coax when they made it. Note to RS: insulators make poor conductors. Note to self: Never by Radio Shack parts ever again as you can buy floor sweepings of much higher quality for much less money at the electronic junk stores.
My K2 worked flawlessly. I got a few much needed QRP DX out of the way too, including KL7 and KH6 on 10, 15, and 20, voice and CW. Got a lot of new states too. Oh, and I broke a pileup with a SP8 on my first call while running 5 watts out on SSB. There were a bunch of QRO stations calling him too. I was impressed with myself.
Not sure of my final count, but I don't care. I had fun and proved to myself that everything works. Well, kinda works. I fell asleep 12 hours into FD. I woke up a few hours later and got back on - only the MFJ tuner I was using decided to not give me any reading on the meters any more. Not sure if a bug has made a home in there or what as I have not been able to pull the cover off yet to look.
Look around you, dude. Net sites are failing left and right and it has nothing to do with people "loosing interest in liberalism". It has everything to do with not making money! Ever been to Fucked Company? Read over just 10 of the FCs - they are mostly stupid ideas in the first place, such as the ever popular breakfastcereal.com - the breakfast cereal portal! Imagine, if you will, Yahoo! with nothing but breakfast cereal. Like I am going to make THAT my home page. And the guy who started that winner of an idea got VC for it.
This has nothing, zero, zilch, to do with us having an idiot president getting his marching orders from the religious right and big business. These sites are failing for a reason: they are poorly run from the outset, have burned through all their VC by buying Aeron chairs for everyone and their dog, and then are left wondering why nobody clicks on the banner ads.
There was an article in the last issue of Home Power about a guy who makes his own biodiesel. Seems to be a pretty simple, if time consuming, process. He goes around his local area and gets the old vegetable oil out of the fryers at restraunts, filters out the food then mixes up his fuel. Granted, it can be a bit on the dangerous side, so kids don't try this at home.
I will post some more about this tonight when I get home. There were some URLs and stuff in the story.
I am not up on Frankenplant myself, but what about pollination? Sure, the plants this season are dead, but say during the course of their life a bee (Eric the Half-A-Bee, perhaps?) came by and carried the pollen to some non Frankenplant. Is that plant now a Frankenplant for the next season?
Seems pretty exponential to me.
Next time you have to go to the bathroom at work..
on
Nike: Just Don't Do It
·
· Score: 5
don't do it. Seriously. Force yourself to hold it until your 10 hour day is up. No way, no how are you to get up from your desk. You must sit there for hours, doing the same repetitive motions over and over.
Want a drink of water? Yeah right.
You are also not allowed to talk to your co-workers. No chatting on the phone, even if it is a call from your mom saying your dad just died.
You are expected to be at work at all times. You are not allowed any time off for any reason. Miss one day and you are fired.
Think I am making this up? This is just a small sample of what it is like to work in a sweatshop.
*Now* please call me a liberal and tell me I am full of shit.
19.2K. I have a little bit of information on my qutiequitefantastic.org website. It is a start anyway.
There seem to be quite a few people writing software, but not a lot playing with the hardware.
Oh, and on my site I talk a bit about this thing being in the amateur radio 33cm band. Don't try to modify it unless you are a ham operator - and if you do modify it you are no longer able to use it to communicate with other cybikos (FCC rules, ya know).
They are using very common parts for this thing - should be very easy to dink with from what I can tell.
Okay, so it is at 19.2k, but it does work. In Ask Slashdot the other day, codepawn asked about the Cybiko. I went out and finally found some. I got one and played with it on Wednesday, then Thursday night I stoped by Best Buy and bought another. At $100 a pop, you can make a quite sophisticated little network of your own.
Granted, the range is not all that great (300 feet in the clear), but for a small neighborhood wireless network, this is good. The things will use each other as relay points, and there can be 3000 users total (30 channels x 100 users/chan).
Cybiko even gives you some software (Win only - but no reason that has to stay that way) to act as an internet mail gateway. As soon as you get into the network with one of the gates then your unit will connect and grab your email.
There is a lot of work to be done to make this a truely kickass device, but nothing says that you can't use these as 19.2k wireless internet modems on laptops, nor write your own email apps, or anything else. And there is a Linux SDK for the thing as well.
I myself am building my own little network around work and at home using these. They really are quite cool.
Went to yet another Best Buy and they were in the process of stocking them when I walked in. These were the new version 2 units - the ON/OFF switch is also the ESC key. I asked the guy stocking them if he knew what was up with this store recall thing and he said he had no clue - just that they were told to pack up all the units and send em back.
Oh well.
Anyway, you are right - it is aimed at kids - big time. But it is also just a pretty neat little hacking toy too. I have decided I need to get another one to play with the CyWIG. Not exactly sure how THAT will work, but I figure if I get enough of the things placed around, it will give some folks nearby some sort of email access. Could be a hoot...
Slashdot Mirror
I think this pretty well sums it up.
Beer, pizza, money, emails - they are all great!
I just started working on a project (I know, shamless plug) a month or so ago. Have not publicized it but in just one place, and am amazed at the number of positive emails and the number of downloads so far.
That said, the emails I like the most are the ones with either code or suggestions. So far one person has sent in a code snippet and three have sent in some really killer ideas - that is the kind of stuff I like! I mean, I am writing the program for me, but I am not the only one using it.
So send in those attaboy emails. Ask if there is something you can do to help. I personally don't care if you are a programmer or not - there are a ton of things you can do to help, mainly in the realm of minutia; that stuff can really be a drag to do but it needs to be done and in some cases those small little things are the biggest part of a project.
Late last week I got a letter in the mail from my SDSL provider, DSL.net stating that they were switching us over to Covad in the next few weeks. DSL.net has been having problems (according to FuckedCompany.com). Wonder if that is gonna happen now?
Oh well, at least I am not the one that made the decision to use this outfit...
"Any deficiencies or faults in the quality of the defendant's goods are likely to reflect negatively upon, tarnish and seriously injure the reputation which Lucasfilm has established for goods and services marketed..."
And this is from the company that brought us Jar Jar Binks and Howard the Duck...
In 1998 I purchased a Dish Network receiver - the JVC DVHS unit (DVHS and Dish 5000 receiver all in one) with the expectation that I would be able to use the unit for a while and easily hook it up to my future HDTV.
Lotta good that thought pattern did.
Dish dumped the HDTV upgrade for the DVHS unit. Then they said the DVHS did not work with HDTV (even though the unit is able to record a 19Mbps bitstream). Then the stupidity started....
On one of the Charile Chats with Dish CEO Charlie Ergen, the HBO guy was on talking about the HDTV upgrades and how HBO was fully behind HDTV. He was right - they were fully behind HDTV but were doing other things back there instead of supporting it. What were they gonna do with their brand spankin new HDTV feed? They were gonna send down the movies in 4:3 aspect ratio at 480 lines. Huh????
That is when I pretty much made up my mind that HDTV was a joke. We ain't gonna see it any time soon.
what kind of things is the big A going to do to compensate this guy for all the pure bullshit they have put him through?
There is not a lot of engineering in one of these things. Most of the parts can be had at a good sized hardware store for a lot less than the hundreds of bucks that "real racks" cost. Granted, they won't look all shiny beige, but who cares?
I am slowly converting my house to be 100% PV. Cost does not even enter my mind, and there are a lot of others who feel the same way.
Yes, I consider myself to be "green". No, I am not a tree hugging hippy. However, I am getting tired of polluting and reqiring mega-corp to furnish me with whatever it is I need.
Fuel cells require some sort of fuel for them to work - in the case of most of the ones I have seen for home use, that fuel is natural gas. That is all fine and good, but that means I have to pay a utility to get it to me. Last winter natural gas prices shot through the roof here in Missouri.
PV, on the other hand, does not require that. You set it up, do some regular maintenance on it, and for at least the next 30 years those panels are going to be generating power. There are quite a few of the very first panels still pumping out the electrons.
Sure, it is going to take me a hell of a long time to pay off any panels I buy. I don't care. However, when the local grid goes down, who's house it still going to have power? Better still, after some sort of a natural disaster, who is going to still have power when the natural gas lines go kablooie?
PV is getting cheaper and cheaper all the time. The people who are doing all the PV FUD are the politicians who have all the oil company bribes in their back pockets.
Yep... it does work. I set it for 3000 days and it expires in 2009.
then no, it is not all that hard. Tricky and difficult at times? Maybe. It IS harder than plugging card A into slot B, which any trained monkey can do.
I don't just slap a board together and consider it finished, though. There are modifications that can be made along the way. Although I have not made any to my Elecraft rig yet, I have heavily modified some other kits with my own designs.
stories like this one?
That is true, Craig. But there are plenty of rag chewers out there. I am one. I am also a contester. But when I do FD I always aim to do two things: have fun for myself and try to make it fun for everyone else.
For example, I can't begin to tell you the number of young ops I heard. I am guessing they were just kids that were either harmonics or kids who happened to walk by some public field day and were invited to make a few contacts. I went straight for those.
Worked a number of them - you could hear the fear in their voices of talking to someone over the radio. It was quite funny in that "I have been there myself" sort of way.
As the day progressed and the youngsters went away I then started to listen for the guys who sounded like they were having fun and the guys who sounded like they had never worked a contest before (the ones who would stumble through the exchange) - those were the rag chewers. Had a number of nice two or three minute QSOs. It is also good to listen for people in your section. I was in KS this year, but just barely. So, I listened for KS and MO stations. Worked most of the stuff around the KC area, I think. All those resulted in some decent QSOs and as we heard each other as time progressed, we invariably would end up having yet another short QSO just to find out how things were.
If you don't like how your club does FD, you might want to think about heading out with another club next year, or, better yet, head on out with some of your friends! That's what I have done in years past and never had a bad field day yet.
That is what I did with my K2. Don't remember the actual parts count, but I think it was close to 1,000,000. :) Actually, I believe it was somewhere around 600. It took me a week to build the K2. The first night (a Thursday) was devoted to inventory. I soldered the first part in on Friday night, and worked every minute I was able to in order to finish the radio - so, that ended up being like 6 hours Friday, 25 hours spread over Sat and Sun, and 6 hours each night from Monday to Thursday... so pretty much right around 55 hours build time.
There is no comparisson between building a PC and building a radio. You don't have to have any knowledge or talent to put a PC together.
Randy NV0U
We are running radio stations. They have the ability to do great harm if operated incorrectly - not just to "messing up someone's TV" (99% of the time it is the TV that is fault, btw) but also medical equipment, police and fire communications, aircraft communications and navigation.... THAT is why this information is publicly available - so the owner of said station can be contacted quickly and the problem fixed.
It is also a way for public service departments to get in touch with us during real emergencies.
Also, for the past 75+ years, the American Radio Relay League has been publishing QST magazine. It contains lots and lots of, gasp!, call signs in it! Ohhh! and there is CQ magazine too! And I bet one issue of CQ can potentially have more calls posted in it than an entire year of QST when the contest results get published.
Give it a rest, dude.
Randy NV0U
I decided pretty much at the last minute that I should go on FD this year. So, I packed the car then headed out to my mom's house on the other side of town where she has plenty of land to put up big wire antennas. I ran class 1B-Battery this year, and was 100% solar powered for the duration.
Setup was not much of a problem. I did blow a fuse in the PV combiner box (one of the wires to one of the solar panels came loose and shorted everything). Then the Rippoff Shack cable I bought was screwed up - the idiots did not strip the center conductor of the coax when they made it. Note to RS: insulators make poor conductors. Note to self: Never by Radio Shack parts ever again as you can buy floor sweepings of much higher quality for much less money at the electronic junk stores.
My K2 worked flawlessly. I got a few much needed QRP DX out of the way too, including KL7 and KH6 on 10, 15, and 20, voice and CW. Got a lot of new states too. Oh, and I broke a pileup with a SP8 on my first call while running 5 watts out on SSB. There were a bunch of QRO stations calling him too. I was impressed with myself.
Not sure of my final count, but I don't care. I had fun and proved to myself that everything works. Well, kinda works. I fell asleep 12 hours into FD. I woke up a few hours later and got back on - only the MFJ tuner I was using decided to not give me any reading on the meters any more. Not sure if a bug has made a home in there or what as I have not been able to pull the cover off yet to look.
Randy NV0U
Where in the hell did you pull this from? Rush?
Look around you, dude. Net sites are failing left and right and it has nothing to do with people "loosing interest in liberalism". It has everything to do with not making money! Ever been to Fucked Company? Read over just 10 of the FCs - they are mostly stupid ideas in the first place, such as the ever popular breakfastcereal.com - the breakfast cereal portal! Imagine, if you will, Yahoo! with nothing but breakfast cereal. Like I am going to make THAT my home page. And the guy who started that winner of an idea got VC for it.
This has nothing, zero, zilch, to do with us having an idiot president getting his marching orders from the religious right and big business. These sites are failing for a reason: they are poorly run from the outset, have burned through all their VC by buying Aeron chairs for everyone and their dog, and then are left wondering why nobody clicks on the banner ads.
The Veggie Van - the guy also wrote a book called "From the Fryer to the Tank" all about making your own fuel
National Biodiesel Board
It is not. A gallon of biodiesel costs about 70 cents a gallon.
There was an article in the last issue of Home Power about a guy who makes his own biodiesel. Seems to be a pretty simple, if time consuming, process. He goes around his local area and gets the old vegetable oil out of the fryers at restraunts, filters out the food then mixes up his fuel. Granted, it can be a bit on the dangerous side, so kids don't try this at home.
I will post some more about this tonight when I get home. There were some URLs and stuff in the story.
No, but it is still a valid question.
I am not up on Frankenplant myself, but what about pollination? Sure, the plants this season are dead, but say during the course of their life a bee (Eric the Half-A-Bee, perhaps?) came by and carried the pollen to some non Frankenplant. Is that plant now a Frankenplant for the next season?
Seems pretty exponential to me.
don't do it. Seriously. Force yourself to hold it until your 10 hour day is up. No way, no how are you to get up from your desk. You must sit there for hours, doing the same repetitive motions over and over.
Want a drink of water? Yeah right.
You are also not allowed to talk to your co-workers. No chatting on the phone, even if it is a call from your mom saying your dad just died.
You are expected to be at work at all times. You are not allowed any time off for any reason. Miss one day and you are fired.
Think I am making this up? This is just a small sample of what it is like to work in a sweatshop.
*Now* please call me a liberal and tell me I am full of shit.
19.2K. I have a little bit of information on my qutiequitefantastic.org website. It is a start anyway.
There seem to be quite a few people writing software, but not a lot playing with the hardware.
Oh, and on my site I talk a bit about this thing being in the amateur radio 33cm band. Don't try to modify it unless you are a ham operator - and if you do modify it you are no longer able to use it to communicate with other cybikos (FCC rules, ya know).
They are using very common parts for this thing - should be very easy to dink with from what I can tell.
Okay, so it is at 19.2k, but it does work. In Ask Slashdot the other day, codepawn asked about the Cybiko. I went out and finally found some. I got one and played with it on Wednesday, then Thursday night I stoped by Best Buy and bought another. At $100 a pop, you can make a quite sophisticated little network of your own.
Granted, the range is not all that great (300 feet in the clear), but for a small neighborhood wireless network, this is good. The things will use each other as relay points, and there can be 3000 users total (30 channels x 100 users/chan).
Cybiko even gives you some software (Win only - but no reason that has to stay that way) to act as an internet mail gateway. As soon as you get into the network with one of the gates then your unit will connect and grab your email.
There is a lot of work to be done to make this a truely kickass device, but nothing says that you can't use these as 19.2k wireless internet modems on laptops, nor write your own email apps, or anything else. And there is a Linux SDK for the thing as well.
I myself am building my own little network around work and at home using these. They really are quite cool.
Went to yet another Best Buy and they were in the process of stocking them when I walked in. These were the new version 2 units - the ON/OFF switch is also the ESC key. I asked the guy stocking them if he knew what was up with this store recall thing and he said he had no clue - just that they were told to pack up all the units and send em back.
Oh well.
Anyway, you are right - it is aimed at kids - big time. But it is also just a pretty neat little hacking toy too. I have decided I need to get another one to play with the CyWIG. Not exactly sure how THAT will work, but I figure if I get enough of the things placed around, it will give some folks nearby some sort of email access. Could be a hoot...
I just went to three stores - Best Buy, Office Max, and Office Depot. All three were out - and they were not sold out either.
Apparently Cybiko has recalled all the products. The people in each store confirmed this.
As to what is going on, your guess is as good as mine...