- From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: bricoleur, a person who creates bricolage; that is, who pieces together useful things from odd bits that are just lying around. In other words, me.
- Now, this interests me: Modkit, a GUI IDE for Arduino, with drag-and-drop “blocks” for program structures (inspired by MIT’s Scratch language for kids) and function calls. Alas, I don’t have any good way to test it (nor time to take up Arduino tinkering, as much as it appeals to me) but this is definitely headed in the right direction. I’m not sure I’d prefer it all out in the cloud, but that’s what seems to be in vogue these days.
- Sometimes the universe is so startling that it looks fake. Like this.
- I’m thinking that I’ll be toting an Android someday, and I was pleased to see the logo for the Android port of Firefox, called Fennec. When my father was in North Africa during WWII, he and his buddies at the AACS radio station in Mali killed time by attempting to tame the local desert fox population, generally by applying K-rations. What the fennecs thought of K-rations was not recorded, but as best I know they were not driven to extinction in the process.
- I’d had this insight some years ago, while listening to one side of lame cellphone conversations in supermarkets (triggered, I’m guessing, by the invention of Bluetooth earclippie headsets) but evidently there’s some research behind it: Overheard “halfalogue” conversations are far more distracting than conversations heard in full. I know! Put it on speakerphone!
- The guy who ran the UK Segway operation rode his scooter off a cliff to his unfortunate demise. Gravity’s a bitch, and overconfidence kills. (Thanks to Michael Covington for the link.)
- Back when I was in college I saw a truck carrying uncounted cartons of head lettuce hit a low railroad viaduct and split open, and heads, well, rolled. Over in Japan, they’re working on the dressing side, with a major mayonnaise spill.
- And from the same site, a writeup on a new Las Vegas hotel that makes significant use of solar energy, even if they didn’t actually intend to. (Did FLW have this kind of trouble?)
- From the Gadgets I’m Sure I Will Never Use Department: In case of emergency, well…
Odd Lots
Steampunk Geiger Counter, Part 3
With the rash fading and the nerve pain lessening (and Carol safe home!) I stole an hour or so downstairs last night to see what could be done in an hour or so downstairs. And I did well: I got a spark gap together, all made out of junk I’ve had lying around here forever. Not much to it, really: Some brazing rod, two husky black 5-way binding posts, and a battered 4-row barrier terminal strip. I had to drill out two of the holes in the barrier strip to pass a 10-32 thread, but apart from that, the only work was grinding points on two pieces of brazing rod and adjusting the binding posts so that the brazing rod pieces met point-to-point.
Done. Didn’t test it; ran out of evening. However, I did put 450V on my capacitor bank to make sure the caps were good, and it took a right-fine charge. It was interesting to watch how quickly the 450V bled off into the probes of a 50,000 ohm/volt VOM. (I miss my old Heathkit VTVM, may have to pick up another.) The more capacitance, the more energy is stored from the spark rectifier, and the longer the counter will run without another crank on the interrupter. So as time allows I’m going to put together a second plug-in cap bank.
The next step is to lash up the interrupter circuit to see if it can charge the caps and make sparks on the above rig. The rotary interrupter still needs some work, but I can clip-lead in an SPST pushbutton switch to give it a go.
Damn, but it feels good to get my hands dirty again. And let me tell you, boys and girls, there is nothing quite like the smell of a gallon milk jug packed full of 40-year-old black Bakelite barrier terminal strips!
Carol’s Wild Ride
The night before last, Carol woke up at 3 ayem from some of the worst abdominal pain she’s ever experienced. After a few groggy minutes of watching her thrashing around in agony, I did about all I could: called 911 and had an ambulance get her up to Memorial Central.
I had a kidney stone in 1997 and it reminded me a little of that: No position she took would ameliorate the pain even a little. The nexus of the pain seemed wrong for a kidney stone, but science knows far less about complex systems like human biology than it claims to, and such systems don’t always perform the ways that we demand they do. I have no experience with appendicitis and worried about that as well, so off she went.
Colorado Springs Memorial Health System is a superb hospital, and though I certainly don’t want to ride over there in an ambulance (or anything else) if I can avoid it, I’m glad it’s there if I ever need it, and certainly glad it was there when Carol needed it. They got her into a comfortable room, got an IV going, and gave her pain killers almost instantly. The people we dealt with were amiable and very competent, and by mid-morning they had decided to admit her, to continue testing and give her some time to recuperate under controlled conditions. I went back home breakfastish to feed QBit and pack the other three members of the Pack off to “grandma” Jimi Henton (their breeder) for a short vacation. By the time I got back we had a diagnosis of inflamed pancreas and a treatment plan. Carol was a little groggy from the painkillers and was dozing a lot, but she was no longer in pain and according to the medical staff was in no danger.
Memorial has a bogglingly good cafeteria downstairs, where I lunched on tender London broil with almond rice pilaf, chased by an excellent oatmeal-raisin cookie–all for about $6, which is generally what I part with on any odd trip to McDonald’s.
After lunch Carol had a visit from the rector of our Episcopal parish, Fr. David Koskela, who dropped everything when he learned that Carol was in the hospital and roared over there to give her a blessing and a kiss and encouragements. (If we were still Romans there would have been no such visit; even “last rites” are tough to come by these days, with so few priests left to confect them.)
I stayed with Carol most of the day, coming home again suppertime to feed QBit, then returning until 8 or so, when I started getting crosseyed for lack of sleep. Memorial is unusual in that they allow visitors at any time, 24/7, and don’t obsess about cell phones. We talked to family back in Chicago last night on Carol’s cell, and none of the high-tech machinery in the room died in showers of Trekkish sparks.
I brought Carol her toothbrush, some clean clothes to come home in, and a stuffed bichon to keep her company during the first night she’s spent in a hospital since 1966. QBit keeps searching the house for her, and I’m sure we’ll all rejoice when she gets home. More as it happens.
UPDATE: Carol was discharged from the hospital at about 2 PM today and I now have her tucked in bed with QBit at her feet. She’s on liquids and bed rest and “the boys” are going to stay at “grandma’s” for a couple more days. (Carol really doesn’t want even a single bichon on her lap right now, considering how close her lap is to her pancreas–much less the continuous rolling bar-brawl we call the Pack.)
Steampunk Geiger Counter, Part 2
It still hurts like hell to lean back against anything (for latecomers, I’m working through a nasty case of shingles) so I spent a good part of today sitting on my venerable and much taped-up barstool downstairs in my shop, drowning my pain in milk-jugs full of antique electronic parts. As I mentioned yesterday, having tried and failed to do so in 1963, I’m attempting to build a Geiger counter. I’m going to try to do it without active elements; that is, without including an audio amplifier for pulses coming off the Geiger tube. That makes speaker output impossible, but I have 2500-ohm “can” headphones from WWII, which are about as sensitive as that sort of transducer ever gets.
The first Geiger tube came with the morning’s mail. It’s a Victoreen OCD-D-103, a NOS spare for the famous yellow Victoreen civil defense portable counters from the 1950s. I actually found a mating 3-pin female connector in my junkbox, which is good, since I have no idea where I’d look otherwise. (The alternative is cannibalizing an octal tube socket for individual pin-grippers, generally by crushing a Bakelite socket in a vice until it crumbles.) Including the pins, the tube is just under 4″ long and 0.625″ in diameter. I’ll have to build a probe housing for it eventually, but near-term I’ll mount it in a pill bottle, of which there are legion.
The top photo is a stack of three 1000-volt mica capacitors, adding up to .048 MFD. That’s about what one circuit calls out, but more is better, and I have a 1950s steatite banana plug bar into which two such stacks will go. So I’ll build a second and put them in parallel. That will get me to about 0.8 MFD, which ought to be enough. If it isn’t, I’ll see what else I can scrounge in the line of high-voltage caps.
I’m modifying an old ceramic wafer switch to be a current interrupter, but I need to get a little farther along before I know if that will work. Those familiar with such switches will understand: I bent down the limit tabs so that the switch shaft can be turned continuously, and at each click current will make-and-break between the wiper and the stationary contacts. Crank it like a Model T, and you generate a series of quick DC pulses to the transformer.
Or that’s the theory, anyway. We’ll see how well it works. More as it happens.
Steampunk Geiger Counter, Part 1
I haven’t really done much in electronics in the last year or two, and I miss it. So when stumbling around in my scanned schematics folder tree, I came across a couple of Geiger counter circuits that I discovered while scanning Carl & Jerry out of Popular Electronics a few years ago. What struck me back then was how little there actually is to a Geiger counter circuit, and, with a Geiger tube in hand, I could have a working counter in a couple of hours or less. (A really ugly clip-lead lashup might take me half an hour.) And although Uncle Louie gave me a Raytheon counter tube when I was 11, I can no longer find it. So up I went to eBay, and discovered to my delight that somebody was selling an Amperex 75NB3 counter tube. This is significant (nay, an omen!) because I’ve been looking for one for a while. It’s the tube called out in a circuit PE published in July 1955, with the cool Ed Valigursky prospector cover. (Scroll down to it.)
The circuit is simple; nay, minimal: Basically, a 375V DC source applied to the center element of a Geiger tube through a current-limiting resistor. Any time an energetic particle passes through the tube, it ionizes some of the gas inside (generally neon with some trace gases to sharpen the pulse by quenching the trail quickly) and for an instant the tube conducts. You can pick off a pulse through a blocking capacitor and hear it with sensitive headphones as a sharp click.
Getting 375V worth of battery is nontrivial these days, but also unnecessary. Note what happens above: The batteries do nothing but charge a couple of capacitors. A circuit I found in the July 1957 issue finesses high-voltage batteries completely by setting up an output transformer as a step-up, and applying interrupted DC to the output (low impedence) winding. The interrupted DC induces high-voltage pulses in the input (high-impedence) windings, and if you capture them in a capacitor, you can power the Geiger tube from a single D cell.
The one glitch is interesting all by itself: You have to pass the pulse through a spark gap. In this circuit it’s an automotive spark plug (remember those?) but it can be anything you can crank down to a thirty-second of an inch or so. In a similar circuit published in The Boys’ Second Book of Radio and Electronics, Alfred Morgan uses two small nails held in binding posts, and lacking a spark plug in the junkbox, that’s probably what I’ll do. The spark gap acts as a crude rectifier, making sure that only the positive excursion of the induced pulse goes to the hot side of the .05 cap. The interrupted DC is generated by repeatedly pressing and releasing a momentary-contact pushbutton switch. The transistor here is a headphone amp, but again, high-impedence headphones will make pulses audible direct from the tube.
So. Is this really a steampunk technology? In other words, could someone with some skill and knowledge have built one of these in 1900? (Again, the circuit does not require a transistor, nor even a vacuum tube to amplify the pulses.) I don’t see why not. You’d need somebody who understood ionizing radiation, but that’s no stretch for a 1900-era mad scientist in brass goggles. Neon gas in a graphite-coated glass tube? Transformers? Headphones? Kid stuff.
While I’m waiting for the counter tube, I’m going to lash up the cap charging circuit and see how it works. The output transformer called out in the circuit used to be present in every single All American Five clunkerjunker tube radio I found on the curb on Garbage Day, but you may have to ask around for used units, or spend (much) more on a new transformer from Antique Electronic Supply.
And to test it? In my box of gas-regulator tubes I have a couple of old units that were “salted” with something like a trace of Lead-210 to make them conduct instantly when power is applied. Such tubes aren’t very radioactive anymore because the salting materials have short half-lives, and it’s been 55 or 60 years since most were made. And hey, if they really are dead, there’s always a few cosmic rays floating around.
I was told recently that bananas are mildly radioactive. (It’s the Potassium-40.) This seems like a stretch to me, but…we’ll find out.
Odd Lots
- So far, two people have written to request that I post photos of my rash. Ummm, no. You’d barf. And most of us take far too many trips to Three Mile Island already these days, Web discussion being what it is.
- And no, I’m not getting better. In fact, I may still be getting worse. But I do think it’s time to dump what’s in the Odd Lots file:
- While I wait patiently for more sunspots (and thus better ionospheric conditions for long skip) scientists tell me that I may have to do without them for awhile. (This from a link in a post with more graphs and links at WUWT.) The last time I had a really good antenna during a really good solar maximum was 1980.
- Intel is doing with its CPUs what IBM did with its mainframe processors in the 1960s: Disabling CPU features (in IBM’s case, it may have been as simple as inserting NOPs into the microcode) and then offering to turn them back on for a fee. (In this case, $50.) This is one of those things that sounds good on paper, but may not work well, and will certainly not make them any friends. (Odds on how long it takes the hardware hacker community to provide a crack?)
- PVC pipe fittings are wonderful big-boy tinkertoys, and come in any color you want as long as it’s black or white. If you want to broaden your spectrum a little, here’s how to permanently stain white PVC pipe any color you want.
- The battle between portrait mode and landscape mode in the online magazine world may come down to simple economics: It costs more to lay out (or somehow code up) a digital file that reads well both ways. Between the lines, however, I sense an attempt to twist Apple’s arm to cut their 33% cut of subscription revenue. Obnoxious question arises: How are iPad-targeted mags different from ambitious ad-supported bloggish Web-article sites like Wired, Slate, or Io9?
- While driving to our HMO’s Urgent Care facility the other day, I counted three MMDs (Medical Marijuana Dispensaries) on the eight-mile trip. Which means that Colorado Springs has a marijuana store every 2.7 miles. I guess we’re not so conservative here after all.
- One of the MMDs had a big banner across the storefront reading, “ICE CREAM!” Somehow I don’t think it’s French Vanilla.
- Pertinent to both of the above: The kettle is trying hard to prevent legalization of…the pot.
- It’s not the fat. It really is the fructose. (Thanks to David Stafford for the link.)
- Last Tuesday night we spent a little dusk-and-evening time at Cottonwood Hot Springs in Buena Vista, Colorado, and I highly recommend it. Not as slick as Mt. Princeton Hot Springs, but for looking up at the stars while immersed in hot water, you can’t beat it. (They keep lighting around the springs pools to an absolute minimum. Walk carefully if you value your toes.)
- Do you still smoke? If cancer doesn’t scare you enough, consider what it will do to your looks.
- I moderate comments on Contra pretty harshly, but I have to say, a recent spam comment from an IP in Vietnam is a testament to something. Maybe automated translation: “The content on this publish is really a single of the top material that I’ve ever occur across. I love your article, I’ll appear back to verify for new posts.” Heh. No, you won’t.
Daywander
I think a lot of the air is going out of the whole pirates thing; surely I thought there’d be more pirate talk online yesterday, but saw virtually none. Dare we hope that declaring a holiday for a meme may be the kiss of death for that meme? I’m not sure what else will work, as they don’t respond to DDT anymore. So perhaps somebody needs to declare International Walk Like A Zombie Day. I’m open to suggestions on dealing with vampires. Suck Like A Vampire Day? They already do.
The pirates themselves are still out there, even if they’re not talking much. I got a note from the Jolly Pirate last week telling me that he has finally filled a 2 TB hard drive with MP3s, mostly downloaded from Usenet. The collection comes to 350,000 songs. He just grabs whatever gets posted, no matter what it is, and looks for duplicates when he’s bored. (He admits that about 10% may still be dupes; I’m thinking that figure is higher.) This is boggling; I wouldn’t have thought that that many songs had ever been produced in all human history. But what’s more boggling yet is that all 350,000 will fit on a $100 2 TB SATA drive. I asked him how long he’s been gathering them, but have not heard back yet. That’s just under 100 songs per day for ten years. (My guess: he’s been scrounging songs from his friends by the thousands.)
I’m anal about filenames (I’m the Degunking guy, after all) and not a hoarder to begin with, but I’ll bet others have that problem too. Perhaps someone should write a utility that compiles a database of Bayesian signatures for each MP3 file, so to easily spot mostly similar (but not bit-for-bit identical) song files having different titles. Easy Duplicate File Finder doesn’t do this. I’m not an expert at such things, but it might also be able to suggest excessively similar photos (like the endless hundreds we have of various Pack members) that might be deleted and never missed.
I’ve been using the minuscule and frighteningly response Atlantis word processor for odd documents lately, and turned on the sound effects just for jollies. Atlantis plays small sounds at certain times, including a very realistic typewriter click on each keystroke (trust me, I know what those sound like!) a typewriter bell when the line wraps (ditto) and an odd little “mew” like a kitten when it encounters a word not in its dictionary. It also plays a sound like a car horn the first time you touch a key after pressing either Caps Lock or Num Lock, which is surprisingly useful, especially for people like me who watch the keyboard as much as the screen while typing. For awhile I found this annoying, but at some point I ceased to notice it, and now when I type on close-lipped Word 2000 it “sounds funny.” Odd how quickly we adapt to small changes in our environment, quickly making them the norm. Or maybe I just miss my old Underwood Standard.
I had the strange notion today that when I finally get around to building my Geiger counter, I’m going to craft an oak-and-brass case for it, with fluted knobs, shiny trim and whatever other odd touches might be necessary to make it a steampunk artifact. Of course, then I’d need to get with my sister to design the rest of the outfit to match. (“Does this Geiger counter make my butt look small?”)
The shingles rash is spreading around the entire left half of my torso, and is so touchy now that I can’t lean back in my computer chair. So be glad you’re not here; not only am I growing contagious but am also uncharacteristically grouchy. I’ve been making some good progress on the first novella I’ve attempted in almost thirty years, but it’s increasingly difficult to get into flow with the constant electrical-ish prickliness on my back, which morphs into a weird sort of pain with any kind of contact. So I may have to set Drumlin Circus aside for awhile, and continue to gather research on the Pleistocene megafauna. (In the story, all the circus animals are megafauna now extinct on Earth.) I learned yesterday that there was once a 6,000 pound giant wombat, and am trying to get my head around the concept. Whatever else our early human ancestors did, they certainly ate well. For awhile.
Not Your Average Roof Job
I’ve been scarce here this past week, and for a reason: I’ve felt lousy since Tuesday or so, with headaches, mild queasies, and a weird prickly surface pain on the skin of my back, just under my left shoulder blade. The headaches may be due to my trick neck, which throws all kinds of tantrums (including headaches) whenever I look up too high. The back pain was a puzzle; I thought it might have been a pulled muscle from a rough weight training session a week ago Thursday, but it’s not as deep a pain as with other muscles I’ve molested over the years.
Carol scratched her head as I downed another couple of Tylenol yesterday noonish, and said, “I sure hope it isn’t shingles.” I didn’t think so. No spots. So about 3:30, when I found myself scratching an itch on my back, I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror.
Spots.
We called a dermatologist I saw some years back, but Friday being Friday, his office was already closed. With that not an option, Carol sent me packing to our HMO’s Urgent Care facility so fast my head spun. Sure ’nuff, the little bastards that gave me chicken pox in 1960 have been hanging out in my nerve fibers for half a century, and just happened to choose this week to come out and party.
So I’m on antivirals and Prednisone for awhile. Physician said I did very well by coming in an hour and a half after pegging the symptoms–which is all due to my brilliant wife’s intuition and expertise–since most people don’t look for help until the outbreak is much further along and the antivirals don’t work as well. That’s good, because if it gets a whole lot worse than this I’ll be a very unhappy guy.
More as it happens. Or doesn’t. Oremus.
Flying a Hi-Flier–If Not Very High
Yesterday afternoon, Carol and I went down to the schoolyard near Safeway, and we did something I keep telling people not to do: We flew a vintage kite. It was an experiment to see if my advice was always good, or if there might be exceptions.
The advice came out of three separate experiences I’ve had in the last ten years, attempting to fly vintage kites. In each case, the kite didn’t survive even five minutes in the air. In one case, the paper sail more or less disintegrated, and in retrospect I should have seen that one coming. Mercifully, it wasn’t an especially valuable kite, and it was in lousy shape.
In the other two cases, it was the sticks that went. Both times, wind pressure against the kite caused the bow stick to snap at the vertical spar. In neither case was the breeze hurricanic, or even particularly fresh. The lesson? Thin sticks of cheap pine dry out over forty or fifty years and get very brittle.
In this case, the kite in question was present in a lot of ten kites I bought at auction. It’s a 36″ Hi-Flier “Pegasus” plastic kite from the mid-1970s. Its sticks were already cracked, and I simply replaced them with new wood of similar size bought at Hobby Lobby and cut to the same length. The plastic sail had remained wrapped tightly around the sticks in an (evidently) very warm place since 1975, with the expected crinkles and bleedover of the paint on the plastic. So it wasn’t a great kite to begin with, and probably the worst in the lot of ten. If I lost it, I wouldn’t cry. (Too hard, at least.)
The wind was a little stiff for this kind of kite; probably 15 MPH. In a 6-8 MPH breeze they often fly well without a tail at all, but I gave it about seven feet of tassel-tail made out of kite-paper rectangles pinched in the middle and taped to a mylar ribbon. And well that I did: It went a little wild with about 100 feet of string out, which is all I wanted to give it. Any more, and it would have been out over Highway 115 or (worse) Fort Carson. There was plenty of leaning and looping and a couple of outright nose-down crashes into the grass, but nothing broke and nothing tore.
The mark of a truly successful flight is being able to lie on your back on the hillside, and after the wind shifted to the north a little and banked down to about 10 MPH, things got satisfyingly snoozy and I declared the outing a total success. Reeled the kite in and took it home, and I may in fact dare to fly it again at some point. So the advice against flying old kites is generally true if the old kites are really old, and all original equipment. Replace the sticks with new pine, and if the sail isn’t already crumbling to dust, well, you’ve got a chance. Tree problems, heh: That’s up to you.
The Pulps Reconsidered, Part 4
The essential difference between literary (as we define it today) and non-literary fiction didn’t crystallize for me until first-person shooters happened. I’m not one for games in general, but an hour or two playing early shooter games like Doom and Quake back in the 90s was an epiphany: This is a species of fiction. The following years proved me right. Most ambitious action games have at least a backstory of some kind, and some modern MMORPG systems have whole paperback novels distilled from them. (See Tony Gonzales’ EVE: The Empyrean Age, based on EVE Online.)
Of course it’s not literature. Did anybody say it was?
What it is is something else, something important: immersive. You get into a good game, and you’re there. I can do the same thing with a decent SF novel, but the phenomenon is in no way limited to SF. I’m guessing that Farmville or almost any reasonably detailed simulation works the same way.
Immersivity is the continental divide between literary fiction and pulp fiction. Like anything else in the human sphere it’s a spectrum, placing World of Warcraft on one end and Finnegan’s Wake on the other, with everything else falling somewhere in the middle. The term measures the degree to which you can lose yourself in a work, where “lose yourself” means “forget that you’re reading/playing and enter into experiential flow.”
Don’t apply a value scale to immersivity. It’s only one dimension of many to be found in fiction, and my point here isn’t to dump on Finnegan’s Wake. Literature is intended to evoke a response in the reader, but that response is not necessarily immersion. (It can be, particularly with classics like Huckleberry Finn that are new enough to be culturally familiar to us–dare you to read Chaucer without footnotes!–and yet not so new as to be afraid of Virginia Woolf.)
Pulling the reader in and carrying him/her along requires a smooth, linear narrative style, a vivid setting, and enough going on to maintain the reader’s interest after a long day working a crappy job. Pulp characters are often types, but that’s not necessarily due to a lack of skill on the writer’s part. A carefully chosen and well-written type allows room for a reader to imagine being that character, which is important in immersive fiction. As much as I enjoyed Gene Wolfe’s massive Book of the New Sun (and I’ve read it three times since its publication) I had a very hard time imagining myself as Severian. I empathize with him and certainly enjoyed watching him against the dazzling surreality of Urth (though I had to read numerous sections several times to be sure I knew what was going on) but being him? No chance. Keith Laumer’s Retief, on the other hand, no problem. Louis Wu? Same deal.
And for the umptieth time: (I can hear the knives being sharpened) This is not to denigrate literary fiction, of which I’ve read a lot and still do. My point is that immersive fiction is a valid entertainment medium, requiring different mechanisms and different skills than literary fiction. Let’s not dump on things for simply being easy to read. Easy is good if easy is what you want–and (on the author side) if easy is what people are willing to pay for.
Which should not suggest that easy to read is necessarily easy to do. The immersive magic of the pulps is obscured by the fact that a lot of it was just badly done, and could not have been otherwise, given that some pulp titles paid a quarter cent a word and published eighty thousand words twice a month. We can do much better these days, at least on the quality side. A brilliant potboiler is eminently possible–if we as readers give authors some sense that it’s ok to take up the challenge, and that they’ll be paid for their efforts when they succeed.
More in this series as time allows.
