This sounds like a fascinating setup. I've seen some infrared remote control software but it usually sucks. I suppose just making disc numbers 3 digits long, since track numbers can't go above 99, would make this sort of control easy.
Personally, I'm looking for a similar widget that would interpret numbers as letters to let me jump to a track. This would be used on my laptop with an external numeric keypad velcroed to the dash. (Key-remapping software would let me pop the keycaps into phone standard upside-down layout, to avoid learning the right-side-up numeric keypad.)
Normal string should work fine, it's the membranes on each end that you want to improve. Tin cans only resonate on a narrow band of frequencies. Paper cups are a good start.
Anyway, you've suggested a good first hop, but what do you do with the data once it comes out over the other coupler's serial port? I know you've got some old Lantronix rs232-over-token-ring gear sitting around, don't you?
Now keep going..
(BTW, I'm planning a "jam session" after the contest judging, where everyone can graft their entries together into the world's weirdest data transmission setup.)
First, as everyone else has suggested, run a bunch of antenna feedline down to the phone, from an antenna parked in a good location. This sucks, because there's a tradeoff between flexibility and performance. Also, the antenna connector on your handset may or may not be very durable. However, if you're going to go this route, check a truck stop for adapters. Truckers generally spend a lot of time outside traditional cellphone coverage, and any well-equipped service plaza that's more than a hundred miles from a big city will probably carry an assortment of antenna adapters. They generally use TNC as the "common" antenna connector, since it was the standard on the old analog bag phones.
Second, you could leave the phone upstairs where it gets decent signal already, and bring the voice downstairs. Do this with a Cellsocket or a Dock'n'talkcellular POTS adapter. Run a regular phone line down to where you spend most of your time, or hook up a cordless phone to the analog port.
Next option: Leave the phone upstairs. Get a really long headset cord, if your phone supports voice dialing and an answer/hangup button on the headset.:)
Yet another dumb idea: Leave the phone upstairs, and use a Bluetooth headset to bring the audio down. You should be able to dial by sending commands from a Bluetooth-equipped PDA.
...is that they only move a few watts of heat at once. They'll get you down to a nice chilly temperature, but if you put a big machine in there, it'll exceed the compressor's ability to move heat.
Try it, empty your fridge, put a hairdryer in there, plug 'em both in, and come back in an hour. See who's winning!
and they're commonly available. You should be able to find plenty of links with a quick Google.
The trick with most of them is getting video to the built-in LCD. I'm still not clear on how that's done. Some of the old cases included an ISA video card that was built specifically for the LCD, and you'd just pop it into whatever motherboard you ended up mounting in the case.
I've also seen some really classy portable CPCI cases, with vertical slots, integrated LCD/keyboard, and everything you'd expect from an industrial CPCI case.
If there's a chance it's a plain bitmap, simple visualization can reveal lots of patterns not evident in a hex dump.
I believe the old wardialing tool Toneloc had a mode, or a companion program, to display logs this way. It was easy to see things like "numbers ending in -0100 never get answered" as a vertical red line, for instance.
The important things would be an adjustable margin, to "wrap" the pixels at varying widths, and adjustable bit depth, so you can discover odd packings that might not otherwise be apparent.
If the data might be compressed, have a look at the article Hacking Data Compression for a great, if slightly dated, conceptual overview.
ERANAI (I am not a reverse engineer), but I hope this helps. Let us know if you have any luck!
Some harebrained schemes for book transport.
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Low Tech Gutenberg?
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· Score: 1
Is decent paper available locally? Ribbon or ink cartridges are small and weird enough to ship without being stolen. Send her a cheap old printer and an old PDA that can drive it. Since the printed books can be taken anywhere, the theft-targets can be left at an arbitrary secure location. This has the advantage of being able to print as many copies as resources and time allow, and once the printed volume exceeds the shipping weight of the equipment, you're winning.
I wonder what it would take to modify the "demo buttons" you see attached to printers at the computer store, so that they'd print out short books at the push of a button.
For a really minimalist implementation, a basic stamp with some serial flash and a receipt printer would fit in your pocket, make hardcopy, and run on batteries.;) Paper costs are likely to be excessive though.
Hmm, on second thought, maybe shipping dead trees is easier. Isn't there some cheap shipping available? You don't need turbo-airmail for 100-year-old text, and if a box gets lost at sea, who cares? Your local used bookstore would love a "fill this bag and I'll give you $10" offer, and send it by the cheapest method available. Repeat this method every few weeks.
If you're not above a little ironic fraud, find the DHL account number that Halliburton uses, and just ship that way.:)
Try to get a story onto the newswire that one of the locals saw the virgin Mary in a tree or something. Fundie tourists flocking to see the "miracle" will bring bibles with them, some of which will be lost or stolen, which can then have the pages washed and reprinted with something peaceful.
Alternately, get word out that the area harbors Al Qaeda, and the Bush administration will bomb it even closer to the stone age. Then Congress will approve a few billion bucks to build it into a technologically advanced society, and your friend can trade beads to soldiers for books.
For extra points, do both of the above simultaneously.
(If I'm gonna get modded flamebait, I'm gonna deserve it!)
Field of view would be easy to conquer if you provide several simultaneous streams. That's the approach I'm investigating with stereo pairs of cameras for 3d view. The problem is that most camera makers don't follow the USB spec, so you can't plug in more than one of the same model at a time.
The exception to the rule is the Vista Imaging VICAM, which was originally made in a parallel port version, then bought by 3Com and released in a USB version as the 3Com HomeConnect Camera. It was then bought by Digi/IONetworks and released as the Watchport/V. In all of its USB incarnations, you can run several Vicams simultaneously.
According to the informative reviews I've read, Vista did a lot of things right with this camera. Despite being an old design, the image quality is still among the best you'll find. You can get accessory lens packs, to change the field of view.
Other cameras that support multiple instances are the Logitech QuickCam 4000 and the ADStech "Turbo USB 2.0 webcam". There may be more.
Now, if only I'd thought to do an Ask/. two weeks ago, someone could've done all this research for me.;)
More so than just the idea of painting, is the fact that it's essentially a gesture interpretation system. If the game is decent at figuring out what you're thinking based on the way you move the mouse, maybe it'd be able to interpret other body motion too, if given the appropriate input devices.
I'm thinking specifically of the motion trackers used in the CAVE system. It's one thing for a virtual character to mimic your movements without understanding them, which has been done for years. It'd be a big step for the character to make inferences about your emotions based on how you stand or move.
The obvious pitfall here is that, after interacting with such a game for a long time, people might forget how to use the expressions that the game doesn't understand or react properly to. It's easy to keep a mental separation when the interface is very different from regular human interaction, like a keyboard. I like to think that most of us don't vocalize "lol" on a daily basis. But as the interfaces get closer to regular life, will the line blur enough to throw us off?
Response time has already been pointed out, but I think contrast ratio is much more important. LCD technology is not suitable for this application. Consider how bright the glowing needle of a modern gauge is, compared to the dead black of the face behind it. Or vice-versa, for the white-face gauges with thick black needles. An LCD has a continuous backlight and relies on each pixel to block light in its region. A little bit inevitably leaks through, resulting in the mottled gray that LCD makers euphemistically call "black".
If the contrast ratio weren't bad enough, you have significant temperature and response time issues. Most affordable screens will go nearly blank in extreme hot or cold, as the controller's adjustment ratio hits its limits. Wide-thermal-range LCDs are expensive and have their own tradeoffs. At least you don't have to worry about viewing angle.
Plasma displays would be better suited for this. By actually generating the light at each pixel, they solve the contrast problem pretty neatly. Their mechanism is also fairly temperature hardy. Interfacing color plasma displays is even more arcane than LCD though, so I wish you luck. If large OLED displays were available, I'd suggest them.
Did you say skinnable interface? Watch out for cock-shaped soundwaves. Holy shit, as if the usability of modern vehicles wasn't already bad enough.
Anyway, a replacement for the stock cluster sounds a bit ambitious. Try an add-on panel for now. Actually using a PDA like you suggested sounds like a good way to start. Get your software worked out, for pulling the values off the bus and drawing gauges with low latency.
One more thing just occurred to me: Have you ever watched the display of an LED clock jump around while chewing, or walking, or anything that makes your eyes wiggle a bit? Each segment is only lit for a small fraction of each second. LCDs don't suffer as much from this problem because the crystals in each pixel are slow to respond, but you still might get shimmer or wiggle as you go over bumps in the road. The refresh cycle of your display's controller will determine how obvious this is.
Next issue: Getting the data from the ECM. OBD-II doesn't allow high refresh rates, last I checked. It's fine for watching parameters like throttle position and temperature, but a tach might not be practical unless you're reading straight off the CANbus. Alternately, try to get the data that the computer's already sending to the gauge cluster, in whatever custom format that is. The problem here is that this high-refresh-rate data is only sending the parameters that your existing gauge cluster needs to know about.
I don't want to sound like a killjoy, but from the questions you're asking, this project sounds a little complicated. There's no harm in trying, but don't be disappointed if you end up with a marginally useful system. Publish your findings so that others can benefit.
I'm using Ricochet modems for this exact purpose. They'll go 2000 feet on the stock antennae without any special positioning.
A minor tweak to XP's modem inf files fixes an initialization bug (not the modem's fault), and dialup server happily accepts calls on the wireless modem. I can remain VNC'd into my desktop from the corner gas station...
Machine cinema? What a cool combination.
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MMOG Machinima
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Do you know a lot about machinima, or are you interested enough to research its history, culture, present state, and future directions?
Would you like to introduce other curious geeks to machinima?
Are you unafraid of, or capable of drinking enough to be unafraid of, getting up in front of 20-50 of your peers to give a presentation?
You should come present at Notacon! It's a conference about technology, community, art, culture, hacking, music, and you. The call for papers is currently open. What would you like to talk about?
Unless you're right next door to Brazil, I'd suggest coming to Notacon instead. It's a fun mix of tech, art, culture, and community.
The Slashdot crowd ought to be particularly interested in the "Anything But Ethernet" contest. Network silliness is the goal. (Last year's winner was "IP over Voice", a speech-synth and recognition system.)
Take a look, come down to Ohio in April, and present!
Anyway, an open firmware has done wonders for sales of the WRT54G and similar hardware, because people keep dreaming up uses that the manufacturer didn't think of, or couldn't be bothered to implement and support because of the relatively small market. Taken together, all the niche markets who love this gear make for quite a sizeable market.
If I could rewrite the firmware for my Olympus C2100UZ, I'd make it enumerate as a multi-endpoint USB device with the following functions:
TWAIN image acquisition (duh.)
VfW video source
Mass-storage interface
IrDA serial port
NTSC video-out device
RS232 port (it has one!)
Microphone device
Accelerometer (image stabilizer.)
Now, some uses. Parent poster pointed out quite a few. Many of which are already done by DigitaOS, a failed attempt at a camera API used in some obsolete models. (Pricey SDK killed it.)
Let me record audio, without taking a picture first, to use the camera for notetaking. Simply holding down a button while powering on the camera should put it in this mode. No need to initialize the CCD or wake up the stabilizer. Just open a file and dump audio into it.
My laptop doesn't have NTSC-out, but my camera does. I'm likely to have the camera with me while traveling, so using it as a generic video output device would be great. The bandwidth of the camera's USB 1.1 interface might allow for decently smooth video, but really all I want is generic presentation stuff. And with the built-in infrared transceiver, I could use any random remote control to flip pages from across the room.
As long as we're making up for laptop inadequacies and reducing the device count while traveling, let's use that IrDA interface to sync the ol' PDA. No need for another silly dongle in the laptop bag. You bet I'd enjoy open firmware. Oh, and the laptop has no built-in microphone. But the camera does! Convenient? No. Lifesaver in a pinch? Absolutely.
Did I mention that the C2100UZ has an RS232 port too? I could write an Axis-like feature set, leave the camera plugged into power and an external modem, and let it call me when it detects motion or hears a sound. Or I could dial in and poll for images. So what if I can't pan and tilt to make good use of the 10x zoom? Go to wide angle, I still have enough pixels to get useful detail out of a corner of the image. Show me the 300x300 pixel square where the motion was centered, for five consecutive frames. Send those first over the modem. Store the full images, and send them later if I'm interested.
Back in the DigitaOS days, someone wrote a program that would sit in the camera and log NMEA0183 GPS data coming in the serial port. I think this was before EXIF was standardized, but it was similar. A few years have passed, and this concept is largely forgotten. The world is ready for geolocated photography. I'd like to stick my Garmin on my Olympus. Open firmware would let me do just that.
The stabilizer has a lot of potential too. It's a small 2-axis accelerometer connected to a servo that moves a prism/lens around in the optical path. How about logging a stream of wiggle data along with a recorded video, so playback could be accompanied with force feedback in the viewers' seats? With the camera bolted to a vehicle chassis, a day at the races would be a much more engaging experience to relive years later. (Or force the relatives to sit through the "boring slideshow" of the vacation in Switzerland.. don't warn them about the skiing video!)
Okay, how about more "camera-like" functions? Parent poster touched on a few good ones. "Select some images to recompress" would be great. I'd also like to be able to keep my old images on the card, after copying them to the laptop, in case I want to show them to someone on the camera. They should be flagged as "disposable", and overwritten when new images come in, but in the meantime, leave them sitting where
I saw 2 other comments that suggested Toughbooks, but without explaining their logic.
A lot of laptops built for the "outside world" are quite capable of handling temperature extremes, as well as dust and moisture. Most have sealed keyboards that can be blown out with a compressor, or simply rinsed off if stuff gets under the keys.
Laptop drives, while more expensive than desktop drives of similar capacity, are of course built for the rigors of a mobile environment. That includes vibration, thermal swings, and lots of spinup/spindown cycles. They should be fine sitting on a workbench in cold weather.
The rugged laptop screens are also built to handle temperature much better than standard LCDs. Older STN displays radically alter their contrast points with temperature, and even TFT units require special formulation to keep their usable properties over a wide temperature range.
The great thing is that perfectly usable rugged laptops can be found on eBay or elsewhere for a song. Since a lot of customers bid by specs (processor, ram, drive, screen) rather than by construction, the price premium of a rugged machine narrows significantly on the used market.
Since you probably don't need a battery, the main reason to avoid used laptops doesn't apply. If you can get one that's good for an hour or so, that's still useful for car work. Park the machine on the intake manifold with the PDF service manuals on screen, and a small USB camera recording video as you disassemble the engine. When installation fails to be the simple reverse of removal, you'll have a record of why.
The other benefit of laptops-as-desktops is that they simply fold up and sit on a shelf when they're not needed. If your workbench is anything like mine, you'll appreciate this. (And if you disable the lid switch, the sucker can remain powered on, feeding music to your workshop speakers, while on the shelf.)
And this is news, why?
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Wi-Fi Gaming
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· Score: 1
Okay, hams have been playing fox-hunts for decades, and 802.11 is just another digital mode. What's the breakthrough here?
Try setting your phone number as the SSID and see who calls. (Works best with a throwaway number, of course.)
This is a good way to advertise geek gatherings. A pocket-sized AP perched near your local 2600 meeting works fine. As far as I know, Notacon, the technology conference is planning to toss a few APs up around Cleveland with SSIDs along the lines of "IfYouCanReadThisComeToTheHolidayInn".
I'm a bit dismayed at the lack of technical sophistication displayed by TFA. Battery, inverter, adapter, accesspoint? Most APs take straight 12v in, and are quite happy to run directly from a battery. That's much less wasteful and noisy than the roundabout method. The WRT54G/GS rev 2.0 is stable down to about 4.5v input, long after the inverter would've shut itself down.
Many modern APs have enough brains to act as a pretty sophisticated standalone server too, without an uplink. With an extra meg of storage, you could run a telnet BBS or whatever, right on the AP. Or you could be sneaky, and implement a rolling SSID, or FakeAP, or have the thing hide itself when it hears a NetStumbler probe frame, so only Kismet kids can find it.
For antennae, I'd like to see some experimentation with equipment that has diverse receive capability. Mounting a dual-antenna adapter in the focal plane of a dish, so the antennae are slightly right and left of focus, could create a "stereo" antenna. With appropriate software to read signal strengths on each one, you could drastically ease the task of finding an AP.
I strongly disagree with putting cabling under the floor. Out of sight, out of mind works fine when you're talking a few cat-5 runs to a cubicle farm, but when connections are your main business, put them up where they won't be neglected.
The under-floor space can be used for AC power, if you use AC, but that's usually just for convenience outlets. Downflow air handling units that use the floor for air distribution are good too. I've even seen installations where the DC power cabling was run under the floor, and it simplified things greatly. But please, don't put your signal cables down there.
For one, it's easy to drop a tile into the floor while trying to remove it. One bad suction cup can cause the crushing or cutting of a cable. For another, it's awkward to feed cables through the little cutouts at the bottom of a cabinet. I've seen a lot of dirty or damaged connectors because of this.
If you're not bolting your cabinets to the floor, it also creates a shear point if the cabinet shifts. Please do bolt down your racks and cabinets, because they can tip.
Hiding the cabling also encourages poor workmanship. When someone has 20 feet of slack to store, and they throw it in a clump under the floor, it's a nightmare when another cable in the same area has to be pulled out. The initial infraction would've been noticed immediately if it'd been overhead, in plain view.
A well-designed overhead cable rack system is superior to any floor system. It's cleaner, because there's literally less dust colleting on it. Running cables overhead doesn't involve dragging them through a pile of connection-ruining crud. It's easier to install, because you don't have to contend with tile supports. It's easier to expand, because you can visualize the whole layout easily, and see where the congested areas are.
Furthermore, overhead rack is a natural companion to fiber trough systems, most of which are intended to be overhead. If you have a mix of fiber and copper, and most of us do, you owe it to yourself to plan a system that accomodates large amounts of both. As equipment density rises, the amount of cabling you'll need to bring to each rack also rises. Plan for that.
Also, plan for slack runout areas. The cables are never the exact length you need. Running them back and forth in the rack can create all sorts of tangle problems. Having a designated path to run your slack loop down can really make tearouts less dangerous.
Also, don't underestimate the sheer size of the cabling you're dealing with. I saw one particularly bad example, where a company had laid out their aisle of patch panels very carefully. The bottom of each bay was for panels that went to transport equipment, and the top was panels for other equipment. That way, most cross-connects could be made without leaving the bay. There were cable management rings to accomodate the occasional jumper that had to go between bays. It worked great.
Then they merged with another company, and the recordkeeping system changed. The new system made port assignments automatically, and it didn't respect the physical layout of what was where. Now the majority of jumpers were long, inter-bay runs. Over time as circuits got moved around, the management rings got filled, overoaded, and eventually stuffed to the point that the mass of wire was essentially solid. You could punch the bundle and it would go "thud". Pulling out a jumper was likely to burn through its neighbors simply due to friction, so they stopped pulling old ones out.
Eventually they added a dedicated piece of cable rack, and run all interbay jumpers up there. It was ugly, and awkward, but it worked. The initial system was much better, but relied on a level of care and planning that the new owners weren't willing to provide. Consider this: Will your successor's successor curse your name, or laud you for laying out a comfortable, expandable environment?
I've played with DeLorme's Street Atlas a lot, and it includes some remarkably cool speech features. Earlier versions would talk, and the directions are pretty useful. Once you've plotted a route, the software will keep you on it.
The 2004 edition added speech recognition, and you can use it with or without having a predefined route. If you're just cruising around, you can ask things like "Where am I?" or "What is the nearest fast food?" and it'll come up with responses like "You are on eye seventyfive, northbound. City of Troy, Oakland County, Michigan" or "Nearest fast food is Burger King, fourteen mile road".
So how long does it take for lightscribe labels to fade if left in the sun?
Optical media needs to take a page from photographic developing's playbook, and I've said this for years. The problem with CD-R longevity is that the media is still photosensitive for as long as the disc lasts. It degrades from ambient light.
I'd love to see a disc with a semiporous substrate, and a box of "fixer" chemical that I could set it in for a few minutes after the burn. Either that, or another wavelength of light that would chemically convert the dye into a state where the markings would be permanent.
Industrial chemists, I'm talking to you. Reduce the solid waste stream by removing my need to re-burn old discs every year or two.
(Magneto-optical discs don't have this problem, as they're really magnetic recording. Reading is done with a laser, and writing is done with the aid of heat from a laser, but the actual bit-flipping is magnetic.)
To re-re-restate what should be elementary who's ever touched a resistor:
If you "close" the circuit with a high value resistor (say a few megohms), the voltage measured across the resistor will be essentially the same as the voltage measured where the pair leaves the office.
If you "close" the circuit by shorting the wires together, then by definition, the voltage measured across the junction will be 0 volts, with the rest of the loop burning off the current as heat.
Measuring open-circuit voltage with a high-Z solid state meter should show above 50. Measuring it with a moving-coil analog meter will vary depending on the coil's resistance (typically a few k). It's just a galvanometer after all, and depends on some nontrivial current flow to cause needle deflection.
As I stated before, it all depends on the resistance of what you place at the end of the loop. The average human touching the wires presents a resistance of 1k or higher. Most buried cable is 20 or 22ga, sometimes 19ga for longer distances. In any event, the telcos make every effort to keep total loop resistance under 1300 ohms, with the average being closer to 300.
Doing the math here, each side of a 300-ohm loop will be 150 ohms. Let's take 1200 ohms for the human, a number indicated as reasonable by what I've read, and one which makes the math easy. Total circuit resistance is now 1500 ohms. Call the voltage 50, and we end up with 40 volts across the human, and 5 volts lost on either side of the pair.
You're right on the 54 volts thing, the system is nominally 48 based on 2 volts per battery cell, but "floats" at 2.25 per cell to keep the chemistry happy. It drops to 48 very soon after commercial power fails. All the gear should be designed work right down to 42 or less, as lead-acids exhibit a downward slope during discharge.
Also, to clear up some ambiguity from another poster elsewhere in this thread: Ringing is stated at 90v, 20Hz, sine wave.
Oh, not another one. I work in telecommunications, where we use GPS-disciplined clocks to synchronize our fiber-optic networks. (I'm sorry, was that too many big words? If GPS doesn't work, after a while, phones don't work.)
In case you missed it during the August outage, the power grid relies on precise phase synchronization to keep generators from working against each other. If one part of the grid falls out of sync, it can drag its neighbors down with it. Hence, each plant needs a way to compare its phase to a master reference and adjust itself. Referencing each station to its neighbors might sound workable, but it results in a condition called a "synchronization loop" which causes local drift and all sorts of problems.
Prior to GPS, WWV/WWVB was used as a source of sync. I think the decision to rip out the WWVB receivers was a stupid one, the GPS receivers should've been installed alongside them. But the decision was made, and we now have a system that falls apart without GPS.
That's not to say there aren't plenty of good local oscillators, accurate to a few parts per million over a period of several days. There are. But after those several days of good holdover timing, the local oscillators begin to drift, and they don't all drift in the same direction or at the same rate.
Having a local clock, even a very good one, is useless without some way of comparing it to a master.
Try a google for "power grid phase GPS" and get all the links you want.
CDMA falls apart in a number of ugly ways when the towers lose precise sync. Not only does soft handoff fail, but neighboring towers start interfering with each other. The way I understand it, even when soft handoff isn't actually taking place, the towers are still carefully coordinated so that most of the time, your phone can see several pilots, but only uses one. When sync fails, all those good zones turn into bad zones, with the phone only being usable in the areas where it can see one tower and one tower only.
All the Nortel CDMA gear has some amazingly precise Trimble receivers which can provide "hold-over" timing for a while in the absence of a reference signal. I'd assume other vendors are similar. Having run for a while (minimum 24 hours?) with a good reference, the local oscillators are now "disciplined" and essentially self-calibrated.
Aside from CDMA, the rest of the telecommunications network also relies on precise synchronization. SONET links experience slips and degradation if there are timing problems. And although your traceroute doesn't show the lower levels, I'd guarantee your internet packets flow over SONET links at least a few times in their route. (Hint: Anything leaving a router in Chicago and popping up at a router in New Jersey was not on the same piece of glass the whole time.)
Luckily, the clocks used in all this are pretty good, and having had plenty of time under an external reference, their holdover quality should be excellent. Most offices have a redundant pair of GPS receivers feeding a pair of Rubidium oscillators, which provide stratum-2 holdover accuracy for a minimum of several days. Totall loss of signals from the Navstar constellation shouldn't really bother the equipment for a week at the very least. Or, the government could shut down all the satellites except one per area, which would make position information useless but still provide a good clock reference.
However, consider this: All the reference receivers are programmed to trigger an alarm when they lose satellite lock. In the event of a disruption, your average NOC is going to be so flooded with these alarms, they might not notice other noteworthy events. In the even that a major outage was detected, it might be falsely attributed to sync failure, even if the actual cause was much more sinister.
The unintended (but fully predictable) consequence of a Navstar blackout might be a window of opportunity for criminals, thieves and terrorists alike.
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This sounds like a fascinating setup. I've seen some infrared remote control software but it usually sucks. I suppose just making disc numbers 3 digits long, since track numbers can't go above 99, would make this sort of control easy.
Personally, I'm looking for a similar widget that would interpret numbers as letters to let me jump to a track. This would be used on my laptop with an external numeric keypad velcroed to the dash. (Key-remapping software would let me pop the keycaps into phone standard upside-down layout, to avoid learning the right-side-up numeric keypad.)
This question has been asked, and answered, before. See my post Under the floor? Reconsider! (Sunday January 02, @11:02PM) (3, Informative) attached to the article Supercomputers - Does the Cabling Matter?
Normal string should work fine, it's the membranes on each end that you want to improve. Tin cans only resonate on a narrow band of frequencies. Paper cups are a good start.
Anyway, you've suggested a good first hop, but what do you do with the data once it comes out over the other coupler's serial port? I know you've got some old Lantronix rs232-over-token-ring gear sitting around, don't you?
Now keep going..
(BTW, I'm planning a "jam session" after the contest judging, where everyone can graft their entries together into the world's weirdest data transmission setup.)
First, as everyone else has suggested, run a bunch of antenna feedline down to the phone, from an antenna parked in a good location. This sucks, because there's a tradeoff between flexibility and performance. Also, the antenna connector on your handset may or may not be very durable. However, if you're going to go this route, check a truck stop for adapters. Truckers generally spend a lot of time outside traditional cellphone coverage, and any well-equipped service plaza that's more than a hundred miles from a big city will probably carry an assortment of antenna adapters. They generally use TNC as the "common" antenna connector, since it was the standard on the old analog bag phones.
:)
Second, you could leave the phone upstairs where it gets decent signal already, and bring the voice downstairs. Do this with a Cellsocket or a Dock'n'talk cellular POTS adapter. Run a regular phone line down to where you spend most of your time, or hook up a cordless phone to the analog port.
Next option: Leave the phone upstairs. Get a really long headset cord, if your phone supports voice dialing and an answer/hangup button on the headset.
Yet another dumb idea: Leave the phone upstairs, and use a Bluetooth headset to bring the audio down. You should be able to dial by sending commands from a Bluetooth-equipped PDA.
...is that they only move a few watts of heat at once. They'll get you down to a nice chilly temperature, but if you put a big machine in there, it'll exceed the compressor's ability to move heat.
Try it, empty your fridge, put a hairdryer in there, plug 'em both in, and come back in an hour. See who's winning!
and they're commonly available. You should be able to find plenty of links with a quick Google.
The trick with most of them is getting video to the built-in LCD. I'm still not clear on how that's done. Some of the old cases included an ISA video card that was built specifically for the LCD, and you'd just pop it into whatever motherboard you ended up mounting in the case.
I've also seen some really classy portable CPCI cases, with vertical slots, integrated LCD/keyboard, and everything you'd expect from an industrial CPCI case.
Wow, that program is condensed coolness. I'm impressed, thanks for the link! Deeeelicious.
Now, if there were something similar for filesystems...
If there's a chance it's a plain bitmap, simple visualization can reveal lots of patterns not evident in a hex dump.
I believe the old wardialing tool Toneloc had a mode, or a companion program, to display logs this way. It was easy to see things like "numbers ending in -0100 never get answered" as a vertical red line, for instance.
The important things would be an adjustable margin, to "wrap" the pixels at varying widths, and adjustable bit depth, so you can discover odd packings that might not otherwise be apparent.
If the data might be compressed, have a look at the article Hacking Data Compression for a great, if slightly dated, conceptual overview.
ERANAI (I am not a reverse engineer), but I hope this helps. Let us know if you have any luck!
Is decent paper available locally? Ribbon or ink cartridges are small and weird enough to ship without being stolen. Send her a cheap old printer and an old PDA that can drive it. Since the printed books can be taken anywhere, the theft-targets can be left at an arbitrary secure location. This has the advantage of being able to print as many copies as resources and time allow, and once the printed volume exceeds the shipping weight of the equipment, you're winning.
;) Paper costs are likely to be excessive though.
:)
I wonder what it would take to modify the "demo buttons" you see attached to printers at the computer store, so that they'd print out short books at the push of a button.
For a really minimalist implementation, a basic stamp with some serial flash and a receipt printer would fit in your pocket, make hardcopy, and run on batteries.
Hmm, on second thought, maybe shipping dead trees is easier. Isn't there some cheap shipping available? You don't need turbo-airmail for 100-year-old text, and if a box gets lost at sea, who cares? Your local used bookstore would love a "fill this bag and I'll give you $10" offer, and send it by the cheapest method available. Repeat this method every few weeks.
If you're not above a little ironic fraud, find the DHL account number that Halliburton uses, and just ship that way.
Try to get a story onto the newswire that one of the locals saw the virgin Mary in a tree or something. Fundie tourists flocking to see the "miracle" will bring bibles with them, some of which will be lost or stolen, which can then have the pages washed and reprinted with something peaceful.
Alternately, get word out that the area harbors Al Qaeda, and the Bush administration will bomb it even closer to the stone age. Then Congress will approve a few billion bucks to build it into a technologically advanced society, and your friend can trade beads to soldiers for books.
For extra points, do both of the above simultaneously.
(If I'm gonna get modded flamebait, I'm gonna deserve it!)
Field of view would be easy to conquer if you provide several simultaneous streams. That's the approach I'm investigating with stereo pairs of cameras for 3d view. The problem is that most camera makers don't follow the USB spec, so you can't plug in more than one of the same model at a time.
/. two weeks ago, someone could've done all this research for me. ;)
The exception to the rule is the Vista Imaging VICAM, which was originally made in a parallel port version, then bought by 3Com and released in a USB version as the 3Com HomeConnect Camera. It was then bought by Digi/IONetworks and released as the Watchport/V. In all of its USB incarnations, you can run several Vicams simultaneously.
According to the informative reviews I've read, Vista did a lot of things right with this camera. Despite being an old design, the image quality is still among the best you'll find. You can get accessory lens packs, to change the field of view.
Other cameras that support multiple instances are the Logitech QuickCam 4000 and the ADStech "Turbo USB 2.0 webcam". There may be more.
Now, if only I'd thought to do an Ask
More so than just the idea of painting, is the fact that it's essentially a gesture interpretation system. If the game is decent at figuring out what you're thinking based on the way you move the mouse, maybe it'd be able to interpret other body motion too, if given the appropriate input devices.
I'm thinking specifically of the motion trackers used in the CAVE system. It's one thing for a virtual character to mimic your movements without understanding them, which has been done for years. It'd be a big step for the character to make inferences about your emotions based on how you stand or move.
The obvious pitfall here is that, after interacting with such a game for a long time, people might forget how to use the expressions that the game doesn't understand or react properly to. It's easy to keep a mental separation when the interface is very different from regular human interaction, like a keyboard. I like to think that most of us don't vocalize "lol" on a daily basis. But as the interfaces get closer to regular life, will the line blur enough to throw us off?
Response time has already been pointed out, but I think contrast ratio is much more important. LCD technology is not suitable for this application. Consider how bright the glowing needle of a modern gauge is, compared to the dead black of the face behind it. Or vice-versa, for the white-face gauges with thick black needles. An LCD has a continuous backlight and relies on each pixel to block light in its region. A little bit inevitably leaks through, resulting in the mottled gray that LCD makers euphemistically call "black".
If the contrast ratio weren't bad enough, you have significant temperature and response time issues. Most affordable screens will go nearly blank in extreme hot or cold, as the controller's adjustment ratio hits its limits. Wide-thermal-range LCDs are expensive and have their own tradeoffs. At least you don't have to worry about viewing angle.
Plasma displays would be better suited for this. By actually generating the light at each pixel, they solve the contrast problem pretty neatly. Their mechanism is also fairly temperature hardy. Interfacing color plasma displays is even more arcane than LCD though, so I wish you luck. If large OLED displays were available, I'd suggest them.
Did you say skinnable interface? Watch out for cock-shaped soundwaves. Holy shit, as if the usability of modern vehicles wasn't already bad enough.
Anyway, a replacement for the stock cluster sounds a bit ambitious. Try an add-on panel for now. Actually using a PDA like you suggested sounds like a good way to start. Get your software worked out, for pulling the values off the bus and drawing gauges with low latency.
One more thing just occurred to me: Have you ever watched the display of an LED clock jump around while chewing, or walking, or anything that makes your eyes wiggle a bit? Each segment is only lit for a small fraction of each second. LCDs don't suffer as much from this problem because the crystals in each pixel are slow to respond, but you still might get shimmer or wiggle as you go over bumps in the road. The refresh cycle of your display's controller will determine how obvious this is.
Next issue: Getting the data from the ECM. OBD-II doesn't allow high refresh rates, last I checked. It's fine for watching parameters like throttle position and temperature, but a tach might not be practical unless you're reading straight off the CANbus. Alternately, try to get the data that the computer's already sending to the gauge cluster, in whatever custom format that is. The problem here is that this high-refresh-rate data is only sending the parameters that your existing gauge cluster needs to know about.
I don't want to sound like a killjoy, but from the questions you're asking, this project sounds a little complicated. There's no harm in trying, but don't be disappointed if you end up with a marginally useful system. Publish your findings so that others can benefit.
I'm using Ricochet modems for this exact purpose. They'll go 2000 feet on the stock antennae without any special positioning.
A minor tweak to XP's modem inf files fixes an initialization bug (not the modem's fault), and dialup server happily accepts calls on the wireless modem. I can remain VNC'd into my desktop from the corner gas station...
Do you know a lot about machinima, or are you interested enough to research its history, culture, present state, and future directions?
Would you like to introduce other curious geeks to machinima?
Are you unafraid of, or capable of drinking enough to be unafraid of, getting up in front of 20-50 of your peers to give a presentation?
You should come present at Notacon! It's a conference about technology, community, art, culture, hacking, music, and you. The call for papers is currently open. What would you like to talk about?
Unless you're right next door to Brazil, I'd suggest coming to Notacon instead. It's a fun mix of tech, art, culture, and community.
The Slashdot crowd ought to be particularly interested in the "Anything But Ethernet" contest. Network silliness is the goal. (Last year's winner was "IP over Voice", a speech-synth and recognition system.)
Take a look, come down to Ohio in April, and present!
Anyway, an open firmware has done wonders for sales of the WRT54G and similar hardware, because people keep dreaming up uses that the manufacturer didn't think of, or couldn't be bothered to implement and support because of the relatively small market. Taken together, all the niche markets who love this gear make for quite a sizeable market.
If I could rewrite the firmware for my Olympus C2100UZ, I'd make it enumerate as a multi-endpoint USB device with the following functions:
Now, some uses. Parent poster pointed out quite a few. Many of which are already done by DigitaOS, a failed attempt at a camera API used in some obsolete models. (Pricey SDK killed it.)
Let me record audio, without taking a picture first, to use the camera for notetaking. Simply holding down a button while powering on the camera should put it in this mode. No need to initialize the CCD or wake up the stabilizer. Just open a file and dump audio into it.
My laptop doesn't have NTSC-out, but my camera does. I'm likely to have the camera with me while traveling, so using it as a generic video output device would be great. The bandwidth of the camera's USB 1.1 interface might allow for decently smooth video, but really all I want is generic presentation stuff. And with the built-in infrared transceiver, I could use any random remote control to flip pages from across the room.
As long as we're making up for laptop inadequacies and reducing the device count while traveling, let's use that IrDA interface to sync the ol' PDA. No need for another silly dongle in the laptop bag. You bet I'd enjoy open firmware. Oh, and the laptop has no built-in microphone. But the camera does! Convenient? No. Lifesaver in a pinch? Absolutely.
Did I mention that the C2100UZ has an RS232 port too? I could write an Axis-like feature set, leave the camera plugged into power and an external modem, and let it call me when it detects motion or hears a sound. Or I could dial in and poll for images. So what if I can't pan and tilt to make good use of the 10x zoom? Go to wide angle, I still have enough pixels to get useful detail out of a corner of the image. Show me the 300x300 pixel square where the motion was centered, for five consecutive frames. Send those first over the modem. Store the full images, and send them later if I'm interested.
Back in the DigitaOS days, someone wrote a program that would sit in the camera and log NMEA0183 GPS data coming in the serial port. I think this was before EXIF was standardized, but it was similar. A few years have passed, and this concept is largely forgotten. The world is ready for geolocated photography. I'd like to stick my Garmin on my Olympus. Open firmware would let me do just that.
The stabilizer has a lot of potential too. It's a small 2-axis accelerometer connected to a servo that moves a prism/lens around in the optical path. How about logging a stream of wiggle data along with a recorded video, so playback could be accompanied with force feedback in the viewers' seats? With the camera bolted to a vehicle chassis, a day at the races would be a much more engaging experience to relive years later. (Or force the relatives to sit through the "boring slideshow" of the vacation in Switzerland.. don't warn them about the skiing video!)
Okay, how about more "camera-like" functions? Parent poster touched on a few good ones. "Select some images to recompress" would be great. I'd also like to be able to keep my old images on the card, after copying them to the laptop, in case I want to show them to someone on the camera. They should be flagged as "disposable", and overwritten when new images come in, but in the meantime, leave them sitting where
I saw 2 other comments that suggested Toughbooks, but without explaining their logic.
A lot of laptops built for the "outside world" are quite capable of handling temperature extremes, as well as dust and moisture. Most have sealed keyboards that can be blown out with a compressor, or simply rinsed off if stuff gets under the keys.
Laptop drives, while more expensive than desktop drives of similar capacity, are of course built for the rigors of a mobile environment. That includes vibration, thermal swings, and lots of spinup/spindown cycles. They should be fine sitting on a workbench in cold weather.
The rugged laptop screens are also built to handle temperature much better than standard LCDs. Older STN displays radically alter their contrast points with temperature, and even TFT units require special formulation to keep their usable properties over a wide temperature range.
The great thing is that perfectly usable rugged laptops can be found on eBay or elsewhere for a song. Since a lot of customers bid by specs (processor, ram, drive, screen) rather than by construction, the price premium of a rugged machine narrows significantly on the used market.
Since you probably don't need a battery, the main reason to avoid used laptops doesn't apply. If you can get one that's good for an hour or so, that's still useful for car work. Park the machine on the intake manifold with the PDF service manuals on screen, and a small USB camera recording video as you disassemble the engine. When installation fails to be the simple reverse of removal, you'll have a record of why.
The other benefit of laptops-as-desktops is that they simply fold up and sit on a shelf when they're not needed. If your workbench is anything like mine, you'll appreciate this. (And if you disable the lid switch, the sucker can remain powered on, feeding music to your workshop speakers, while on the shelf.)
Okay, hams have been playing fox-hunts for decades, and 802.11 is just another digital mode. What's the breakthrough here?
Try setting your phone number as the SSID and see who calls. (Works best with a throwaway number, of course.)
This is a good way to advertise geek gatherings. A pocket-sized AP perched near your local 2600 meeting works fine. As far as I know, Notacon, the technology conference is planning to toss a few APs up around Cleveland with SSIDs along the lines of "IfYouCanReadThisComeToTheHolidayInn".
I'm a bit dismayed at the lack of technical sophistication displayed by TFA. Battery, inverter, adapter, accesspoint? Most APs take straight 12v in, and are quite happy to run directly from a battery. That's much less wasteful and noisy than the roundabout method. The WRT54G/GS rev 2.0 is stable down to about 4.5v input, long after the inverter would've shut itself down.
Many modern APs have enough brains to act as a pretty sophisticated standalone server too, without an uplink. With an extra meg of storage, you could run a telnet BBS or whatever, right on the AP. Or you could be sneaky, and implement a rolling SSID, or FakeAP, or have the thing hide itself when it hears a NetStumbler probe frame, so only Kismet kids can find it.
For antennae, I'd like to see some experimentation with equipment that has diverse receive capability. Mounting a dual-antenna adapter in the focal plane of a dish, so the antennae are slightly right and left of focus, could create a "stereo" antenna. With appropriate software to read signal strengths on each one, you could drastically ease the task of finding an AP.
As long as you're driving around, why not contribute to the PlaceLab location-aware database while you're at it?
I strongly disagree with putting cabling under the floor. Out of sight, out of mind works fine when you're talking a few cat-5 runs to a cubicle farm, but when connections are your main business, put them up where they won't be neglected.
The under-floor space can be used for AC power, if you use AC, but that's usually just for convenience outlets. Downflow air handling units that use the floor for air distribution are good too. I've even seen installations where the DC power cabling was run under the floor, and it simplified things greatly. But please, don't put your signal cables down there.
For one, it's easy to drop a tile into the floor while trying to remove it. One bad suction cup can cause the crushing or cutting of a cable. For another, it's awkward to feed cables through the little cutouts at the bottom of a cabinet. I've seen a lot of dirty or damaged connectors because of this.
If you're not bolting your cabinets to the floor, it also creates a shear point if the cabinet shifts. Please do bolt down your racks and cabinets, because they can tip.
Hiding the cabling also encourages poor workmanship. When someone has 20 feet of slack to store, and they throw it in a clump under the floor, it's a nightmare when another cable in the same area has to be pulled out. The initial infraction would've been noticed immediately if it'd been overhead, in plain view.
A well-designed overhead cable rack system is superior to any floor system. It's cleaner, because there's literally less dust colleting on it. Running cables overhead doesn't involve dragging them through a pile of connection-ruining crud. It's easier to install, because you don't have to contend with tile supports. It's easier to expand, because you can visualize the whole layout easily, and see where the congested areas are.
Furthermore, overhead rack is a natural companion to fiber trough systems, most of which are intended to be overhead. If you have a mix of fiber and copper, and most of us do, you owe it to yourself to plan a system that accomodates large amounts of both. As equipment density rises, the amount of cabling you'll need to bring to each rack also rises. Plan for that.
Also, plan for slack runout areas. The cables are never the exact length you need. Running them back and forth in the rack can create all sorts of tangle problems. Having a designated path to run your slack loop down can really make tearouts less dangerous.
Also, don't underestimate the sheer size of the cabling you're dealing with. I saw one particularly bad example, where a company had laid out their aisle of patch panels very carefully. The bottom of each bay was for panels that went to transport equipment, and the top was panels for other equipment. That way, most cross-connects could be made without leaving the bay. There were cable management rings to accomodate the occasional jumper that had to go between bays. It worked great.
Then they merged with another company, and the recordkeeping system changed. The new system made port assignments automatically, and it didn't respect the physical layout of what was where. Now the majority of jumpers were long, inter-bay runs. Over time as circuits got moved around, the management rings got filled, overoaded, and eventually stuffed to the point that the mass of wire was essentially solid. You could punch the bundle and it would go "thud". Pulling out a jumper was likely to burn through its neighbors simply due to friction, so they stopped pulling old ones out.
Eventually they added a dedicated piece of cable rack, and run all interbay jumpers up there. It was ugly, and awkward, but it worked. The initial system was much better, but relied on a level of care and planning that the new owners weren't willing to provide. Consider this: Will your successor's successor curse your name, or laud you for laying out a comfortable, expandable environment?
I've played with DeLorme's Street Atlas a lot, and it includes some remarkably cool speech features. Earlier versions would talk, and the directions are pretty useful. Once you've plotted a route, the software will keep you on it.
:)
The 2004 edition added speech recognition, and you can use it with or without having a predefined route. If you're just cruising around, you can ask things like "Where am I?" or "What is the nearest fast food?" and it'll come up with responses like "You are on eye seventyfive, northbound. City of Troy, Oakland County, Michigan" or "Nearest fast food is Burger King, fourteen mile road".
It's coming.
So how long does it take for lightscribe labels to fade if left in the sun?
Optical media needs to take a page from photographic developing's playbook, and I've said this for years. The problem with CD-R longevity is that the media is still photosensitive for as long as the disc lasts. It degrades from ambient light.
I'd love to see a disc with a semiporous substrate, and a box of "fixer" chemical that I could set it in for a few minutes after the burn. Either that, or another wavelength of light that would chemically convert the dye into a state where the markings would be permanent.
Industrial chemists, I'm talking to you. Reduce the solid waste stream by removing my need to re-burn old discs every year or two.
(Magneto-optical discs don't have this problem, as they're really magnetic recording. Reading is done with a laser, and writing is done with the aid of heat from a laser, but the actual bit-flipping is magnetic.)
I don't know if this is one of their sources, but Oakland County, Michigan has had this online for years.
Traffic and construction maps
To re-re-restate what should be elementary who's ever touched a resistor:
If you "close" the circuit with a high value resistor (say a few megohms), the voltage measured across the resistor will be essentially the same as the voltage measured where the pair leaves the office.
If you "close" the circuit by shorting the wires together, then by definition, the voltage measured across the junction will be 0 volts, with the rest of the loop burning off the current as heat.
Measuring open-circuit voltage with a high-Z solid state meter should show above 50. Measuring it with a moving-coil analog meter will vary depending on the coil's resistance (typically a few k). It's just a galvanometer after all, and depends on some nontrivial current flow to cause needle deflection.
As I stated before, it all depends on the resistance of what you place at the end of the loop. The average human touching the wires presents a resistance of 1k or higher. Most buried cable is 20 or 22ga, sometimes 19ga for longer distances. In any event, the telcos make every effort to keep total loop resistance under 1300 ohms, with the average being closer to 300.
Doing the math here, each side of a 300-ohm loop will be 150 ohms. Let's take 1200 ohms for the human, a number indicated as reasonable by what I've read, and one which makes the math easy. Total circuit resistance is now 1500 ohms. Call the voltage 50, and we end up with 40 volts across the human, and 5 volts lost on either side of the pair.
You're right on the 54 volts thing, the system is nominally 48 based on 2 volts per battery cell, but "floats" at 2.25 per cell to keep the chemistry happy. It drops to 48 very soon after commercial power fails. All the gear should be designed work right down to 42 or less, as lead-acids exhibit a downward slope during discharge.
Also, to clear up some ambiguity from another poster elsewhere in this thread: Ringing is stated at 90v, 20Hz, sine wave.
Oh, not another one. I work in telecommunications, where we use GPS-disciplined clocks to synchronize our fiber-optic networks. (I'm sorry, was that too many big words? If GPS doesn't work, after a while, phones don't work.)
In case you missed it during the August outage, the power grid relies on precise phase synchronization to keep generators from working against each other. If one part of the grid falls out of sync, it can drag its neighbors down with it. Hence, each plant needs a way to compare its phase to a master reference and adjust itself. Referencing each station to its neighbors might sound workable, but it results in a condition called a "synchronization loop" which causes local drift and all sorts of problems.
Prior to GPS, WWV/WWVB was used as a source of sync. I think the decision to rip out the WWVB receivers was a stupid one, the GPS receivers should've been installed alongside them. But the decision was made, and we now have a system that falls apart without GPS.
That's not to say there aren't plenty of good local oscillators, accurate to a few parts per million over a period of several days. There are. But after those several days of good holdover timing, the local oscillators begin to drift, and they don't all drift in the same direction or at the same rate.
Having a local clock, even a very good one, is useless without some way of comparing it to a master.
Try a google for "power grid phase GPS" and get all the links you want.
CDMA falls apart in a number of ugly ways when the towers lose precise sync. Not only does soft handoff fail, but neighboring towers start interfering with each other. The way I understand it, even when soft handoff isn't actually taking place, the towers are still carefully coordinated so that most of the time, your phone can see several pilots, but only uses one. When sync fails, all those good zones turn into bad zones, with the phone only being usable in the areas where it can see one tower and one tower only.
All the Nortel CDMA gear has some amazingly precise Trimble receivers which can provide "hold-over" timing for a while in the absence of a reference signal. I'd assume other vendors are similar. Having run for a while (minimum 24 hours?) with a good reference, the local oscillators are now "disciplined" and essentially self-calibrated.
Aside from CDMA, the rest of the telecommunications network also relies on precise synchronization. SONET links experience slips and degradation if there are timing problems. And although your traceroute doesn't show the lower levels, I'd guarantee your internet packets flow over SONET links at least a few times in their route. (Hint: Anything leaving a router in Chicago and popping up at a router in New Jersey was not on the same piece of glass the whole time.)
Luckily, the clocks used in all this are pretty good, and having had plenty of time under an external reference, their holdover quality should be excellent. Most offices have a redundant pair of GPS receivers feeding a pair of Rubidium oscillators, which provide stratum-2 holdover accuracy for a minimum of several days. Totall loss of signals from the Navstar constellation shouldn't really bother the equipment for a week at the very least. Or, the government could shut down all the satellites except one per area, which would make position information useless but still provide a good clock reference.
However, consider this: All the reference receivers are programmed to trigger an alarm when they lose satellite lock. In the event of a disruption, your average NOC is going to be so flooded with these alarms, they might not notice other noteworthy events. In the even that a major outage was detected, it might be falsely attributed to sync failure, even if the actual cause was much more sinister.
The unintended (but fully predictable) consequence of a Navstar blackout might be a window of opportunity for criminals, thieves and terrorists alike.