Peter takes note that it is Time for the world peashooting championships again!. This is what happens when junior high school kids get older but don’t grow up. Age does make a difference as the tools of youth tend to acquire a sophistication of accessories and enhancements. While some keep to the bare bones classic straw armament, others are using gyroscopic stabilization, optical scopes, and laser indicators. Check it out.
Peashooting tech
July 11th, 2010Signal strength
July 2nd, 2010It looks like Apple has stimulated some renewed interest in signal reports. Their latest cell phone has an antenna that is placed to keep the brain cancer folks happy but it can be easily hampered depending upon how you hold the phone. One problem Apple has was the phone signal strength indicators. Most cell phones use a 5 bar weak to strong signal indicator. This is like the Ham’s S meter. They can be deceptive.
cnet FAQ: What does the 5-bar signal strength icon really mean? has a good rundown on the issue.
With old time radios, signal strength was based on what the radio could pull out of the background noise. These days, a common power level to get a readable signal may be -100 dBm which is about a tenth of a trillionth of a watt (1e-13). A billions of a watt, -60 dBm, would usually be considered an excellent signal. By IARU standards a radio S-9 (very good signal) is equivalent to a power of -73 dBm for frequencies below 30 MHz. Each S unit is 6 decibels
My cable modem is reporting -12 dBmV down and 54 dBmV up. To convert volts to watts, you need to use the 75 ohm impedance of the cable. See From dB to S-point : Learn to play with power units (ON4SKY) for more on calculating signal strength in various units.
HDBaseT
July 2nd, 2010The big story this week seems to be a new cable standard for high definition TV’s. “Valens, LG, Samsung and Sony teamed up to work on an entirely new cabling system named HDBaseT.Valens, LG, Samsung and Sony teamed up to work on an entirely new cabling system named HDBaseT.” (Tech.Blorge).
This is an ‘about time’ thing. The new standard uses existing and well proven Cat 5 network wiring. The interesting parts will be how they can run 100 watts over 24 gauge wires while still supporting extremely high data rates. EE Times indicates this may be a result of some DSP magic by Valens. A comment at Tech Reports illustrates the power feed problem, though.
Appliance Magazine says “The cornerstone of the technology is 5Play, a feature-set that converges uncompressed HD video, audio, 100BaseT Ethernet, high power over cable, and various control signals through a single 100-m/328-ft CAT5e/6 LAN cable.”
The comparison chart (PDF) indicates a data rate of nearly twice that of HDMI 1.4, cable lengths an order of magnitude longer, standard cable and connectors, power delivery sufficient for medium sized TV’s, and daisy chain, USB, and networking capabilities.
Engadget says this was introduced at CES 2009 so it’s taken a while to settle to the 1.0 specification.
The telephone company designed the twisted pair cable and the RJ connectors for low cost and reliability. Ethernet has used that technology successfully and enhanced data rates by improving cable quality. The key to this HDBaseT standard is in the interface chips that Valens is producing. If those chips can be provided at low cost and if clones can be developed, also at low cost, this new standard could indeed match its hype.
Two days in May, 11,500 miles of track
May 31st, 2010It was May 31, 1886 that a two day rail gauge conformance effort began. Southern railroads changed the distance between the rails from five feet to four feet nine in order to be compatible with the Pennsylvania Railroad. PrawfsBlawg suggests Happy Uniform Gauge Day! How a 3-inch nudge destroyed American federalism.
Today is the 134th anniversary of one of our most important yet most unrecognized constitutional events: On May 31st, 1886, the operators of Southern railroads began their famous two-day conversion of all southern railroad tracks
Check the link for the story. This was just one very big step towards conformity to enhance and enable commerce. The problem was widespread. “In 1871 no less than 23 different gauges existed in the United States, ranging in width from three to six feet.”
We face similar standards development processes today. Since computing technology has become a consumer good and service, protocols for communications, data storage, and service descriptions have followed the railroad gauge uniformity history. Back in the eighties, there were many different ways of connecting computers together both in terms of the wires and also in terms of the methods. Now the methods are overwhelmingly TCP/IP and the wire is twisted pair ethernet. The process continues in the wireless regime, however, as cell phones and wifi and other approaches compete.
There will always be custom solutions for niche markets but the economic advantages of standardization are usually overwhelming. From Cargo containers to rail gauges to electrical power delivery to clothing sizes, much of our prosperity comes from being able to talk a common language and share products and services easily.
As to whether this standardization and conformity is a attack on federalism, I don’t know. I think Rick has headed out to hyperbole, with the title of his post. States, towns, and counties still exist and have not been shoved off the map. They can just communicate better and profit more from each other’s efforts.
Technology maturing
May 16th, 2010That was then, this is now: Why OSNews Is No Longer OSNews.
You don’t see much alternative operating system news on OSNews any more because there is none. … In the established worlds, the situation isn’t any better.
You can see the same maturing of the technology in Shuttleworth’s discussion about Window indicators and such truck in Ubuntu.
OS/2 v2 started the ball rolling in the early 90′s and the OS innovation went fast and furious from then for about ten years. The action now is in the mobile space, not the desktop. On the desktop, the OS isn’t the issue as the basic features and capabilities have pretty well settled out and are being provided by any system expecting widespread use. The innovation is in the small stuff, like fine tuning window indicators. The technology has matured. Growing pains are in the past and the future is just a matter of ironing out the wrinkles.
But you never know what might come down the pike to stir things up. All you can figure at this time is that it is going to have to be something that is at odds with a paradigm established over thirty years.
NIST Handbook of Mathematical Functions
May 14th, 2010When it’s time to get your math on, NIST has the Digital Library of Mathematical Functions up. The goal is to provide
a reference tool for researchers and other users in applied mathematics, the physical sciences, engineering, and elsewhere who encounter special functions in the course of their everyday work.
This is a reference work. That means you need to know what you are doing to be able to make best use of it. The online version has links to papers and other documents that will provide background but otherwise this is like a dictionary of mathematics.
Post install Ubuntu 10.04
May 3rd, 2010The persistence problem with the yellow box identification message has resurfaced …
Handbrake is being rebuilt. See the PPA page for huntkerk – it says “waiting to build” four and a half hours ago. When its done, a “sudo add-apt-repository ppa:hunter-kaller/ppa” followed by an update should allow installing handbrake.
Some post install commentary: The Silent Number: Ubuntu 10.04 Post-Install Guide: What to do and try after installing Lucid Lynx!
and
Lucid 10.04 – All the stuff people forget to tell you – Flash, Codecs, Medibuntu, Packages, Fixes. « SilverWav’s Journal
Also don’t forget the manual Getting Started with Ubuntu for the ‘official’ handbook on installing and using 10.04.
Ten four good buddy! Ubuntu 10.04 impressions
May 3rd, 2010A clean install of Ubuntu using an existing home directory. All went well. The previous desktop settings remained, including having the title bar window control buttons on the right instead of the left as a blank install would do. But some things regressed and some things got fixed.
The screen blanking bug came back. Even with the screensaver turned off or its time maximized and the power settings the same, the screen goes blank after a few minutes idle. That was fixed once but now its back.
The thump when opening a new audio app appears to be fixed. Now I can start up Audacious to play some background music without a horrendous thump bang.
The default theme made contrast rather poor so I couldn’t see the workspace icons in the control panel. That was easily changed.
Install via USB is easy and convenient on modern computers that have a BIOS boot menu option.
The flash plugin for Firefox on a 64 bit version persisted and remained functional. I wonder if the system plugin works now.
I see GQview has been renamed. Geequie? eeuw.
The HP all in one was better setup by the system printer process rather than running hp-setup. That simplifies things. The problem is that the driver from HP fails to load and that means the scanning functions are not available. This needs to be resolved. — run as ‘sudo hp-setup’ as it doesn’t detect it isn’t running as root.
Handbrake will require a development snapshot – again. It seems some library keeps getting updated in an incompatible way that breaks this program every release.
A next test will be to install the 32 bit version on an HP Slimline core solo to see if the RealTek ethernet driver has been fixed. That one has had trouble, depending upon release, staying alive.
Time to hit the search engines and find solutions and work-arounds! as usual.
Cost of the machine
March 31st, 2010The first PC system I bought was a TRS-80 Model I for about $3k in 1979. That was a Z80 based 64k machine. Then there was the Gateway 386 with 1 MB of memory for about the same price in about 1990. I would be hard pressed to figure out how to spend that much money on a machine nowadays.
Technologizer takes a look at Classic PCs vs. New PCs: Their True Cost to demonstrate just what has happened to make these machines so much of a common appliance.
What is hidden in the look at personal computing systems is how the cost effectiveness of computing power has infiltrated so many established technologies and enabled so many new ones. Whether it is automobiles or cell phones, it is hard to look around at the many things in our lives without seeing some rather significant computing power that has made those things less expensive yet more capable.
And still some folks moan about the “good ol’ days” when life was rosy and all that.
Finding the right place for the subsystems
March 26th, 2010Test equipment has an input, a processing component, and a display. Modern computing technologies have complicated the question about how these should be integrated. From standalone devices and chart recorders the trend is towards segregating the functions of data collection, processing that data for measurement, and display of the measurement.
Electronics Lab describes an interesting example in Screenscope: a standalone oscilloscope – just connect a monitor. Oscilloscopes provide an interesting example because of the potential for complex processing and the need for a graphic display. Ancient technology just collected a signal, scaled it, and shot it onto a CRT for display. Modern equivalents digitize the signal, subject it to all sorts of analysis, and then create a graphical presentation. The range runs from the standalone oscilloscope to the software that uses a sound card on a common PC. In between are the data collectors that feed software on a PC and the Screenscope that only uses the display.
The key for the Screenscope is that it bundles its software with its input and only uses a video display as a ‘shared’ component. This heads towards the standalone format with only one expensive subsystem left for the user to define. This puts the software component as a commodity and reduces user complexity and constraints significantly.
The next step is one most often seen in video monitoring systems. Those present a video camera as a node on a network that can be used via a standard web browser interface. Geographic information systems are another example in this vein where personal navigation devices can provide not only a map display but also provide position information to an upstream computer. The possibilities are enabled by inexpensive processing capabilities that can not only provide the intended measurement but also present that via net services. They need to be able to provide both the manufacturer’s intended function with built in software but also to allow access to the collected input in near real time so that users or third parties can leverage the equipment via standard interfaces and protocols for additional or custom processing and use.
As with video, there are many ideas being tried to determine protocols and procedures as well as presentation and subsystems. The access to various subsystems is often obscured due to concerns about intellectual property protection. Progress is being made but there remains a long road to go. The goal is to make it easy for users to be able to choose their level of involvement and customization and to move the level of expertise for this from internal development engineer with access to proprietary information to that of the informed amatuer.