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Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 1, 2024

KQRZ

KQRZ

Came across this station while driving. I've come across it before and it's pretty great. 'Real Oldies' is how they bill themselves. The only problem with this station is that it is a low power station, so by the time I've gone a few miles down the road it has faded into oblivion. Something prompted me to wonder if maybe they had a website, and sure enough they do. Then I realized that anybody anywhere in the world could tune into these guys, so here I am telling the world about these guys - KQRZ Real Oldies

They've been playing Public Service Announcements where Joe Walsh is shilling for amateur radio. Did I hear that right? Joe Walsh? Really? Um, yeah, really:


Joe Walsh Ham Radio PSA for The ARRL
Michael Huey AKA W7ZI

This is as weird as finding out the Rod Stewart built a monster model railroad layout in his attic. This is how I know Joe Walsh:


Joe Walsh - Life's Been Good
Joe Ramen

Usually I go for some kind of action with my music videos, but I really like this still image.

My friend Jack and The Silicon Graybeard are both amateur radio men.

P. S. The logo on the website has a black background, but when I copy the image and paste it into my blog it has a white background, so I started poking around looking for ways to turn the background black. I looked at this and I looked at that and then I realized when I opened it in Google Photos, it had a black background, so I took a screen shot and cropped it and here we are.


Monday, May 25, 2020

Mathematical Mystery Unraveled

Integer Repetition Table
When I first came across this table I was hoping that it had some kind of mystical purpose that would allow you to decode some fancy numbers, like trigonometric functions or logarithms or square roots or something. I mean those Finns are inscrutable, who knows what's running through their heads. Alas, that is not the case. It is simply a way for teachers to assign a whole batch of simple arithmetic exercises to their students.

The answer comes to us from jpgordon on the Wikipedia Reference Desk:
"Mr. Reinhard now tells us a very simple procedure to demonstrate as many and different exercises in arithmetic with pure numbers to all the students through all basic operations up to the unlimited number range. His method is based on a scheme consisting of 81 squares, in which the basic numbers 1 to 9 are set in nine vertical and just as many horizontal rows so that the first two are never repeated in two successive numbers. Various combinations and result in many thousands of exercise examples..."

Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Funnies


I've taken to collecting funnies on Pinterest. Pinterest is not the best site, if shows all images the same size and there doesn't seem to be any way to enlarge them. But it works for most of these. Someday I might find a better site, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Thursday, January 2, 2020

Criminals

Finished doing my bookkeeping, minimized the browser, and a browser window with this image appears. I don't know what triggered it, but I certainly didn't ask for it. How do I know? Because the URL is for hiphollywood. Any kind of celebrity bullshit is like a big red warning flag. Have to give them credit for creative fishing.

0

Saturday, June 16, 2018

"Teardrop" - Massive Attack


"Teardrop" - Massive Attack

I used to listen to this tune all-the-time but after nine zillion plays it became firmly embedded in my brain and I started listening to other stuff. Just stumbled over a thread on Reddit full of comments from other people who also like it. Might have to spend more time on Reddit.

Reddit has redesigned their website and I don't like the new format so I use the old style.

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Smart Phones

Looks like the Smartphone market is saturated. From a report by Mary Perkins. Via Detroit Steve.

Is it 'Smart Phone'  or 'Smartphone'? I'm a little perturbed by this mashing together of two perfectly cromulent words to make a new word. Sometimes it just doesn't work. I ran into one earlier that really confused me. It took me several seconds to decode it. Can't remember what it was now. Wasn't that important, just another example of our world going to hell in a handbasket, and we've already got plenty of those.

Friday, May 25, 2018

Nonsense

I've been spending time on Quora recently. Many of the questions posted there are inane, but every once in a while I find something interesting, and I can usually find a simple math or algebra problem that is challenging enough to keep me entertained for a few minutes but not so difficult that it will strain my brain. Today I ran into this one:
How many ways are there to create a six digit number using digits from 0 to 9 without repetition such that the number has the digit 7 and exactly 3 even numbers?
 Usually these kinds of problems can be solved by simply multiplying some numbers together. For instance, the number of 6 digit numbers is 900,000, which is just 9 times 10 to the fifth power. You start with 9 because anything that starts with zero is not going to be a six digit number, so the first 100,000 numbers get lopped off immediately.

After that it gets a little tricky. I thought about it for a minute and then decided that it would be easier to write a simple computer program to count all the possibilities. There might be a way to calculate the answer, but there might not. A computer program can do it for sure and it shouldn't take that long to write. Besides, the program will use recursion and I have another program that uses recursion that has had my stymied for a couple of weeks, so writing this one will be like a tune up for my brain.

The program was easy enough to write, but it didn't work. Took me a couple of hours of mucking about to sort out what all the problems were. Muddy thinking was the big one.

The answer I got was 38,880, which agrees with the only other answer that was posted, and that person got it the same way I did: by writing a computer program. He wrote his using Python, I used C. You can see mine on github.

I am still not totally sold on github, they still insist on displaying everything with tabs set to 8 spaces. I use 4 spaces. I like 4 spaces. Why does github have to be so contrary? To their credit, they do allow you to set the tab spacing in their editor to 4 spaces, though they call it indent, which technically should only apply to the beginning of the line. Whatever. But when you leave edit mode, it goes back to 8 spaces and all your pretty formatting goes to shit.

Monday, April 30, 2018

Egg Spoons

The chef Alice Waters cooking an egg over a fire in her Berkeley, Calif., kitchen using her beloved, hand-forged iron egg spoon. - Alex Welsh for The New York Times
California Bob has a few words to say in response to a story in The New York Times:
Even moreso than someone having something that we CAN'T have...when someone enjoys something that we don't enjoy, it seems to infuriate us... even moreso than, say, someone having something we covet.

"I wish I had a Ferrari like Bob.  But Frank cooks his eggs in a weird pan! What a jerk!"  

Is this syndrome what is behind the persecution of the Christians, the hatred of fags, the mockery of "culture?"
Uniberp replies:
Wood fire smoked eggs are nice, even though the eggs themselves are corporate farming products. 

For me to be interested in one of those egg cookers, I would need to know the provenance of the coal smelters iron used, even the origin of the coal itself, plus have a notarized record of the poems memorized for recitation by the blacksmith during the forging and wielding. (note: "wielding" , not "welding). 

There, that should piss a little higher.
I think they have covered the subject well.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I have a couple of things to say about the story. I didn't read the whole thing because I have very little interest in cooking. I can grill meat on the barbeque, I can order meals at restaurants and I keep the refrigerator stocked with food that doesn't require cooking.

I'm not linking to The Times (except for the caption under the picture) because they are big stinkers and they want me to subscribe. I was only able to read this story because I am under their monthly allocation, and I am under because I avoid them because I don't want to see another one of their cut-off notices. Yes, I could subscribe, but as Tam has pointed out numerous times they are voice of East Coast stupidity. And if I subscribed to them, I might be tempted to subscribe to The Atlantic and I might start sending donations to Wikipedia and The Guardian, and then where does it stop? Pretty soon you are spending hundreds of dollars a month for stuff that you don't have time to read.

I am still waiting for someone to start a text subscription service. You pay a flat fee every month, they count up all the web sites you visit and divide up your payment accordingly. I could do it, but someone would need to convince some of these big news sites that it would be a good idea. And then I would need a small army to actually implement it.

P.S. There is some debate as to whether moreso is a valid word. Grammarist has a page on the subject.

Monday, March 12, 2018

Liquisearch

Liquid
I'm reading the preview of Oryx and Crake on Amazon and I come across this line:
It is the strict adherence to daily routine that tends towards the maintenance of good morale and the preservation of sanity.
The speaker tells us it feels like a quote from a book, so to Google my friends, whereupon a link to Liquisearch pops up, where I find that that the line comes from Slaughterhouse Five by Kirk Vonnegut. I read that like a zillion years ago. The line is spoken by a British officer to a group of Americans arriving at a German POW camp.

Liquisearch seems to be new. Their home page proclaims it to be "a new phase in internet search technology", but there are no links to anything else. There is not even a search box, so right now it appears to just be an extension to a conventional search engine. There is a search box on the pages delivered by Google, so once you get in you can wander around. We shall see if it turns out to be useful.

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Radio Garden

Screen shot of Radio Garden
All the radio stations in the world, or at least all those that have a streaming channel on the internet. Via Detroit Steve. It's pretty cool, or a little scary if you are paranoid, as it knows exactly where you are. A nice touch is the pseudo static that comes out of your speakers when you mouse over the map. Click here.

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Good News and Bad News

Thompson Reuters Open Calais is an online service that reads text and extracts information from it. It picks up things like names, numbers and dates, and probably does some more complex analysis as well. The good news is that it is free.
    When you feed it some text, it returns an RDF file which contains all of the extracted information in some special RDF format. I imagine this RDF file is good for something, but I haven't figured that part out yet. It is part of the Resource Description Framework.
    They also offer a paid subscription service for lawyers and stock brokers. This is where it gets interesting.

Open Calais Features 
I cut off the financial features checklist so the chart would fit on this page. 
We didn't lose any information: all the features are checked green for the premium package.
The financial package gets you green check marks on all of the features. Most of the features are self explanatory, but there were a couple of bits of jargon in there I didn't recognize.


Okay, so Open Calais picks information out of your story and generates all the metadata codes in the world, but look at the next couple of items:

  • Pharmaceutical Drugs
  • Financial Deals
Think news of FDA approval of a new drug might be of interest to Wall Street types? Well, yeah, but I didn't think it would so important that it would rate it's own line in the features list.

All of which make me think that the recent extraordinary price hikes on some drugs (Epi-pen springs to mind) might be related to the way Obama-care is being administered. In other words, I think someone is gaming the system.

Via Detroit Steve

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Online Tools

Magical Mystery Mouse

Added a list of Online Tools to the sidebar. Bookmarks just don't work for me.

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Video

Tube Compressor
Video compression is all done in software, so no cool pictures.

Dug up an old post this morning looking for something I had written. Found the post, but the video I had included was missing. Well, we can't have that, so I undertook to replace it. First task is to find a copy.
    Took a little effort to track it down, especially since I hadn't bothered to label the video, and the text in my post doesn't provide much of a clue. The YouTube id got some hits with the search engine, Yahoo in this case, but no cigar. The Wayback Machine got me the YouTube page, but no video. The YouTube page has the video title, and searching for that string got me to an East Asian site, Korean, I think, that did have the video.
    Okay, let's download it, since the internet obviously cannot be trusted to save anything for more than a couple of nanoseconds. I've downloaded videos before and it's generally worked pretty well. Simply ask the search engine for 'download video' and pick the first one that pops up. Not this time. The first half dozen or so all wanted to sell me something, or download an app, or register. Wasn't until I got to ClipConverter that I got something that would just download the video.
    ClipConverter offered a choice of video formats, and since Blogger has not always been the most accommodating video host, I thought I could pick something common, like mp4. It downloaded fine but the video quality was piss-poor. Ok, let's try the default format, after all, the video I'm trying to steal is crystal clear. Better, but not still not there. Fine, let's try the format with the largest file size. Larger means less compression which means better video quality, right? The file type is 'flv', which I have never heard of, but Blogger has handled the first two okay, so let's give it a try. It downloads and Blogger accepts it. The video quality is better than the first two, but still not up to the original.
    The video isn't all that great, but it irritated me that it had vanished. It took so much effort to track it down that I thought I better record my efforts, because it will probably happen again, and having these notes might save me some time.

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

451

New HTTP error code 451 to signal censorship
Mark Nottingham explains HTTP Status Code 451, not to be confused with Farenheit 451, though I can see how you could be. See also Warrant Canary. Via Tam, Status 451, Google & my idle curiosity.

What status code 451 does NOT tell you is whether the legal reason is someone enforcing their copyright, or whether someone in the government just doesn't want you to see something.

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

DMOZ

DMOZ is an acronym for Directory Mozilla,
also known as the Open Directory Project

How is it that I had not heard of DMOZ before? I just stumbled over it while looking for info about mainframe emulators, which might tell you something. In any case, I seem to have opened a can of worms. DMOZ is the current name for the Open Directory Project (ODP) which is a directory of the internet. Ambitious, to say the least. It's kind of like Wikipedia in that it is compiled by a global community of volunteer editors. I've added a DMOZ search box to my sidebar. No, Pergelator isn't listed, but I wouldn't expect it to be, being as I might be a little hard to classify.

Why is DMOZ using that wimpy little logo? I mean if you are going to use a dinosaur, use a DINOSAUR.

Friday, February 5, 2016

Hey! Who broke the Internet?


The internet was down solid around six this morning. It's working now, mostly, but I just got this cute little error when I tried to access a site. Never heard of CloudFlare before, but evidently it's a real thing. Wikipedia even has a page about it.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

POS

You go to the Point-Of-Sale (POS) terminal (aka the cash register) to buy your latest Piece-Of-S**t (POS) consumer electronic do-dad (WARNING! DANGER WILL ROBINSON! FOWL/FOUL LANGUAGE! NSFA!):



A few years ago we got a Motorola DVR (Digital Video Recorder) from Verizon. It pretty much works most of the time, but for as much as it costs, and as much as it gets used, it's a real POS. It's a pain in the neck to use, it doesn't do what it's supposed to, it's just a pisser.

Santa brought us a Logitech Revue for Christmas, and it sounded pretty good, I mean they were hooked up with Google, but after living with it for a week I am not sure it is any better than the Verizon, er, Frontier DVR. The first test is trying to watch a show via Netflix. The 1st day was no go. A couple days later it worked fine. Last night it wouldn't work again. We ended up watching an old episode of In Plain Sight on my wife's laptop. There we are sitting together on the couch, in front of the big screen TV, watching an old TV show on the laptop. Both the laptop and the Revue are using a wireless connection to the same router in the basement, so there's really no excuse for the Revue to fail.

Except I suspect the software was written by a bunch of arrogant asshats who don't know didley about writing firmware, who wave their hands and use big words and C++, the most useless POS ever foisted on the programmer world.

It's all my own fault of course. I'm lazy and I'm cheap. I could set up another computer to do all this, and it would probably work better than what I've got, but that means having to do some actual work, and undoubtedly having to spend hours combing through web pages full of useless information in order to find the two or three bits I actually need, and me being who I am, and the web being what it is, I will undoubtedly get sidetracked and spend three or four weeks chasing wild geese just because I've never seen a goose painted with hot pink camouflage and sequins.

Nissan Micra Sport SR with Nissan Sport Geese in red, white and blue.
Bah.

P.S. The first link I tried for In Plain Site went to the USA Network's official website, but it brought my computer to a stop while it was loading all this crap, so I opted for the Wikipedia link instead. Quick, direct, and no clogging my computer with all their extraneous garbage.

Update April 2016 replaced missing pictures.