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Ham radio…

Posted on by Archturiat in blog, rants No Comments

There was a story on Slashdot about selling off a chunk of radio spectrum that amateur radio uses as “secondary users”. The usual arguments back and forth were had, including somebody trotting out the old standby of ham radio will save us when all else fails!~!.

Aside from the fact that even I, somebody who’s a staunch advocate of amateur radio as a technical playground and resilient backup communications plan, don’t 100% agree with that perspective, it ignores the simple fact that ham radio as a hobby is dying with the generation of men and women who took up the hobby in the Baby Boomer generation.

My comment:

Increasingly, there aren’t enough ham radio operators in some areas to really depend upon when the fit hits the shan.

I’ve seen it in my own community here in Oregon. The RACES/ARES group that helps out at our Renaissance Faire with emergency comms now does not have enough healthy bodies to man a station 24 hours a day for three days. And you can’t get enough young people interested: it’s worth noting that between myself and a handful of other young folk, there are more hams on the staff of this Faire than the emergency comms group has in its active membership (side note: I’d be a volunteer for this emergency comms group, but I live 80 miles away). But we’re too busy actually doing Faire things to have our hands on radios… we can barely keep up with our “day jobs” on site and the radio traffic relevant to our immediate Faire Guild.

The past few disasters locally have largely been worked by a handful of dedicated hams, many of them working to exhaustion. As these men (many of whom are in their 60s or older) age, their ability to man a radio for 16 hours a day is rapidly declining. Soon, there may not be enough active, well trained hams with ready-to-go equipment to respond.

If you are a tech geek and don’t have a license, get one. If you have a license and don’t have at least a “scram kit” with at least an HT and some basic tools for building antennas, making electroncis repairs, and a couple of good maps (plus all the “usual” recommended disaster supplies) you are part of the problem.

So, to that, I’d like to issue a challenge to the geek friends of mine who are out there. If you do not have a ham radio license but would like to get one, talk to me and I’ll help you anyway I can. If you are an inactive ham who doesn’t have a “scram kit” built, or you feel you lack the skills or know-how to use it, seek me out and we’ll put one together for you and teach you basic emergency techniques. If you are an active ham with an assembled “scram kit” but have never had the opportunity to use it, let’s talk about a sked, where we both take our field kits out somewhere and try to work each other.

These skills are valuable not only to each other, but to our greater community. The more we demonstrate our value by keeping our skills current the more likely we can keep the hobby relevant and interesting to the next generation of geeks, not to mention society at large. If we lose our relevance, no amount of donations to the ARRL Spectrum Defense Fund can help us.

As above, so below.

Posted on by Archturiat in blog, current events, rants 8 Comments

I really don’t have much of a developed opinion over the verbal free-for-all presently going on in the pagan comminity over PantheaCon.  But, I do have this observation.

Any group that excludes based upon factors that do not take into account the holistic individual are doomed to exactly this sort of failure.  If, as Z. Budapest has had a quote regarding this attributed to her along these lines, one must have a period to be “female”, does that mean that a woman born female but had her uterus removed surgically before puberty (due to disease or injury) isn’t a woman?  What if medicine were to provide a way for genetically born men to have a uterus “grown” for them and implanted?

Where does one draw the line?  Sex and gender are rarely black and white.  I thought the whole point of this exercise was that we don’t have to be defined by stereotypical gender roles because we may have been born with one particular set of genitalia.  We are all capable of being divine, both feminine and masculine.

Oh, and other genders as well.

Privilege Escalation…

Posted on by Archturiat in blog, rants No Comments

I’m noticing an odd trend on Android applications.

Increasingly, applications are asking for more and more “privileges”. Today, CBS’ TV.COM application is asking for “audio record” capabilities on the latest upgrade.

Um… okay. What? You want me to allow your app to record audio from my phone? How about a no.

It isn’t the first app I’ve seen that’s done this. There’s been a handful of such “privilege escalation” attempts done by a few apps. Groupon, for example, at one point wanted “fine” GPS location instead of “coarse.” Um… no, “coarse” should be just fine, thank you (a later version seems to have rescinded this requirement).. you don’t need to know exactly were I’m at, a coarse cell tower fix should be fine. Other apps have wanted access to the SD card for no discernable reason.

In most cases, I suspect it’s just a sloppy implementation of a new feature. But for the life of me I’m still trying to figure out what legitimate purpose TV.COM needed to record audio from my phone.

Maybe CBS is working on some new reality TV show…

The revolution will be webcast.

Posted on by Archturiat in blog 2 Comments

I routinely get annoyed by older people who don’t understand the why’s of technology.

Here’s a case study: paper vs. digital records of any type.  “Paper is better,” says this crowd, “because it is in an inherently readable form!   And it lasts longer than any other storage medium!  It isn’t subject to computer crashes and disk failures!”  I’ve heard all the arguments, and they’re all pure bullshit arguments coming from ignorance.

I have a copy of one of the original BBSes I ran in the early 1980’s.. every text file, every post.  I have most of my journals (the ones I kept in electronic form).  I have scanned copies of telephone bills from the late 1980’s.  I have every game I used to play as a kid.  Heck, I even have a lot of the analog media (music, TV shows) as well.  And it is almost guaranteed that I will continue to have all of this until the day I die.

How can I guarantee that?  Because data is fungible.  It’s a living entity: it isn’t an object.  Hard drives fail.  Media disintegrates.  But the data can live on, PRECISELY because it isn’t tied to the object that carries it.   It can be rewritten countless times.

Since I’ve been a teenager, I’ve made it a point to back everything up religiously.  Every year for the past 25 years, I’ve taken my archives and copied them to a bigger hard drive.. and then put the old hard drive in an offsite storage unit.  More recently, I keep a RAID 5 array at home.. but still, once a year, there’s this “buy a new hard drive, take the old hard drives out and lock them away” process that guarantees that everything gets copied. And even though my digital archive keeps expanding and growing, the space required to store it has actually gotten a little smaller over the years.  Hard drives are now smaller than ever, and store more than entire rooms of equipment did years ago.

Try that with paper.  No, really.   Try it.  Try expanding your paper storage capacity without expanding the space it occupies.

If I had a fire in my apartment tomorrow, I’d probably lose hundreds of books.  I’d lose a few weeks of mail.  I’d probably lose identity documents, such as my passport and birth certificate.  You know what I wouldn’t lose?

The lifetime of memories that is sitting in the storage unit across town on last year’s hard drive.

And that’s the point that gets missed.  Every year, the data is refreshed.  Even though the picture might be 15 years old, the bits on the media are never more than a year, maybe two, old.  Yes, I’ve lost individual item once and a while through bit rot and/or accident during the copy process.  There was the one year I completely trashed the backup of dustpuppy, which resulted in me losing some of the goofy stuff I did on that machine (like the “This is BS!” edit of the CBS bumper of that era).

If I cared, when it happened I could have probably fished around the previous year’s hard drive and found it.  I didn’t care.

Computer data is survivable precisely because there’s little, if any, incremental cost to copy and store it.  As computer storage capacity continues to increase, so does our ability to retain it.  And stewardship of the data is easier  as well.

The most recent bullshit argument, which demonstrates the fallacy the “paper is better!” crowd like to bring up, is “you can’t read a punchcard from the 70’s!”  Actually, yes I can (oddly enough, I can read punchcards, both in EBCDIC and ASCII, by hand.. as can anybody who’s ever worked with them).  But I don’t have to.

Why can I log in to my 25 year old BBS?  Because I copied the data off of the obsolete medium of Commodore 1541 floppy disks when I migrated to a new platform (then a Commodore Amiga) while the storage medium was still viable.  The 170 kilobyte disk image sits in my Linux ext3 filesystem RAID array, ready to be accessed with a simple command, that starts a C-64 emulator, mounts the floppy disk, and assigns the virtual C-64’s serial port to a UNIX TCP/IP socket that I can simply connect to at my leisure.  Since the emulator is open-source, and also backed up with the data, there’s no reason why (with proper stewardship) somebody 100 years from now couldn’t build the code (or at least analyze it and create a modern equivalent) and log in to the Neverending Story BBS of Anaheim, California circa 1983.

Oh, and guess what?  Through the magic of “the cloud”, I can now store that data in multiple datacenters in different countries operated by different companies, if I’m really worried that keeping a hard drive in a locked storage unit across town isn’t adequate.  As we move forward, the ability to maintain your personal “data soup” is only going to get easier.  Even without intending it, if I lost both my “active” copy at home and my “archive copy” in the storage unit I could probably reconstruct a small percentage of my personal data just scraping pictures off Facebook, my web server, and a few other scattered places.  Hmm.. maybe it’s time I get in the habit of the yearly rsync.

By being fungible, data is assured survival.  Hey, if a bored geek can do it to his prepubescent C-64 BBS, anybody can.

There will be more on this later, believe me.

Posted on by Archturiat in blog 4 Comments

I just wanted to pop over here and write something brief about this, mostly to jog my own memory for later.

I’ve been working on a series of articles for here about religion, atheism, spiritualism, and where my current beliefs sit on all of this. That’s all a bit complicated, but suffice to say I’m probably what you’d call a “wavering skeptic.”

Anyway, I’ve been participating in a lot of the discussions on reddit regarding atheism and such. And I now think I have some understanding of the reasons many who embrace the Scientific Method tend towards atheism (or at least agnosticism): that being the concept of Arguing from The Null.

The Null Hypothesis is very important to the Scientific Method. Most of the truly interesting science happens when you test against the null, and H0 is perhaps the most radical idea anybody has ever invented. And I think a lot of theists don’t fundamentally understand the perspective of the Argument from The Null. You are either for something, or against something. It’s impossible that you could be arguing from a neutral position, a position that allows any valid theory to be proffered, tested, debated, buried in soft peat for three months, recycled as firelighters, and then perhaps even accepted.

I forgot just how awesome H0 really is. Thank you, arguing on reddit.

Posted on by Archturiat in blog, rants No Comments

FlowchartA little bit of a side rant here on what “steampunk” means.

Before I start, let me just say that I don’t have a problem with any of what I’m about to piss on.  I love this kind of genre play, and I think that a lot of the artwork and stuff created by the many talented artists in Steampunk really kick ass.

However, I think something needs to be said about “keeping it real” in the interests of fairness.

The way I’ve always understood “Steampunk”, it’s a genre based on an alternative historical timeline that assumes we never transitioned from steam power to the internal combustion engine, for whatever reason (and the reasons are quite varied and really unimportant).  There’s usually some history rewritten as a result: Charles Babbage actually built his Difference Engine (and it is used to “power” much of society), Nikola Tesla was successful in his 1899 Colorado Springs Experiments, some (not experienced in our reality) natural disaster had far reaching consequences,  and/or the popular science-fiction of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells became true as written.

In short, there’s a fairly specific time period that “Steampunk” looks like it is trying to emulate: that of the late Victorian era.  In fact, most of the seminal works of Steampunk seem to want to wrap themselves in the Romanticism of that era, regardless of how far forward they put themselves in the timeline (see: a few Doctor Who episodes I can name: in fact, the present image of the TARDIS is, itself, very “Steampunk” in character).

Yet, at the same time, it seems that a lot of us in the Steampunk-admiring fandom forget the world that we’re actually supposed to be living in.  We forget that “Metropolis” (the 1927 Fritz Lang silent film) is probably, at best, in Steampunk’s very near future, but probably not in the present.  I see Art Deco influences up-played, Art Nouveau downplayed.  An excellent example of some of this can be seen here at BuzzFeed: some of the artwork is excellent, but is it really Steampunk?  Are silent films even technically “Steampunk”?

I’d venture to guess, if I understand the timeline correctly, that the cinema didn’t really take hold until the early 1900’s at best.. and it wasn’t until the 1910’s that it really caught on.  As I understood it, “the new movies” were largely shown in burlesque (and the later Vaudeville) houses, and rarely as stand-alone features until well into the 1910’s, if not even the early ’20s.  Okay, I’m willing to accept some “Steaming” of the tech to make it work, and the invention of the motion picture is inevitable.. but given that it requires the production of celluloid film in enough quantities to shoot miles of the stuff, it’s largely a product of the early 20th Century, and of the petroleum revolution that ends the Steam Age in our reality.

“Steampunk” is more ferrotype, less celluloid.

tintype of the author and a female friend

Tintype of feedle and Norma, SteamCon 2010

At SteamCon II this year, I observed something that kind-of made me sad as somebody who’s in this fandom for the history.  A wonderful Gentleman was doing ferrotypes, even though conditions for the same frankly sucked.  He was using period techniques, even using a period camera (although his plates were aluminum and not “japanned iron”).   He even had a wonderful cart, not unlike what you would have seen in a country fairground of the era: he completely had the “travelling photographer” thing down as you would expect to see circa 1885.  The sad part: he was not promoted at all by the convention (in fact, they seemed to kick him to the curb at the earliest opportunity when a vendor complained about the odor), and eventually was relegated to a dark corner of the hotel’s atrium out in front of his room.

Why was this guy not “front and center”?  I had two ferrotypes made, and they are something I will cherish about my SteamCon experience.  This is the sort of thing we should be embracing as “Steampunks”.  (Side note: He’s in Salem, and deserves your business: http://yaquinaphotography.com/)

Maybe my experience as a Renaissance Fair rat comes through a little strongly here.  I’ve already ranted a bit about the tendency towards poor hat etiquette.  I have a whole laundry list of complaints, quite honestly.. but this is at the center of many of them.

This is the Victorian era, people.  We don’t have to follow everything down to the letter (goddess knows the racism and sexual repression alone is something we could do without), but at least let’s try to maintain the class, lustre, and genteel-ness of the era we love.  To throw that away is to miss the greater point of the Age of Steam, and turns us all into that flowchart above.  Does it have gears?  No, guess I better add some more…

Mooooooving…

Posted on by Archturiat in blog No Comments

Hey everybody.

As a few of you know, I’m moving again. This time, in the same building: from the third to the first floor. I now have a 1 bedroom!

I need as much help as I can get getting stuff boxed up and just moved. There’s really not that much stuff, it’s just I can’t imagine myself going up and down the stairs the 100 or so times it would take to get everything moved. I have a friend coming by in the evening to help with the furniture-y bits.. I just need help moving stuff.

If you can help, please just stop by on Saturday after 10:00am, or call me. My address is 315 High Street in Oregon City. Push the buzzer for 105 and I’ll come let you in.

Thanks, in advance for the help.

Hat etiquette

Posted on by Archturiat in blog, rants 6 Comments

Does nobody understand proper hat etiquette anymore?

Okay, I know this is a convention, and people are dressed in costumes. However, we’re supposed to be in the Victorian age (or at least in a retro-future world rooted in Victorian ideals). We’re supposed to act that way.

The biggest violations? Last night at the Cabaret. It’s theatre, dammit: MEN ARE SUPPOSED TO REMOVE THEIR HATS WHEN IN A THEATRE. Or a restaurant. Or, for that matter, any “intimate” interior space (generally speaking, one can leave their hat on in corridors and large open indoor spaces, such as a lobby or arcade). In addition to the “remove your hats when you are indoors” rule, it’s also polite to those who are sitting behind you.

Another big violation: the “lady in a lift” rule. If you are in an elevator and a lady boards, take it off, dammit.

Lastly, and this is another one that gets under my skin, is failing to remove your hat at the dining table. And for crying out loud, when you do remove your hat, you don’t put it on the table.

Come on, people. We’re supposed to be demonstrating ideals from a more “enlightened” and gentler age. Let’s act like it by using the manners incumbent on the era we’re playing.

Quick Note from Steamcon…

Posted on by Archturiat in blog No Comments

Just a quick note from Steamcon II. Having a great time..

There’s an awful lot of really cool costume bits here. Norma and I are both taking a lot of pictures, I’ll post some a little later.

I also had a great opportunity to have a ferrotype made. The conditions weren’t the greatest for the photographer.. it is really cold, and the beautiful interior space of the SeaTac Airport Marriott apparently has UV blocking windows (ferrotypes typically need a lot of blue and UV light).

Also went to a panel this morning with Jake Von Slatt. He’s the guy who makes all the interesting keyboards and stuff. I took video, I’ll be posting that to YouTube a bit later.

Okay, off to find Norma and get some lunch..