jhallenworld

So in Boston (which is the No. 10 radio market),

https://ratings.radio-online.com/content/arb013

WBZ 1030 AM (news radio) hovers around no. 5. They transmit on HD radio also (HD 2 on 107.9 FM), but the range is limited compared with AM.

RKO 680 AM (local right wing talk radio) is also near the top.

Conclusion: AM is not dead

It's interesting how the mines work, all of the coal is taken:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longwall_mining

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXQwdQnT60k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmwEB4DY_jc

But aside for the CO2, the coal ash is a big problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvx-W-XAie0

As are the mine fires:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire

Also a close call in Mexico. In this case, they were trying to dispose of the source properly, but the truck was held up and stolen along the way:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/12/04/248737662...

I bought one recently on eBay from a seller in Ukraine (despite the war, shipping is still up- from Kiev at least). I also bought its brother, an MK-52.

These calculators are interesting:

Extremely slow: inverse sin takes ~3 seconds.

Dead keyboard: they use foam for the key spring so there is almost no action. The plastic keys touch membrane contacts.

Leading digits are required before the decimal point: .5 is not allowed, you have to enter 0.5.

The result is only printed in scientific notation: so 1 / 5 gives 2e-1

MK-52: has non-volatile memory. You transfer between RAM and EEPROM via some extra functions.

Even with all these limitations, they are nice RPN programmable calculators with vacuum fluorescent displays. It's cool that they are made with an independent (from the rest of the world) electronics fabrication system.

Like Soviet radios, you get a copy of the schematics along with the calculator.

To get an idea, here are translations of the Cyrillic keys:

https://www.thimet.de/CalcCollection/Calculators/Elektronika...

I just tried the online site: my complaint is that they only show AAA-rated places to eat. On the other hand, the "5 diamond" places look really nice... it might be interesting to try some of them. I forgot all about AAA-rated restaurants.

>Why aren't we having a big tech CEO layoff for massive wrongness?

The only job of the board of directors is to decide when to fire the CEO. (Waiting for Tesla's board to do their job..., but I digress)

Sure, capital is represented on the board, but what about labor? No representation, so a round of layoffs is not going to be a reason for this to happen.

Replacing tubes in aerospace heat exchangers seems to be a thing:

https://www.meggitt.com/products-services/heat-exchangers/

"Its innovative design means that single tubes can be easily replaced during overhaul periods, minimising costs to operators.

The operational lifetime of a tubular unit is 3 million flying hours and 50 million Serck Aviation bonded interfaces in the field have never failed."

Even the patent mentions:

"In addition to aerospace applications, the disclosed headers can be used generally in other transportation industries, as well as industrial applications."

But actually I think the spreader could be contained within some kind of bell-shaped header, and not actually attached to the heat exchanger tubes, just immersed in the same fluid. So replacement might be easy.

But any kind of spreader is adding weight compared with an empty header, so not sure if the easing of the fluid flow is worth the weight gain. No doubt this depends on the application.

It seems like it would massively complicate heat exchanger repair..

I learned of an obscure tool recently- a roller tube expander. You use this to tight-fit a tube in a boiler's tube-sheet. So you can install or replace tubes in pressure vessels such as a boilers or heat exchangers. Check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7UQKNapTBE

Failure:

https://youtu.be/HlXVP2HHTfo?t=696

Repair:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7znd-hpy2Vc&t=708s

There are different types of cement: Portland and CSA (Calcium Sulfoaluminate).

https://caltra.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/What-is-CSA...

Portand is the cheap stuff- like the $6 Quikrete bag at Home Depot. CSA is more expensive, but also available at Home Depot- look for the "Rapid Set" brand (Rapid Set Cement All is like $28 a bag).

It's kind of awesome, it's so fast you can sculpt vertically with it. You use more water with it than Portland, it starts out more mud-like. It tends to be preferred for repairs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO8wyQfjpt4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaB22ceIrqk

I'll add to that: always tell customer up front if there is stock or if back-ordered. Burned too many times by the silent back-order.

Yes! It needed a new speaker and the clock motor needed lubrication, but I also added the polarized cord and moved the switch to the hot side. It has the floating chassis, but it's not very isolated from the external metal case (just some cardboard).

Like many of these it uses a "couplet" (early IC) for the audio inter-stage coupling.

I'm sitting next to one of these:

https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/benrus_clock_radio_10b01b15b_1...

With nice Telechron clock..

Yeah, they are dangerous, but their safety can be improved: add polarized cord (probably have to move the power switch to the hot side for this) and replace the chassis ground capacitor.

Table top FM radios and TVs also tend to be hot chassis.. (that mains transformer is just too expensive). Even today you can find capacitor dropper powered devices which are hot.

AA5s are nice in that you can almost always get them to work for cheap. I mean if you have an older radio with a bad mains transformer, it's probably not worth fixing.

Another advantage: they will work on 120V DC.

I don't think low end hot chassis radios were popular in Europe, they all seem to have a transformer. Maybe 220V is just too dangerous... (but you can certainly have a primary to secondary fault in a transformer..)

"the question is why did C++ survive the Javapocalypse"...

I was thinking you can't run Java on AVR, but you can run C++ (Arduino..)

But here you go:

https://atmega32-avr.com/java-virtual-machine-for-the-atmel-...

Even so, this VM is written is C, with no JIT compiler on the 8K microcontroller, so C++ is much faster. Hmm.. now I'm wondering if GCJ could work with avr-gcc..

Nice project! I've used Crosslink-NX and Cypress FX-3 on various MIPI camera projects as well. Did you notice that Radiant does not control the timing of the data from the mixel hardmacro to your FPGA logic? (click on one of the pins in the physical viewer to see this). I ended up adding a ring of flip-flops and physically locking them near the top edge of chip to get consistent timing.

Looking at code: why are you not using the byte aligner built into the hardmacro?

The Goldstar memorial bridge over the Thames river in Connecticut is the same type as that I-35W bridge that failed in Minneapolis (only Goldstar is older and higher). I worry every time I cross it..

https://bridgehunter.com/ct/new-london/3819/

>BASIC is a terrible language, but there were few alternatives back then.

Ah, but where are all the stories from people who were inspired into programming by using Java?

I was wondering about Markus Persson (aka Notch) who wrote Minecraft in Java, but: "Persson started programming at the age of seven, using his father's Commodore 128"

AM needs better content. Where are the podcast channels? I think it would be cheap to set up a station that just rebroadcasts podcasts.

RPL is like LISP in that it's all about quoting. ' and eval are primary (unshifted) keys on these calculators.

There was a LISP based pocket computer: the Casio AI-1000:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-yuZ2pejGU

Check out HHC, the HP Handheld Conference. It's just like EmacsConf, but the people are older :-)

https://hhuc.us/

The presentations are on YouTube, some I like:

"Don't make me wait" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPJdAvQpsGc

"Book binding 2.0" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAnkiaefcB8

"Know thine enemy (TI)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIN2y-SnA6c (TI fast mode)

I don't disagree with you (I've written plenty of GPL-licensed software), but as someone who gets paid to develop products for other companies, it's an issue. Few of my customers are interested in making the embedded software for their product open source.

Actually the MIT open source license (and other similar ones) solves a completely different problem for me. It allows me to reuse this software for many different customers. It's slightly easier to do this when I tell them that I'm going to use "this open source library" vs. "my personal library that I'm granting you a license for this product, but I retain the right to use it for other customers".

Two issues with readline: it's GPL and it's big. For embedded systems intended to become products you really need something else. My tiny variant is this, but for sure there are many others:

https://github.com/nklabs/libnklabs

("nkreadline" has editing, tab-completion (for embedded "nkcli" commands) and history)

I've been programming in C forever, one advantage is that the language has not evolved much (especially compared with C++), but it has evolved.

There was the big K&R C to ANSI C function declaration transition. For portable code, you used K&R C well into the 90s (because older machines only had the K&R compiler), or used ugly macros to automatically convert from ANSI to K&R.

Another was the addition of 'const' to the language. It used to be said that const was a virus: once you start using it, you need to use it universally in your entire code-base.

A more recent big one is stdint.h (types like uint32_t). To correctly use these types you must also use the macros in inttypes.h for scanf and printf conversions. IMHO, they both should have been in the same header files, they go along with each other.

So in the old days, you would say: unsigned int x; printf("%u\n", x);

But now, you should tediously say: uint32_t x; printf("%"PRIu32"\n", x);

(Because uint32_t might be defined as a long even if it's the same size as in int, so you will get compiler warnings. You could use %lu, but then you get compiler warnings the other way.)

Another: On UNIX, we don't have to worry about "wide" characters (use UTF-8 instead) and wide strings, but you certainly do on Windows. "Wide" characters are obsolete but Windows is stuck with them since they are built into the OS.

I have a need for something like this "WatchMinder":

https://watchminder.com/shop/watchminder3

It's pretty good, battery lasts a month, but it has a stupid limitation: the programmable reminder messages don't allow numbers, only letters.

Also, it's nice that you can program the watch directly, but a smartphone app or laptop would make it easier: I would be OK with a USB cable from the charging station in lieu of Bluetooth.

Smartwatches should be able to provide this function, but they don't. For example, reminders should repeat until acknowledged. (Text messages on phones should do the same thing...)

Well I need to show this to my mom, who made 8-year old me ride my bike back to school (2.5 miles, admittedly on some busy roads) to retrieve my forgotten homework.

I remember looking at this book at my local library when I was a kid:

https://archive.org/details/tibook_how-to-build-your-own-wor...

So I knew about the CPU before I knew about the home computer..

Oh, one other thing I remembered: there were integrated injection logic (I2L) versions of the 9900: the SBP9900 (this was bugging me because the I thought the TMS9900 was I2L, but it's NMOS):

https://www.cpushack.com/tag/sbp9900/

Here is a datasheet, the I/O structures are interesting:

https://source.z2data.com/2020/11/29/8/20/42/604/RSELSA00012...

Runs off of 500 mA at 1V.

slrn: from John Davis, author of JED editor..

Some are still going..

https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/sci.electronics.design

https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/comp.arch

https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/rec.arts.sf.written

https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/rec.radio.amateur.misc

https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/comp.compilers

Sounds like NNTP combined with BitTorrent..

Back in the day I remember dreaming ways to optimize the NNTP server- surely there was a better way than storing each article in a separate file.. but actually it was a very convenient to have a shell account on the same system that ran the server. This is why I enjoyed TheWorld (Software Tool & Die). You could cat the articles if you wanted.

/usr/spool/news, C-News, innd (Rich $alz!), it's all coming back..

The closest thing in this text to a ban is "The legislation must require polluters to bear the full cost of the carbon pollution they are emitting. "

This is not a ban, and sounds pretty reasonable to me.