What is Amateur Radio?

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Imagine that you have a light. A small, not very powerful light, maybe 2 watts or so. You read somewhere on the internet that the ionosphere (that’s up in the sky, way above the trees - really high) can bounce light back to the earth if the light is the right colour. You read a bit more and find out that different heights do different things and that if you get just the right color, you can actually bounce it down, up, down, up and then down again to the other side of the planet. Like fibre optics in the sky.

So you screw around by adjusting the color and you send a message in morse code. Or if you’re really fancy you change the color of the light depending on the waveform of your own voice. You actually get just the right frequency so that the light is visible (just barely) to somebody that lives 8,000 miles away.

And here’s the really crazy bit: not only does somebody over there see the light and decode the morse code (or your voice), they send you a message back. Apparently this guy (or hot, sexy blonde Danish woman, if you prefer, but you know it’s a guy so that’s just a fantasy) saw the same instructables article as you and bought the same kit from some website somewhere.

And you guys talk for a while. But really it’s way more fun to try to see if you can find somebody in a whole different country on the other side of the world. Eventually you decide that if you’re really expert with this thing that you can reach somebody in every country in the world if you really try hard enough. So you sit up late at night, or you spend your entire weekends morning and afternoon, trying to reach people with your little light (which you put on top of your house now, just because it’s easier). And, well, you start to look like somebody that hasn’t come out of a cave in a while, but you’re sort of obsessed and you just can’t stop now anyway.

But it’s not enough… you decide to bounce that light off of the moon (OK, you need a slightly brighter light here) or bounce it off of meteor trails! Or you decide you are only going to use ultraviolet light that doesn’t bounce off of the sky, but that’s cool because you can use your spare torch and a filter and it doesn’t cost you any extra and hey, that thing’s pretty bright maybe it will work. Or maybe a blacklight if you grew up in the 70s.

Oops, now you’re hooked. Welcome to Amateur Radio.

- Adapted from a post to Reddit by “jenkstom” K5EHX.

Dear Lazyweb: Encoding data to sound?

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Back in the day, home computers could save your data files onto an audio tape, by converting them into warbly noises that you could record. This relied on the fact that it made noises that were in the normal pitch range of human speech, so they could be reliably recorded onto existing audio storage mediums.

My question is: Can you still do this? Are there programs available that will take an arbitrary data file, and convert it into a wav file (or similar), the contents of which represent the file? There must be more modern methods than were available in the 80s.

I’ve had a Google, but I’ve found nothing useful. Help me Lazyweb, you’re my only hope.

Why I hate Android

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I don’t hate the concept of Android — in fact, at one point, I loved it. What I hate is what Android has become.

All of this backstory knowledge fuels my rage. When I see Google talk about how “open” the platform is, setting it up as the foil to the “closed” (and framed as “evil”) iPhone, I want to scream and rip someone’s head off. It’s not only the most extreme example of being disingenuous that I can ever recall seeing — it’s nuclear bullshit.

Apple, for all the shit they get for being “closed” and “evil”, has actually done far more to wrestle control back from the carriers and put it into the hands of consumers. Google set off to help in this goal, then stabbed us all in the back and went the complete other way, to the side of the carriers. And because they smiled the entire time they were doing it and fed us this “open” bullshit, we thanked them for it. We’re still thanking them for it!