It is one of Murphy’s laws, we think, that you can’t get great things when you need them. Back in the heyday of shortwave broadcasting, any of us would have given a week’s pay for even a low-end receiver today. Digital display? Memory? Digital filtering? These days, you have radios, and they aren’t terribly expensive, but there isn’t much to listen to. Making matters worse, it isn’t easy these days to string wires around in your neighborhood for a variety of reasons. Maybe you don’t have a yard, or you have deed restrictions, or your yard lacks suitable space or locations. This problem is so common that there are a crop of indoor antennas that seem attractive. Since I don’t often tune in shortwave and I don’t want to have to reset my antenna after every storm, I decided to look at the Tecsun AN-48X along with a YouLoop clone from China. Let’s start with the Tecsun. Continue reading “An Antenna To Throw You For A Loop”→
What is this dystopia coming to when one of the world’s largest tech companies can’t find a way to sufficiently monetize a nearly endless stream of personal data coming from its army of high-tech privacy-invading robots? To the surprise of almost nobody, Amazon is rolling out a paid tier to their Alexa service in an attempt to backfill the $25 billion hole the smart devices helped dig over the last few years. The business model was supposed to be simple: insinuate an always-on listening device into customers’ lives to make it as easy as possible for them to instantly gratify their need for the widgets and whatsits that Amazon is uniquely poised to deliver, collecting as much metadata along the way as possible; multiple revenue streams — what could go wrong? Apparently a lot, because the only thing people didn’t do with Alexa was order stuff. Now Amazon is reportedly seeking an additional $10 a month for the improved AI version of Alexa, which will be on top of the ever-expanding Amazon Prime membership fee, currently at an eye-watering $139 per year. Whether customers bite or not remains to be seen, but we think there might be a glut of Echo devices on the second-hand market in the near future. We hate to say we told you so, but — ah, who are we kidding? We love to say we told you so.
The opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics is going on today. It’s an over-the-top presentation meant to draw people into sport. And for the next few weeks, we’ll be seeing people from all across the world competing in their chosen physical activities. There will be triumph and defeat, front-runners who nonetheless lag behind on that day, and underdogs who sneak ahead. In short, a lot of ado about sport, and I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. Sports are fun.
But where is the Hacker Olympics? Or even more broadly the Science Olympics or Engineering Olympics? Why don’t we celebrate the achievements of great thinkers, planners, and builders the same way that we celebrate fast runners or steady shooters? With all the pomp and showmanship and so on?
Here at Hackaday, we try our best! When we see a cool hack, we celebrate it. But we’re one little blog, with about a millionth the budget of the International Olympic Commission. However, we have you all as our biggest multiplier. It would be awesome if we could take over the entire city of Paris in celebration of science and engineering, but until then, if you see something smart, share it with us. And if you see something on Hackaday that you think was awesome, share it with your friends.
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A QSL Card from Radio Moscow probably got many 14-year-olds on government watch lists. (Public domain)
Between World War II and Y2K, shortwave listening was quite an education. With a simple receiver, you could listen to the world. Some of it, of course, was entertainment, and much of it was propaganda of one sort or another. But you could learn a lot. Kids with shortwave radios always did great in geography. Getting the news from a different perspective is often illuminating, too. Learning about other cultures and people in such a direct way is priceless. Getting a QSL card in the mail from a faraway land seemed very exciting back then.
Today, the shortwave landscape is a mere shadow of itself. According to a Wikipedia page, there are 235 active shortwave broadcasters from a list of 414, so nearly half are defunct. Not only are there many “dead” shortwave outlets, but many of the ones that are left are either not aimed at the world market or serve a niche group of listeners.
You can argue that with the Internet, you don’t need radio, and that’s probably correct in some ways but misses a few important points. Indeed, many broadcasters still exist as streaming stations or a mix of radio and streaming. I have to admit I listen to the BBC often but rarely on the air. My computer or phone plays it in crystal clarity 24 hours a day.
A future Hackaday author in front of an Eico shortwave radio
So, while a 14-year-old in 1975 might be hunched over a radio wearing headphones, straining to hear NHK World Radio, these days, they are likely surfing the popular social media site of the week. You could easily argue that content on YouTube, Instagram, and the like can come from all over the world, so what’s the problem?
The problem is information overload. Faced with a shortwave radio, there were a limited number of options available. What’s more, only a small part of the band might be “open” at any given time. It isn’t like the radio could play games or — unless you were a ham — allow you to chat with your friends. So you found radio stations from Germany to South Africa. From China and Russia, to Canada and Mexico. You knew the capital of Albania. You learned a little Dutch from Radio Nederlands.
So, [zyumbik]’s trademark seems to be sexing things up, and the Artsey layout did not escape their gaze. This is the Sexy Artsey. Let’s back up a bit.
Image by [zyumbik] via redditArtsey is a keyboard layout for chording, and this keyboard is built for it. It’s a one-handed keyboard meant for pressing multiple keys at a time to produce each character. With some use, [zyumbik] discovered that the Taipo layout might be a better fit, so there are currently some elements of both.
If you’d like to make this adorable keyboard, everything is waiting for you to download, including files for various thingamabobs you can stick on the side there where the rainbow is now. There’s also a groovy flower version of the knob.
Controller-wise, you can use a Seeed Studio Xiao in either BLE or RP2040 format, or the Waveshare RP2040 Zero. The firmware is written in ZMK.
Remember the death metal macropad? (Who could forget that tentacled nightmare?) This is the same creator. Kind of hard to believe, innit? Well, except for the spikes. Apparently they’re for thumb discipline.
If you’ve ever watched Predator, you’ve noted the tactical advantage granted to the alien warrior by its heat vision. Indeed, even with otherwise solid camoflauge, Dutch and his squad ended up very much the hunted.
And yet, back in reality, it seems the prey might be the one with the ability to sense in the infrared spectrum. Research has now revealed this unique ability may all be down to the hairs on the back of some of the smallest mammals.
Few types of accidents speak as much to the imagination as those involving nuclear fission. From the unimaginable horrors of the nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, to the fever-pitch reporting about the accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, all of these have resulted in many descriptions and visualizations which are merely imaginative flights of fancy, with no connection to physical reality. Due to radiation being invisible with the naked eye and the interpretation of radiation measurements in popular media generally restricted to the harrowing noise from a Geiger counter, the reality of nuclear power accidents in said media has become diluted and often replaced with half-truths and outright lies that feed strongly into fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
Why is it that people are drawn more to nuclear accidents than a disaster like that at Bhopal? What is it that makes the one nuclear bomb on Hiroshima so much more interesting than the firebombing of Tokyo or the flattening of Dresden? Why do we fear nuclear power more than dam failures and the heavy toll of air pollution? If we honestly look at nuclear accidents, it’s clear that invariably the panic afterwards did more damage than the event itself. One might postulate that this is partially due to the sensationalist vibe created around these events, and largely due to a poorly informed public when it comes to topics like nuclear fission and radiation. A situation which is worsened by harmful government policies pertaining to things like disaster response, often inspired by scientifically discredited theories like the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model which killed so many in the USSR and Japan.
In light of a likely restart of Unit 1 of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in the near future, it might behoove us to wonder what we might learn from the world’s worst commercial nuclear power disasters. All from the difficult perspective of a world where ideology and hidden agendas do not play a role, as we ask ourselves whether we really should fear the atom.
