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.

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.

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!

With these rubbish phone cameras we take terrible photos of some of our most important moments and cherished memories. I am not complaining about composition and lighting here; I’m not a photographer. I am talking about the quantity of meaningful visual data contained in these files. Future historians will decry forever the appalling lack of visual fidelity in the historical record of the last decade.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

The only way he could have stopped these sections from being included would have been to try to veto the bill in its entirety, a move that would have been both political suicide as well as being futile, as Congress would simply have overridden him. He is explicit in his opposition to exactly the parts of the bill everyone here hates, going so far as to detail exactly which sections he opposes and why.
You’ll notice that the bill also restricts his ability to close Guantanamo Bay; this isn’t coincidence. These sections are openly hostile to the President’s stated mandate – they are effectively a giant ‘fuck you’ to the President, as well as a nasty way of eroding the President’s support with his own base.

Fireworks over the San Francisco bay for 2011 new years

Android should be reserved for those who know what they are getting into. If someone I know needs a recommendation for what smart phone to get, I would not recommend Android to them.

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament],

“Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?”

…I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

- Charles Babbage

Sir Isaac Newton! December 25, 1642 – March 20, 1726

What other company can claim to have had the same logo for a hundred years?