Tag: Crass consumerism

Yes

You’re standing in the electronics aisle of your favorite hardware store thinking to yourself “I’ve got a razor blade and some pliers. This should work.”  You are wrong.

You’re standing in the electronics aisle of your favorite hardware store thinking to yourself “I’ve got pliers. Maybe the stripping tool is sufficient.”  You are still wrong.

Spend the twenty dollars or whatever for the combo cutting, stripping, and crimping tool. Future you will love you. And in the end you will have saved money because you’re going to get there anyway.

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Darwin's wire tools

The antenna

My 43′ vertical antenna kit and enough coax to park it at the top of the backyard are whizzing their way to the Tuck as I type this. It’s the final piece of the getting-to-broadcast-on-HF puzzle.

A 43′ vertical is a nice compromise antenna that can be tuned with my radio’s on board antenna matcher to within an SWR of 1.3. 125′ of coax is required to mitigate the impedance mismatch that ginormous aluminum tubes present to the radio’s expected 50Ω out.

Some time next weekend N0FEZ should be on the international airwaves. This is a thing that has been five years in the making and, if you can’t tell, I’m way stoked. I just hope the assembly goes as well as it did for this guy…who is hilarious.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Smoking up the man

I don’t listen to a lot of commercial broadcast radio so maybe this has been a thing for a long time. But, still, this is new to me. Apparently a certain segment of the vaping/e-cigarette crowd is anti-government. I heard a commercial about every seven minutes today suggesting that vaping is, amongst other awesome things, a tax dodge.

Stick it to the man and his obscene taxes on tobacco–vape instead of smoke!

And Tea Partyists believe they are a political group instead of a marketing demographic.

Possible build

Given the fun that my going on six years old laptop is presenting w/r/t the power management circuitry I’ve started looking at its replacement. I think I’m done with laptops as my primary workstation because they just don’t have it on the value for dollar front.

I’m shooting for a relatively robust workstation able to support multiple VMs. Host operating system will be some *nix distro, probably Mint at this time. Gaming isn’t really my bag and the kinds of games I enjoy are usually turn-based strategy games so graphics performance isn’t key. The only other thing I do is play with audio editing.

So, workstation that can support multiple VMs, edit audio, run server apps, and compile code is what I’m looking for. Also looking to build it from scratch because reasons and possibly saving a little money. Came across an awesome site, PC Part Picker that does a nice job of helping keep the moving parts together.

Here’s the current configuration I’m looking at: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/2UufI

It’s me, right?

Companies advertising specials for folks being affected by the shutdown of the federal government rub me the wrong way. Giving away free crap, well, I suppose I’m not as irritated by that kind of thing. It still reeks of taking advantage of tragedy for a little self-promotion but I can see how it might be an even trade.

The thing I’m really starting to get irritated about however is this phenomena of “half off tickets to $FOO for folks with IDs proving they’re affected” advertising. To me that reads as, “Hey, you. Experiencing hard times, right? How about stupidly spending some of your dwindling capital on some cheap entertainment? Well, come right this way…”

This isn’t a party. It isn’t a marketing opportunity. It’s a tragedy being foisted on us by a group of people who are trying to take legislative shortcuts because they lack the popular support to do things the right way. And crap is about to get a lot more serious in the coming week. No one thinks that Congress will force us into default but no one thought Congress would shut down federal operations either.