Blackcap Blog

Published at 21:02 on 7 December 2011

Having noticed how local public radio station KUOW has some interesting-sounding programming on their HD radio subchannels, I did a little Google searching and found an HD tuner (new in the box) being offered for the somewhat astounding sum of $40. I did some research on the seller, and found her to be highly rated, so I decided to order it as a Christmas present for myself.

I was somewhat floored to find a box containing my purchase sitting on my doorstep this afternoon. I had not paid extra for rush shipping, and the quoted delivery time for non-rush shipping was as much as 4 weeks in the future. And it was as described: new, in unopened packaging.

Alas, HD radio itself proved to be as big a disappointment as the vendor who sold it was a pleasant surprise. HD is a subcarrier-based system, so it works basically like stereo FM signals: only the stronger signals present solid stereo reception, and only the stronger signals come in on HD. But, HD is even more fussy than the stereo subcarrier; you need a really solid, strong signal to get HD. Forget any sort of indoor antenna, you need something on the roof.

The only station I could reliably get in HD with an indoor antenna was the one I could care the least about receiving: the local right-wing Christian station. I had no luck getting an HD signal for KUOW, despite being able to get a fairly solid stereo signal on that station with an indoor antenna.

It’s presently not worth my scarce time and money to fuss with erecting an external antenna on the roof, particularly such a steep roof as the house I’m currently residing in as. So much for that experiment; glad I didn’t throw more than $40 at it.

Published at 22:04 on 6 December 2011

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is just how absolutely moronically most IT departments make decisions.

We’re not talking about anything the least bit utopian or radical here; we’re just talking about the sort of stuff that any capitalist business should logically be expected to jump on and implement immediately, presuming capitalism is about profit maximization. Because any of this stuff will obviously help maximize profits by making one’s workers work more efficiently.

But no: politely and respectfully suggest that you would, for example, like a Mac on your desk because you work more efficiently with Macs, and odds are the typical IT manager will bite your head off: either there’s a “standard” (and Macs aren’t it), or Macs are “too expensive” (not by very much, particularly when you compare hardware costs to IT labor costs), or some other rationale that is quite frankly absolute horseshit.

Ditto for things like simple requests to be moved to a more quiet or dark (screen glare can be nasty) part of the office which nobody else is currently using.

Really, now: you’re hiring IT professionals because you don’t have the time or the skills to do the IT work yourself, then you turn around and ignore what they tell you in their best judgement as IT professionals will improve their productivity? It just doesn’t make sense.

So choice of computer hardware is one of the questions I try to ask on interviews, because it helps screen out the morons I don’t want to work for. Because thankfully not all managers are abject morons. Some even have adopted the common-sense approach of simply giving each IT worker a budget to spend as s/he chooses on a workstation.

What astounds me is how rare (relatively speaking) that approach is. It all goes to show how capitalism is about more than just making money. Hierarchy and control, and the desire for authoritarian personalities to exercise it over others, figures very big in the equation.

Published at 21:34 on 6 December 2011

A few days ago, I went on a brief test “DXpedition” to an area about 1/3 of a mile south from where I live. It’s an open area without many buildings or power lines not far from the summit of Seattle’s highest hill. I thought it might offer better listening conditions. I was right; the noise floor is dramatically lower than it is here.

While there, I ran across this signal (almost certainly a pirate broadcaster, given the frequency and time) on 6925 kHz at about 0045 UTC:

Unidentified signal

Published at 20:54 on 6 December 2011

Recorded this evening:

Voice of Korea, 0100 UTC, 2011-12-07

Note that I’m no longer using yourlisten.com to host audio and this blog unfortunately does not stream audio. Hopefully I can get it to do that without much trouble; we’ll see. I will say that I’m probably finished with yourlisten; their advertising has been getting more and more annoying and in-your-face, and their site seems to be getting less reliable as well.

Published at 22:20 on 5 December 2011

This greeted me when I stepped out the front door this afternoon, after being in continually since this morning:

I thought I had left this sort of crap behind when I left Kings Hill in Portland. I guess the behavior is more widespread than I had thought. Perhaps it’s spreading.

From what I’ve heard, UPS is a pretty awful place to work for as a delivery truck driver. Management continually sets unrealistic quotas, and then disciplines drivers for failing to achieve the impossible. So I guess it’s not a surprise that some drivers are retaliating by filling out batches of UPS spoors during their lunch break, and then shaving time off their routes in half-minute or minute increments by dashing to doors and slapping UPS spoors on them instead of knocking and waiting for someone to answer.

I may soon have to revert to my past policy of refusing to accept UPS deliveries. My worry is that since the Postal Service is losing money, some idiot who thinks that capitalists have all the answers will appoint an expert from UPS to “reform” the Postal Service into doing just this sort of crap (first to its letter carriers and then to customers as a logical end outcome).

Update: If you Google “ups leave note without knocking”, you will see that I am hardly the only person to have this sort of experience with UPS. Guess it’s back to insisting on Parcel Post of FedEx Ground for me.

Published at 15:21 on 22 November 2011

Some years ago, when faced with the decision to be anonymous or not, I basically said “fuck it” to anonymity. At the time, I was focusing on not being interested in selling my liberty to speak out (on my own spare time, on a web site paid for with my own money) for a salary.

I also thought it was basically impossible to remove any trace of myself. Technically, that is correct. Practically, it will take extra work to locate any such stuff, work that some employer Googling my name probably won’t bother to engage in. So effectively, it is indeed possible to grab back lost anonymity. Plus, I haven’t really lost all that much anonymity, because I have been mostly anonymous already.

Furthermore, I have come to an alternate “fuck it”: The Internet combines the lack of privacy of the village with the lack of humanity of the big, cold city — fuck it.

On the other hand, it does make me pause a little that I might be turning my back on my earlier principles and hiding who I am just for employment’s sake. I’ve pretty much decided that I’m not, if I’m mostly going for privacy and anonymity: leaving only a tiny bit on the Internet that is easily attributable to me, and otherwise being as invisible as possible in cyberspace. Which is why I have no plans to create any Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social networking pages.

But still, the whole exercise does stir vaguely unsettling feelings in me.

(And if you are an employer who found this entry by searching my name: Congratulations, you are far more persistent in your explorations than most.)

Published at 21:58 on 17 November 2011

Is here. It’s a few days old; didn’t get around to editing and uploading the audio until tonight.

Also, a recording of the final 40 or so minutes of the shortwave pirate station Northern Relay Service (recorded tonight) may be found here.

Published at 23:12 on 16 November 2011

It never ceases to amaze me how something so simple can be so brutally effective at muzzling the worst radio frequency interference (RFI) sources. The above picture shows the one I installed on the thermostat wires of the new furnace (whose fan motor controller was using those wires as an antenna to spew RFI). It took multiple turns through the core, but I did end up mostly driving the RFI from the new furnace into the local noise floor.

Some Internet searching reveals that some individuals go inside the furnace to install beads on wires. I didn’t want to open it up, because it’s not mine, and I don’t want to void the warranty. I reasoned (correctly) that since it has a grounded metal case, it’s essentially a Faraday cage already and I could address the issue it by dealing with the wires that exit it.

Haven’t gotten around to those two lower yellow wires yet. Was going to put that bead around both sets of wires, but experimentation revealed that the thermostat wires were by far the worst offenders (to the point where I needed to wrap as many turns of them as possible through the bead), and the lower wires (which control the condensate pump) don’t have a very long run outside the furnace anyhow.

Published at 11:03 on 8 November 2011

OK, you’ve just seen (in my last post) how much better than shortwave Internet audio quality can be. One might be tempted to conclude that demonstrates shortwave broadcasting is now obsolete. Not so fast.

First, this is an example where shortwave fares unusually poorly, even by its own standards. The signal paths between India and the USA are so difficult that India has never even tried to target the USA for their shortwave broadcasts. Even though I’ve been lucking out with a strong signal and low local interference the past two mornings, the signal still ends up seriously degraded by being forced to take a multi-hop path over the polar regions. That’s why it has such a fluttery character to it.

If India were to rent time on a transmitter in Eastern Canada or the Caribbean, for example, my audio recording would have had significantly better quality. It still wouldn’t have been as good as the Internet download, of course, but the newscast would have been completely intelligible instead of only partly so.

Second, the US Government does not particularly care if I listen to news broadcasts from India or not. So the government is not blocking my ability to download podcasts of their news bulletins, or requiring ISPs to report the names of their customers that attempt to do so. The Chinese are not so fortunate. If they want to hear news that has not been subject to their government’s censors, the Internet is of little or no use to them. On shortwave, they often end up in cat-and-mouse games with jamming transmitters, but in such games sometimes the mouse wins.

Basically, any communications medium that requires either payment for access and/or third-party (beyond the producer and consumer, that is) infrastructure is extremely vulnerable to censorship. Governments can track or block payments, or pressure the third parties into not carrying the offensive material. Pretty much any satellite or Internet-based means of delivering information ends up falling onto this category.

Direct-broadcast satellites could theoretically provide a real alternative, once there are free (to the consumer) options and they get to the point where there are a large number of such options under a wide diversity of ownership. Those latter points are critical, and current satellite broadcast options do not satisfy either one.

Therefore, shortwave is still really the only option for getting information into an area against the will of the government which controls it. Crappy audio quality beats no audio any day.

Published at 10:25 on 8 November 2011

I just discovered today that All India Radio news broadcasts actually are available on line. It’s just that AIR has done a very good job of hiding them, by hosting the audio files on a completely separate site from their main site.

It’s actually a good thing for me, as while the diction of their announcers is pretty good, it is still accented English, and when one adds the degradation of a long propagation path to the signal, it turns what was a perfectly intelligible news bulletin into something only partly intelligible.

To see what I mean, compare what I recorded over the air (note that this contains a minute or two of the music that aired prior to the news bulletin) to what I downloaded from their web site.