Blackcap Blog

Published at 18:50 on 22 April 2013

I took a quick ride down to one of my favorite spots in the Seattle park system this evening, to the Arboretum where Foster Island ends and Union Bay begins.

Alas, it won’t stay as nice as it currently is for much longer. Seattle has acquiesced to the tripling of the width of the freeway they made the mistake of allowing to be built through that park in the first place. Naturally, the neighborhood of upscale homes immediately adjacent will have an expensive tunnel built to conduct the freeway under it. (Why preserve public amenities when there is private wealth to pander to?)

That is the sort of thing I am very glad to be bidding farewell to.

Published at 07:59 on 20 April 2013

The Obama Administration is denying the Boston bombing suspect his civil rights.

As Glenn Greenwald points out, this is not a surprise. Obama’s poor record on human rights is the main reason I voted for a third party candidate in the past presidential election.

And spare me the rhetoric about how evil those two brothers were as an excuse. Sure they were evil. So were Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and any number of other violent criminals that come to mind. All of whom were successfully prosecuted without having to ignore the Constitution.

Published at 20:29 on 17 April 2013

Well, missing parts of Seattle, that is, particularly the wealth of historic buildings, which I’ve always appreciated. If only the City of Seattle didn’t have so many other aspects (already hashed to death in precious posts, so I won’t rehash them here) which I just can’t stand.

And that’s the rub: I’ve never really found a city that I can truly love wholeheartedly. I thought I had, back in my twenties, when I moved to Seattle. Eventually a long-distance romantic relationship opened my eyes to all the ways in which Seattle is just plain dysfunctional, things that had been grating on me but which I had accepted.

By then, I was in my thirties, and thought I had found another place I could love, Portland. I even bought a home there. Then discovered just how hellish a place it is in May and June when the grass pollen levels go through the roof, and just how difficult a place it is to find a good job.

All in all, I’m glad to be out of Portland and have absolutely no intention of ever moving back there; it suits me even less well than Seattle does.

Bellingham would be ideal, if I could find a good stable job there. But that’s an awfully big if, and past experience has taught me that a good job can degrade into an intolerable one quite easily as people come and go. Jobs are so scarce there that that would leave me with the dilemma of either moving yet again (possibly taking a bath in the real estate market) or sticking it out with a bad work situation.

Which pretty much gets me to where I am today, deciding that better access to nature matters more than most of the urban amenities of Seattle. Which, in general, it does — but an evening walk through the Madrona neighborhood reminds me that there still will be things I’m giving up that, all in all, I’d rather not.

Published at 12:50 on 14 April 2013

Hardly any apartment on Bainbridge Island has a gas stove, so I’ve purchased a portable induction cooktop so that I won’t have to fight with a conventional electric stove on a daily basis. Of course, I wanted to test it out as soon as it arrived to make sure it wasn’t defective.

Executive summary: induction works much better than a conventional electric stove, but it’s not going to unseat gas as the best cooking method.

First, the good news. It’s true: induction is at least as responsive as gas. When a pot reaches the desired temperature, just turn it down and it will go down. Instantly. Gone is the feeling of driving a car where you have to turn the steering a quarter-mile before the next turn you wish to make.

Now, the quirky stuff. There’s actually less temperature memory then even gas, to the point where you can’t just turn the stove off when you’re done, unless you want the food to get cool right away. An induction stove doesn’t get hot, so if you turn the burner completely off, the cool stove top will quickly suck much of the heat out of the pot via conduction.

Now, the negatives. First, the one everyone already knows: you can’t use any old pot on an induction stove; only magnetic ones will do. Moreover, you can’t use round-bottomed things like woks; only a flat-bottomed cooking vessel has enough metal close enough to the induction coil.

Not so well known is that induction stoves are noisy. Because they contain lots of heat-sensitive electronics, and there’s a hot pot bottom in contact with them, they need cooling fans to stop that conducted heat from building up inside and shortening the lifetime of that electronics. Cook with induction and you will have the sound of a fan going in your kitchen whenever the stove is on. What I find most annoying about this is that I’m used to using sound cues to know when I need to turn the heat down (or up), and the fan noise makes it much harder to hear the boiling or simmering noises.

Take those disadvantages, and to them add that induction stoves are by far the most costly kind (costing at least twice what conventional electric stoves do), and it becomes clear that they will never have more than a niche market.

Just look at electric stoves: there’s enough of a penchant for sacrificing quality in the name of lower price that the extremely modest savings (compared to the total cost of a home) of not running a gas pipe to the kitchen and installing a range that maybe costs 10% more means that there’s a huge number of homes with natural gas service yet which have electric stoves. In a market dominated by that sort of mentality, why would one expect builders to install a stove that costs at least 100% more?

Induction’s niche will be customers like yours truly: people who appreciate just how poorly conventional electric stoves perform, want nothing to do with them, yet for whatever reason do not have gas available in the kitchen as a cooking fuel.

Published at 12:21 on 14 April 2013

Pretty much all communications-grade digital voice protocols sound awful, for the same reason that DMR sounds awful. Probably the least awful-sounding one, from the samples I’ve heard, is NXDN. Even that can’t hold a candle to plain old analog FM, however.

It all leaves me wondering if digital is just plain the wrong answer to cramming a voice signal into a smaller bandwidth. I’m inclined to thing using something like SSB plus an intelligent, software-defined receiver (with sophisticated noise filtering and precise, automatic carrier insertion) might be better.

Noise tends to be not a super-big issue at VHF and above, anyhow, so losing a degree of immunity to it might not be such a big deal, particularly if one uses digital signal processing techniques to remove as much of it as possible. SSB can sound as good as AM (which, unless noise gets in the way, blows digital out of the water when it comes to audio fidelity and overall intelligibility), provided you insert the carrier at just the right spot when receiving.

As a further plus, a voice-quality SSB signal uses half or less the bandwidth per channel of any of the digital protocols currently out there.

Sometimes the right answer to a question about employing a new technology is not to employ it at all (or, in this case, to employ it, but in a significantly different way than originally proposed).

Published at 21:16 on 10 April 2013

Somewhat obscure geeky things that other ham radio operators generally overlook tend to interest me.

It’s one reason I bought a 900 MHz transceiver at the Puyallup swap meet last month; it’s a band with almost no equipment built and marketed to ham radio operators. It took some searching to find something suitable (in this case, an HT marketed to business and government users which could be unlocked and programmed on that amateur radio band).

Probably for the same reason, DMR (Digital Mobile Radio, commonly known by its Motorola trademark MOTOTRBO) piqued my interest. Unlike 900 MHz (which is very quiet), there’s actually a smattering of operators using that mode on the 70cm band.

The downside is that the audio sounds positively awful (I’ve been listening to it on the net here). Think cheezy sci-fi voice effects from the 70s, sometimes so heavy that one must strain to hear what is being said.

Maybe it shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise. Unlike digital home entertainment audio, greater fidelity was never a goal for DMR. Instead, the goal was to cram as many channels into as little radio spectrum as possible.

If that’s your main goal, quality is going to suffer. There’s nothing particularly magic (or evil) about digital technology in this regard; one can use analog techniques to compress signal bandwidth, and those have a negative effect on audio quality as well.

I haven’t done much listening to it, but I’ve heard the “official” digital protocol for amateur radio in the VHF and UHF bands, D-Star, suffers similarly.

I think the chief upshot of this awful sound is that we cannot expect any such digital mode to last nearly as long as analog voice modes have lasted. As technology improves, ways will be found to make audio suffer less as it is compressed into a digital signal. It still won’t be high fidelity, mind you, but it won’t leave the listener straining to discern speech, either.

Because of present poor audio quality, the high likelihood of rapid obsolescence, and the significantly higher cost of digital over analog, digital voice is unlikely to be more than a bit player on the ham bands in the near future.

To that can be added adoption issues. A business licensee is a single organization; it can decide to go digital, make the investment in equipment, and issue all employees new radios. We amateur radio operators are individuals making individual choices; this creates a high path dependency in favor of the status quo.

Moreover, the commercial and public service bands are much more congested, so being able to cram in more signals is more important there. Even so, I wouldn’t expect present-day digital technologies to have comparable longevity to, say, analog FM.

Published at 11:54 on 8 April 2013

I received the following in the mail a few weeks ago:

(Click to enlarge; the red box was added by yours truly for emphasis, of course.)

Published at 09:33 on 21 March 2013

Unfortunately, the move was complicated (and somewhat compromised) by a curve ball from my present landlord, who is unwilling to let my tenancy go month-to-month after my lease expires.

Faced with the choice of committing to stay in a place I had already decided to leave this year, or conducting a hurried move, I chose the latter. I did manage to negotiate a 1-month extension to my lease, which made the whole move far more possible (and significantly less costly, because I’m not going to be paying for moving things into and out of storage, not paying for significantly more costly short-term housing).

So starting in about a month, I will see how well the island actually suits me. As I’ve written before, it’s hardly a perfect place. It merely appears to be the most practical alternative, given all the constraints which can be expected to be in place for the foreseeable future.

I’m hoping it will work out well enough that stability becomes justifiable and I can start looking to buy a home for myself in six months or so. The whole mess with this most recent lease, and the recurring hassle of moving, has really created a desire for both stability and not having to deal with landlords any more.

Published at 08:30 on 9 March 2013

I guess I’ve become jaded by political hypocrisy, because I find it more amusing than depressing or infuriating that there’s so many double standards in the Establishment media’s summing up of his legacy.

The Guardian had a great editorial the day after he passed away, which unfortunately seems to have been pulled from their web site. The gist of it was that most of the bad stuff being repeated about Chávez is indeed both true and bad stuff, but that his overall legacy must be balanced against the significant gains the least fortunate have made during his regime, and that the economic difficulties Venezuela has been experiencing over the past few years are being greatly exaggerated by one-sided reporting.

Like most resource-rich Third World nations, Venezuela has (still has, despite the progress of the past 15 years or so) an absolutely staggering amount of inequality. This is sadly not unique to Venezuela. Natural resource wealth in the developing world tends to end up concentrated in a few hands, with the vast majority sharing in little or none of it.

None of this justifies Chávez’ authoritarianism, of course, but neither does the authoritarianism invalidate the progress which has been made. And Chávez’ authoritarianism was a far more mild variety than that which existed in Chile under Pinochet or in Argentina during their military dictatorship, to pick just two examples of many one can find in Latin America.

If the coup against him in 2002 — backed by the US — had succeeded, all available past historical evidence indicates that human rights would have been vastly worse under the resulting right-wing dictatorship.

Published at 19:36 on 26 February 2013

Remember back when the Establishment media were waxing triumphant over the defeat of the Tamil Tigers? I was skeptical that it would result in any improvement of human rights in Sri Lanka, given the past record of the racist government there.

Well, it looks like I was right on the money. In case that Reuters article disappears, here’s the report from Human Rights Watch that it cites.