Monday, November 11, 2002

WNYC will air a piece honoring Veteran's Day tonight at 8:00PM Eastern. It will be aired on many NPR stations and you can also catch the broadcast on one of their streams. It is also likely that the show will be archived. 1:18:19 PM     If you are geek enough to care about the IBM 970 you will be delighted that IBM has posted the foils of the device's introduction. 1:11:29 PM     Movielink is yet another experiment by the entertainment industry to sell movies to you. Visiting the site I was warned that I need to upgrade my machine to Windows 98, 2000 or XP. I'm running OS X and don't consider those anything but rather dramatic downgrades. Telling my browser to spoof Explorer for Windows I learn that this is a 384kbps experience - roughly the equivalent of VHS on an average day with many motion artifacts - not a great or even average experience. The most interesting information on their site is the terms of use page. Item 17 is particularly interesting. Basically you are allowing them to destroy your computer and all of its data and agreeing that this is OK with you even if they are aware that this will happen. It is interesting to speculate on what might happen if a service like this became popular. Every consumer broadband system I am aware of is built recognizing that people don't consume much bandwidth and that demand is semi-random. What happens if cable and dsl modems are tied up with huge downloads? My guess is that we will see bandwidth limits (we already are in some areas). 1:03:05 PM     The recent Microsoft tablet announcement caused me to recall a product announcement from Bare Bones Software. Note the release date. It is very difficult to improve on some things. 8:57:56 AM     Here is a simple experiment for those of you who have an investment in your home entertainment system. If you have a set top box for your cable system, it is likely that you have a mixture of analog and digital channels. Disconnect the box and run the cable directly into your TV. Carefully study the images of a few channels that you can receive (it is likely that most of the network TV channels are analog and will work). Now reconnect the box and look at the same channels. Do they look the same? I did this with a General Instruments (now Motorola) DCT-2000 class box and was startled to see how much the analog signal was degraded. I wouldn't be very happy if I had a $2000 TV and added a $70/month cable service to find my non-digital channels were being degraded. The box must be poorly designed and/or out of spec. A very interesting question for investors is "how recession proof is cable?" Historically cable use has grown through recessions, but cable is nearly at saturation levels at this point. The recession in the early 90s saw cable subscriber growth, but a rather steep drop in premium channel subscription. Cable rates have increased dramatically in the past decade and it will be interesting to see where consumers draw the value line. Basic cable is clearly cheap entertainment, but will people keep $1000 a year subscriptions if they are worried about their jobs? Locally we may be seeing a bit of a potential future. My township has been battered by heavy layoffs in several industries. I'm involved with the town's cable TV board and we have seen a strong move to satellite TV as well as to the basic service from the local operator. The local operator has been doing a less than stellar job, but it is possible that these moves are driven by the declining economy. 7:25:55 AM     As a teenager I built a simple plasma speaker spurred on by notes in a Popular Electronics. It was very unsophisticated - take the audio output from an amplifier, user a tesla coil resonator which terminates on a couple of tungsten electrodes in an ion enriched flame (propane torch with a saltwater wick). The amazing thing was that it worked - it was very noisy in the worst sense, but I remember listening to a radio program on it. In theory modulating a plasma is a great way to produce sound and some people have built plasma tweeters. This looks like a reasonably fun project. The author of the page will build interesting audio devices on commission for those who support the performing arts. A bit of hunting turns up several plasma tweeter projects. Here is another that looks like a good starting point with more than enough information for anyone who knows what a proper chassis is and has built something with tubes. Is anyone up for building plasma headphones? 7:04:55 AM     Another interesting activity from the golden age of electronics is listening to natural very low frequency radio phenomea. Anyone who has spent time with a shortwave radio is familiar with whistlers, but listening to the spectrum below 1 KHz brings out amazing stuff. Auroras produce some of this radio frequency signal, but lighting is another major source. A good place to listen is at spaceweather sounds. Building a receiver isn't difficult, but those who want to buy something for themselves or for a gift might take a look at the WR-3 VLF Receiver. A local high school has one and it works very well. INSPIRE is a science eductation project built around VLF monitoring. It may be possible to still purchase kits. 6:50:57 AM     It seems likely that the recent elections will put intelligent design in the classrooms. The American Association for the Advancement of Science is urging policy makers to keep it out of science classrooms (which only seems reasonable as it is anything but science). Pseudo science isn't science. Perhaps the right wing is interested in creating their own version of Lysenkoism. 6:20:57 AM

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