{"id":650,"date":"2009-04-03T12:55:06","date_gmt":"2009-04-03T16:55:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=650"},"modified":"2009-04-03T12:55:51","modified_gmt":"2009-04-03T16:55:51","slug":"odd-lots-59","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=650","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.duntemann.com\/12vtubes\/shoptips.htm\">My Web article on how I designed my workshop<\/a> has <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.makezine.com\/archive\/2009\/04\/jeff_duntemanns_shop_tips.html\">just been aggregated on the Make Blog<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Here is <a href=\"http:\/\/users.telenet.be\/j.janssens\/Spotless\/Spotless.html\">the best summary of sunspot-less days<\/a> I&#8217;ve yet seen. We may be coming out of a freakish-high period of solar activity; five of the ten most intense solar cycles ever recorded have occurred in the last 50-odd years.<\/li>\n<li>Even NASA admits that <a href=\"http:\/\/science.nasa.gov\/headlines\/y2009\/01apr_deepsolarminimum.htm\">our near-record solar minimum may get even deeper<\/a>. I guess I don&#8217;t need to build that 6M vertical any time soon. (Thanks to Mark Moss for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>On the other hand, the DX can be had, with some&#8211;heh!&#8211;effort. In fact, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.arrl.org\/news\/stories\/2009\/03\/31\/10738\/\">some guys in Germany recently bounced a radio signal off of Venus and heard the echo<\/a>. They used the same 2.4 GHz radio frequency as Wi-Fi&#8211;just with 6 KW of power. No word on antennas or ERP, though the words &#8220;big&#8221; and &#8220;parabolic&#8221; come to mind.<\/li>\n<li>Print-on-demand meets the magazine business with <a href=\"http:\/\/magcloud.com\/\">MagCloud<\/a>. Basically, the magazine is printed when you order it. All pages are in full color, printed using the <a href=\"http:\/\/h10010.www1.hp.com\/wwpc\/us\/en\/ga\/WF05a\/18972-18972-236257-90275-3638783-3722856.html\">HP Indigo<\/a> technology, with a saddle binding. The price is still steep: 20c per page, giving you a 48 page mag for $9.60. Of course, that&#8217;s all content and no ads, so it&#8217;s not utterly insane when you consider that a lot of modern magazines are lucky to have 48 pages of Real Stuff. The system works like Lulu for the most part, and if you have the need to publish a short, full-color booklet of some kind it might be worth a look. (Thanks to Jim Dodd for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>Pete Albrecht sent <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usmm.org\/postermisc2a.html\">a link to some WWII posters<\/a>, and the interesting one is about not using broadcast receivers. Few people know that nearly all ordinary radio receivers are also very low-level radio transmitters, courtesy of the local oscillator or oscillators in the frequency conversion stages. It&#8217;s possible to detect superhet receivers at considerable distance using a good directional antenna, and this was evidently done during the War. The BBC also used to do this (and may still, for all I know) to enforce receiver licensing rules, by sending a truck around towns listening for local oscillators and logging street addresses. (I learned this from the UK pub <em>Meccano Magazine<\/em> circa 1962.)<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s the not the fat. It&#8217;s the high-fructose corn-syrup. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eurekalert.org\/pub_releases\/2009-03\/e-fmb032409.php\">Here&#8217;s another brick<\/a> in the edifice of evidence. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>And finally, <a href=\"http:\/\/slowburn.typepad.com\/.a\/6a00d8341d21c953ef011279017be728a4-pi\">a food pyramid that I can get behind<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My Web article on how I designed my workshop has just been aggregated on the Make Blog. Here is the best summary of sunspot-less days I&#8217;ve yet seen. We may be coming out of a freakish-high period of solar activity; five of the ten most intense solar cycles ever recorded have occurred in the last [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[41,37,45,39,44],"class_list":["post-650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-astronomy","tag-food","tag-ham-radio","tag-health","tag-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=650"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":651,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650\/revisions\/651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}