Hack Pittsburgh!

Last Saturday I had the opportunity to spend some time with the good folks from Hack Pittsburgh, a local group of people from varying tech disciplines who pool their skills to come up with really interesting ideas and projects.

The group gets together weekly to try new things or work on projects.  Recent activities included learning how to knit and a liquid nitrogen ice cream night.  Folks mixed up ingredients for their favorite flavors and then dumped super-cooled nitrogen on the mix to freeze it in minutes.  Definitely beats the old hand-crank version and probably didn't make anybody sore the following morning.

Taking their Arduino 101 class was a blast.  We assembled them from raw parts (soldering irons rock!) and tried our hand at some simple programming to see what we could do with them.  I've had a good bit of experience with these devices but it was fun to see the uninitiated in the room as the light bulbs went on over their heads.  See more photos from the class here.

Matt Stultz, a founding member of the group, led the class step-by-step with the aid of a camera and projector.  When we finished, we hooked the boards up to our laptops and downloaded some simple test code to see how they worked.  Every one of them worked at the end of the class (even mine, and my soldering skills aren't very polished).

If you're interested in tinkering and meeting like-minded people, swing by their space at 1936 5th Avenue some Friday night and introduce yourself.  Their membership is open to everyone but is typically comprised of inventors, "makers", hackers, tinkerers, artists, roboticists, and arts and crafts enthusiasts.

Hack Pittsburgh

Arduino microcontrollers

Verizon MiFi 2200 3G router review

Verizon Wireless stopped by one day like Santa Claus and left us a couple goodies.  One of them was the Verizon MiFi 2200, a pocket-sized and battery-operated WiFi router that allows up to five devices to share one 3G internet connection.  

At first I was a little skeptical about the usefulness of such a device but once I had passed it off to Ced, I found that I missed the little bugger.  It sure came in handy a few times while traveling - it gave me the power to discipline Post-Gazette web servers with ease from the side of the road.

When you turn the device on, it scans for the Verizon network and in most cases it found it very fast.  In fact, by the time my netbook was ready to go from standby mode, the MiFi was ready to hook me up.  The notebook connects right away after you enter the WPA key that appears on the bottom of the device.  Like all wireless routers, it has a web-based administrative page that you can access through a browser to change settings.

Surfing speeds were pretty admirable so long as you keep things in perspective.  The best speed I was able to get from the SpeakEasy.net speed test was about 1,250kbps download and about 780kbps upload.  This will work fine for checking your email or some basic web surfing, but things like streaming video and large file downloads were a little difficult.  And if you do happen to share this connection with a few other people, those numbers will start to drop pretty quickly.  In short, it's great for single-person use or occasional simultaneous use by a couple people.

Verizon says the device has four hours of active use and forty hours of stand-by time on a single charge.  We figured that if we used it that much in test, we'd probably not hear from Verizon again, so we took their word for it.  I can tell you that I charged it only twice and got quite a lot of use out of it during those times.

You can pick one of these up from Verizon stores for $99.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate when you sign a new two-year agreement.  You'll have two choices of packages for your contract:

• $39.99/month for 250 MB allowance, $0.10 per MB overage fee
• $59.99/month for 5 GB allowance, $0.05 per MB overage fee

How can the cellphone companies get away with this stuff?

 An excellent outrage post by the New York Times' David Pogue on the shenanigans cell phone companies can pull on their customers and get away with.

Amazon as Big Brother

 This is a move of unfathomable stupidity on the part of Amazon.com. It seems as though the publisher of the George Orwell books "1984" and "Animal Farm" decided after the fact that they did not want electronic versions of the books sold. But Amazon had already sold the books for reading on its e-reader, the Kindle. So Amazon remotely deleted the two books and credited the purchase price back to Kindle owners without telling those who had bought the books. Amazingly boneheaded move. Amazon may have just thrown away months of good publicity for the Kindle. Read more here

Computers have come a long way, baby

While listening to the Apollo 11 mission rebroadcast, I found this article on the BBC News site that talks about the guidance computer used in the mission.  Staggeringly small in capability but gigantic in size, this thing pretty much flew the ship for the whole mission.  And the best part is that it has less computing power than your average digital watch.

My favorite part about the computer is how they programmed it.  Make sure you're sitting down for this part:

However, the entire computer was not so hi-tech. In order to make sure that the software was robust it was "woven" into so-called "rope core memories".

These used copper wires threaded through or around tiny magnetic cores to produce the ones and zeroes of binary code at the heart of the software.

Pass the copper wire through the core and the computer read it as a one. Pass it around and it was read as a zero.

"Once you get it wired it's not going to change without breaking those wires," said Mr Hall.

The rope core memories would become know as "LOL memory" after the "little old ladies" who knitted together the software at a factory just outside Boston.

These ladies would sit in pairs with a memory unit between them, threading metres and metres of slender copper wires through and around the cores.

"It's an extremely time-consuming process and it meant that the programs had to be finished and fully tested months in advance," said Mr Eyles.

To break this down to layman's terms, the software was written and then boiled down to the actual binary representation of the millions of instructions, and these were pretty much woven into a copper wire sweater in exactly the right order.  That was how the software was stored.

I guess Arthur C. Clarke was right when he said that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - those folks would have thought the 5.25" floppy disk was from another planet.

Take your old computers to Goodwill

 The current mess regarding a computer recycler, only goes to reinforce what TechMan has always advocated. If you have old computers or peripherals to get rid of, take them to Goodwill. TechMan has seen their recycling operation and it is first-rate.

Relive the lunar landing

On Thursday, July 16th at 7:32am EDT, NASA will rebroadcast the entire audio of the Apollo 11 mission, forty years to the day that it began in 1969.

The broadcast will continue through the splashdown at 12:51am, July 24th.

To listen to the broadcast, tune in at that time to the following address:

http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/apollo11_radio

I was born a couple years too late to experience it, but I'm going to do my best to listen in this time.

China bans electric shock treatment to cure internet 'addiction'

 This seems like a good idea. Talk about the cure being worse than the disease!

Beaver County school district hit by cyber fraud

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Transistor radios led the way

For those of us of a certain age, the first time we heard the word "transistor" was in "transistor radio." Although the transistor was introduced by Bell Labs in 1947, it was not until seven years later that the first mass-produced transistor radio appeared in the United States.

The transistor radio is the most common communications device worldwide. Some estimates suggest that there are as many as 7 billion in existence.

Despite the conventional wisdom, the first transistor radios in the United States did not come from Japan. The first one widely commercially available was the Regency TR-1, made by Texas Instruments and the Regency company, of Indianapolis. It sold for $50. Radios from other U.S. manufacturers such as Zenith, Bulova, Emerson, Arvin and General Electric followed.

In 1955, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo Ltd. introduced the TR-55 under the brand name Sony. It imported its first transistor radio to the United States in 1957, the TR-63, which it referred to as "pocketable." There was a rumor that Sony had special shirts with oversized pockets made for its salesmen. Sales of the radios took off and the company changed its name to Sony.

Soon prices fell to under $20 and then under $10, making the radios even more popular. They changed the culture, especially for young people of the 1950s and '60s and their burgeoning rock 'n' roll music.

As with many other technologies, the emergence of the transistor radio rang the death knell for an older technology, in this case the tube radio. The transistor radio had many advantages, the most obvious one being its small size. Replacing bulky vacuum tubes with transistors as the amplifying elements was key, but the lower power requirements of the transistor also allowed the heavy B batteries used in tube radios to be replaced by flashlight batteries or the new 9-volt battery, introduced expressly to power transistor radios.

Transistor radios also were instant-on since there were no vacuum tube filaments to heat up.

As transistor radios became cheaper and more pervasive, manufacturers had to find ways to gain advantage over their competitors.

Certain radios had the label "boy's radio" because tariffs on Japanese radios were higher than those for Japanese toys. U.S. tariff law defined a radio with two transistors or less as a toy, not a radio. Japan took advantage of this by producing countless variations of radios containing two transistors or less. They weren't very good as radios, but they sold well because they were cheap.

In the early 1960s, transistors had become cheap enough that certain manufacturers began to increase the count of the transistors in their radios. Thus the "transistor wars." The idea was that more transistors meant better performance, but in most AM-only radios, only eight transistors are active in the circuit. The extra transistors didn't do anything, and some manufacturers even used "dud" transistors.

The one-upmanship rose to absurd levels, with transistor counts of 16, 18 or higher claimed. The "war" ended when the term "solid state" came to describe any tubeless radio.

Transistor radios also were differentiated by their design, and this has formed the basis for collecting the radios. If you want to see the myriad radio designs, go to www.transistor.org.

Much of the allure of collecting transistor radios comes from the 1950s and '60s concept of futuristic design. The Japanese used a process called reverse-painting that resulted in beautiful radios sought by collectors. Reverse-painting uses clear plastic as the base with dial markings or ornamentation cut into the plastic, leaving a small indentation. The indentations were sprayed or colored with a paint, then the entire back of the clear plastic section was coated with a paint of a different color, or left clear. This resulted in radios with three-dimensional details.

The transistor went on to become the basis of the digital chip that enabled the staggering growth of the computer industry that is still rocking our world. So it may seem that the transistor radio was a trivial use of the new technology.

But don't tell that to the 1960s teenage boy who wanted to take his girlfriend "under the boardwalk" for a romantic interlude and wished to take his music along.