I’m sorry, I can’t put up with listening to the day’s news anymore, it’s all just illogical rubbish, let me just listen to ham radio operators talk on the radio about talking on the radio over a synthwave soundtrack—
There’s a custom URL option in youarelistening.to but I’m not sure exactly how it works so— try this here. Hit play on this and open the stream link below.
Something I noticed recently…
WiGLE added Bluetooth device scanning and database functionality to their Wardriving app a year or so back. Originally, I would see a few things pop up in it, usually headsets and car entertainment systems.
Now, it seems like everything comes with Bluetooth and no fecking power switch.
This is the result of just leaving scanning active overnight as people and their Bluetooth devices move past. The newer BLE stuff has…. kinda terrifyingly long range.
It makes me think… If WiGLE is scanning this for nerds like me, there’s gotta be some shady-ass analytics company using Bluetooth to track everyone without their consent and selling that data.
Personally I use maybe three Bluetooth devices regularly, and they are all switched off when not in active use. Without trying to correlate addresses to vendors or anything, I’m just going to empirically blame Apple’s crappy AirPods for a lot of these potential tracking beacons.
Some people leave the Christmas decorations up long into the new year.
KRXQ-FM 98.5 in Sacramento still has their Christmas HD-2 up.
Picture unrelated
I installed this board a couple years ago in Redding and then I see this on Facebook
Congratulations, you win a free upgrade to this shitty old Arrakis 1200 I dragged out of the e-waste bin.
That being said, You Can Decrease The Likelihood Of Damaged Consoles With This One Weird Trick: use consoles with a vertical front surface. Here’s an SAS like that, I stole the pic off someone else’s post and forget where it is but it’s slick.
Many early consoles had this layout, using big chunky rotary faders.
SAS has also replicated this with the Dees Digital, designed to meet Rick Dees’ desire to have a modern board with digital routing but with the classic rotary pots and vertical panel. It’s a beauty.
And now, additional folderol
Note to self:
The PISS is a magical thing I came up with using a bog standard off the shelf outboard mixer along with the telephone hybrid to perform a few different functions including mix-minus, mono feed to the console, and stereo feed for recording (jock on one channel, caller on the other) to a computer for polishing up and re-airing later. I should really make a proper CAD diagram of this, but come on man it’s called the PISS, and it’s going riiiight in the shitpost category on this blog. The REC switch box thing is there because the USB interface in use was in the Arrakis MARC-16 console AND LET US NEVER SPEAK OF THAT SHITTY THING AGAIN
I forgot to post this over a year ago…
So we were working on the old Continental Electronics 816R that sadly later got nuked by the Carr Fire when we heard a voice come out of the power amplifier.
Uhhh, FM transmitters don’t usually do that.
In addition it kept arcing plate voltage to ground with an irritating snapping sound and restarting repeatedly so it needed some work.
Uh-oh!
Read more “Better late than never– the arcy sparky harmonic filter”
In the late 1990s, my since departed uncle loved listening to a few different programs on WIOD Miami. He wasn’t big on sports commentary, which there was some amount of, but he really loved the programs by the late Neil Rogers and Rick and Suds.
It saddened me to learn this morning that Suds Coleman has passed after a battle with cancer.
I’ll never forget one broadcast of his in particular… As a kid, I didn’t really get a lot of the humor of the shows my uncle liked on WIOD, so I didn’t listen that often, but then he and Rick Riley were there to keep us company through Andrew.
Hurricane Andrew rolled into the Miami area on August 24, 1992. Almost immediately, the television stations went dark and a lot of the other radio stations vanished from the dial or fell dead air. However, of all the goofy places you would not expect to be unaffected… the two tower AM directional in the middle of the freaking BAY stayed up, and WIOD still had power. Their building stood on stilts (a VERY WISE design choice!) and everything stayed powered off their generator and fully on air.
Meanwhile, Rick and Suds were up there in the studio looking down, and from their vantage point, it looked like the bay was just knocking on the station’s door. It probably was, considering how vulnerable the area is to storm surge. The WSVN studio next door had three feet of salt water in it and they were off air. At this point they had lost all telephone lines and other means of communication with the outside world, but were still on the air…. and they were just providing commentary on the objects and satellite dishes from WSVN flying past their windows.
They didn’t have much to report other than that due to the loss of communications, but hearing them on the air from a darkened house buried in about 30 feet of uprooted trees with flaming pieces of debris from a nearby tree that was hitting the power lines somehow managed to convince me that we’d all go outside the next morning and everyone else would still be there.
It’s things like that which will always show just how valuable the local broadcasters are to the community, and I thank him so much for his contributions.
[Buttloads!]
… Back at’cha.
We had a Telos One X Six blow up on us, sadly.
A second unit that needed a power supply was sent over from our other stations down south. as I replaced the power supply, I admired what insane dedication to electronic design went into this monster. Image heavy post follows.
We have these neat signs in our lobby at work with the station logos on them. Originally they were screwed to the wall, leaving holes in them (argh!). At times I had to take them off so they could be used in promotional videos and such then put them back.
The lobby was painted so they came down and I decided this time to put them up with3M Command strips. Yes, their URL is actually command.com … I’ll never forget using DOS…
I used the strips that come backed in that funky high grade Velcro that connects and disconnects with a crunchy snap action, so the signs can go on and off the wall in seconds as needed. Beautiful! I kinda went by memory of where they hung, and it all went great until……
I swear I put that calendar up in the same place using the same anchors in the wall but now it fouls the KKXS sign!
Oh well. For the amazingly weedy share that station pulls in and the amount of grief its satellite automation causes me, it can stay there, right above the calendar everyone in traffic uses and the Keurig nobody uses.
On another note, I clearly have a lot to learn about MySQL. Last night a change I’d made to its configuration led to a “No space left on device” screwage as it shot logs like a firehose. That’s why this site was returning THE VOID when accessed last night.
