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1195 Articles

Tend Your Garden… Again

July 16, 2020 by 55 Comments

In the early 1940s, several countries saw an incredible shift in agriculture. What were called “victory gardens” were being planted en masse by people from all walks of life, encouraged by various national governments around the world. Millions of these small home gardens sprang up to help reduce the price of produce during World War 2, allowing anyone with even the tiniest pot of soil to contribute to the war effort.

It’s estimated that in 1943 alone, victory gardens accounted for around one third of all vegetables produced in the United States. Since then, however, the vast majority of these productive gardens have been abandoned in favor of highly manicured, fertilized, irrigated turfgrass (which produces no food yet costs more to maintain), but thanks to the recent global pandemic there has been a resurgence of people who at least are curious about growing their own food again, if not already actively planting gardens. In the modern age, even though a lot of the folk knowledge has been lost since the ’40s, planting a garden of any size is easier than ever especially with the amount of technology available to help.

As someone who not only puts food on the table as a writer for a world-renowned tech website but also literally and figuratively puts food on the table as a small-scale market farmer, there are a few things that I’ve learned that I hope will help if you’re starting your first garden.

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The Many Methods Of Communicating With Submarines

July 15, 2020 by 36 Comments

It sometimes seems hard to believe that we humans have managed to explore so little of what we have so much of: the seas. Oceans cover something like 70 percent of the world’s surface, but we’ve only mapped 20 percent of the ocean floor. The 228,000 ocean-dwelling species that we know about represents about ten percent of the estimated total aquatic species. And almost all the life we know about, and the area that we’ve explored thoroughly, is limited to the first few hundred meters from the surface.

The paucity of our deep-water investigatory efforts has a lot to do with the hostility of the sea to those who haven’t evolved to survive in it. It takes extreme engineering and fantastically expensive machines to live and work even a few meters down, and even then submariners quickly become completely isolated from the rest of the world once they’re down there. Underwater communication is particularly challenging, since the properties of seawater confound efforts to use it as a communications medium.

Challenging though it may be, underwater communication is possible, and in this article we’ll take a look at a few modalities that have made operating under the sea possible, and a new technology that might just extend the Internet below the waves.

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Jerry Lawson biography

Jerry Lawson And The Fairchild Channel F; Father Of The Video Game Cartridge

July 14, 2020 by 14 Comments

The video game console is now a home entertainment hub that pulls in all forms of entertainment via an internet connection, but probably for most readers it was first experienced as an offline device that hooked up to the TV and for which new game software had to be bought as cartridges or for later models, discs. Stepping back through the history of gaming is an unbroken line to the 1970s, but which manufacturer had the first machine whose games could be purchased separately from the console? The answer is not that which first comes to mind, and the story behind its creation doesn’t contain the names you are familiar with today.

The Fairchild Channel F never managed to beat its rival, the Atari 2600, in the hearts of American youngsters so its creator Jerry Lawson isn’t a well-known figure mentioned in the same breath as Atari’s Nolan Bushnell or Apple’s two Steves, but without this now-forgotten console the history of gaming would have been considerably different.

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Changing System Architectures And The Complexities Of Apple’s Butterfly Approach To ISAs

July 13, 2020 by 64 Comments

Apple computers will be moving away from Intel chips to its own ARM-based design. An interesting thing about Apple as a company is that it has never felt the need to tie itself to a particular system architecture or ISA. Whereas a company like Microsoft mostly tied its fortunes to Intel’s x86 architecture, and IBM, Sun, HP and other giants preferred vertical integration, Apple is currently moving towards its fifth system architecture for its computers since the company was formed.

What makes this latest change possibly unique, however, is that instead of Apple relying on an external supplier for CPUs and peripheral ICs, they are now targeting a vertical integration approach. Although the ARM ISA is licensed to Apple by Arm Holdings, the ‘Apple Silicon’ design that is used in Apple’s ARM processors is their own, produced by Apple’s own engineers and produced by foundries at the behest of Apple.

In this article I would like to take a look back at Apple’s architectural decisions over the decades and how they made Apple’s move towards vertical integration practically a certainty.

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How Early Radio Receivers Worked

July 10, 2020 by 43 Comments

If you’ve ever built a crystal radio, there’s something magical about being able to pull voices and music from far away out of thin air. If you haven’t built one, maybe you should while there’s still something on the AM band. Of course, nowadays the equivalent might be an SDR. But barring a computer solution, there are not many ways to convert radio waves into intelligence. From a pocket radio to advanced RADAR to a satellite in orbit, receiving a radio wave is accomplished in pretty much the same way.

There are, however, many ways to modulate and demodulate that radio wave. Of course, an AM radio works differently than an FM radio. A satellite data downlink works differently, too. But the process of capturing the radio wave from the air and getting them into a form ready for further processing hasn’t changed much over the years.

In this article, I’ll talk about the most common radio receiver architectures you may have seen in years past, and next week I’ll talk about modern architectures. Either way, understanding receiver architectures will help you design new radios or troubleshoot them.

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Bridge Over Trebled Water: How The Golden Gate Bridge Started To Sing

July 8, 2020 by 28 Comments

Throughout the spring, some Bay Area residents from Marin County to the Presidio noticed a sustained, unplaceable high-pitched tone. In early June, the sound reached a new peak volume, and recordings of the eerie noise spread across Twitter and Facebook. Soon after, The Golden Gate Bridge, Highway, & Transportation District, the agency responsible for the iconic suspension bridge’s maintenance, solved the mystery: The sound was due to high winds blowing through the slats of the bridge’s newly-installed sidewalk railing. Though a more specific explanation was not provided, the sound is most likely an Aeolian tone, a noise produced when wind blows over a sharp edge, resulting in tiny harmonic vortices in the air.

The modification of the Golden Gate Bridge railing is the most recent and most audible element of a multi-phase retrofit that has been underway since 1997. Following the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989, The Golden Gate Bridge, Highway, & Transportation District (The District) began to prepare the iconic bridge for the wind and earthquake loads that it may encounter in its hopefully long life. Though the bridge had already withstood the beating of the Bay’s strong easterly winds and had been rattled by minor earthquakes, new analysis technology and construction methods could help the span hold strong against any future lateral loading. The first and second phases of the retrofit targeted the Marin Viaduct (the bridge’s north approach) and the Fort Point Arch respectively. The third and current phase addresses the main span.

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Marian Croak Is The MVP Of VoIP Adoption

July 7, 2020 by 23 Comments

If you’ve ever used FaceTime, Skype, own a Magic Jack, or have donated money after a disaster by sending a text message, then you have Marian Croak to thank. Her leadership and forward thinking changed how Ma Bell used its reach and made all of these things possible.

Marian Croak is a soft-spoken woman and a self-described non-talker, but her actions spoke loudly in support of Internet Protocol (IP) as the future of communication. Humans are always looking for the next best communication medium, the fastest path to understanding each other clearly. We are still making phone calls today, but voice has been joined by text and video as the next best thing to being there. All of it is riding on a versatile network strongly rooted in Marian’s work.

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