Today, digital radios with direct pushbutton entry are commonplace in the portable SW portable receiver market.
I recently tested two such portables, the pocket-sized CCrane CC Skywave SSB and the new tablet-sized Sangean ATS-909X2.
In addition to offering pushbutton tuning and automatic frequency scanning, both come with manual tuning dials, back-lit LCD displays, the ability to tune to the full SW bands (1.711–29.999 MHz) plus AM, FM (stereo in headsets) and the AIR (aeronautical 118–137 MHz) band. The ATS909X2 can also tune to longwave.
They also offer a range of bandwidth filters to improve audio clarity on SW, the ability to preset station memories, and built-in SSB (single sideband tuners) for tuning in amateur radio transmissions heard within the SW bands. //
At $169.99, the CCrane CC Skywave SSBis the less expensive of these two SW radios.
15 LCD keys poised to trigger unlimited actions. One-touch tactile operation lets you control apps, launch social posts, adjust audio, mute your mic, turn on lights and so much more, while visual feedback confirms your every command.
Travel Mode removes vaults from your computers and mobile devices, except those you mark as safe for travel.
Travel Mode is included with every 1Password subscription. If you’re stopped for inspection while traveling, the only vaults on your devices will be the ones you’ve marked as safe for travel.
Right before you travel, turn on Travel Mode:
- Click your name in the top right and choose My Profile.
- Turn on Travel Mode.
- On the devices you’re traveling with, open and unlock 1Password. Vaults that haven’t been marked as safe for travel will be removed from the app.
When you’re done traveling, return to My Profile and click to turn off Travel Mode.
Whenever you turn Travel Mode on or off, you’ll need to open 1Password on your devices while connected to the internet for the change to take effect.
- Allows simultaneous transfer of two channels of either AES/EBU or S/PDIF format in either direction.
- Houses Toslink S/PDIF Inputs/Outputs and AES/EBU (XLR) Inputs/Outputs.
- Compact and rugged design, constructed from die-cast aluminium.
- Dimensions: 85 x 80 x 40mm.
- Includes a standard 9V power supply.
£34.99 £29.16
audio isolator or data diode (one way data -- rs232)
Introduction
Yes, yes...it's yet another set of instructions for constructing your very own digital coaxial to optical converter. First off, why you would need such a device - you have a sound source with a coax digital output, and a digital recorder that accepts optical input (in most cases, everyone's favorite - the minidisc recorder). Total cost for this project will run $25-$30.
Now, does recording digitally make a difference? I would say that while analog recording sounds fine for general use, digital recording is very nice for devices where you would be better off bypassing the DACs. Digital to analog converters do exactly as they say - take digital values and produce a proportional analog voltage to feed your speakers/headphones. //
Contrarians can be useful! Yes, we’re very rude people, but sometimes we can help you avoid making a mistake. There’s a reason why the Catholic Church, when considering whether somebody should be made a saint, used to bring in a Devil’s Advocate.
The Catholic Church of liberal wisdom is The New York Times. But if you work at the Times, you probably exist in an epistemological safe space into which no adverse information ever flows. You may never even hear about certain true things; the information doesn’t penetrate the media outlets you read, the dinner parties you attend or the podcasts you listen to at the gym. //
Bennet lives in a world where everyone “knew” Palin’s team had a “clear” link to the shooting. He had probably read so many left-wing columns and blogs blaming Palin that he simply internalized the information and didn’t bother to check it. The fact-checker glossed over the false assertion also, because she was too overworked to do her job. (“I was checking things fast on deadline … my reading of it led me not to have looked at that specifically . . . I did the best of my ability in the time that I had.”) //
Funnily enough, when I worked at People magazine, where a team of hatchet-faced fact-checkers who made IRS auditors look like friendly Labradoodles would spend my Monday nights haranguing me over every adjective and preposition [.... ] anything that had previously been reported in the New York Times was considered a “red check,” i.e., unassailable truth.
At the Times itself? You can call one of the most prominent political figures an accessory to attempted murder, and the only sound you’ll hear is people shrugging.
For all The Times stories bemoaning that Americans increasingly live in “bubbles” of “misinformation,” it never seemed to look at the bubble inside its own newspaper. //
Hey, I just thought of someone who’d be perfect for the job: experienced in daily journalism, familiar with Times protocols, yet disinclined to automatically believe every vicious assertion about anyone on the Right: Her name is Bari Weiss. Maybe give her a call.
In this climate, John W. Austin approached financier Joseph A. Bower, a Detroiter, in Bower’s offices at the Liberty National Bank in New York City. Austin was an officer of the Detroit Graphite Company, and his aim was to secure a contract to paint such a bridge as might, inevitably, span the Detroit River. Their meeting spawned a remarkable accomplishment – a $23.5 million, privately financed link between the United States and Canada. As the two men met above the din of Manhattan’s streetcars and crowds, they talked of heavy construction and high finance. They could not have foreseen their role in a most curious event in Detroit’s history.
COVID will affect cardiovascular health, health care for years to come, authors say.
A bout of COVID-19 can take a hefty toll on the heart and blood vessels; people who recover from the infection have substantially higher risks of developing any of 20 serious cardiovascular disorders in the year following their recovery. Those disorders include heart failure, stroke, atrial fibrillation and other arrhythmias, myocarditis (inflammation of the heart), and blood clots in the lungs.
Cardiovascular risks increase with the severity of an infection—that is, people who need intensive care for COVID-19 face the highest cardiovascular risks. But, overall, the pandemic virus appears to be indiscriminate, wreaking havoc on cardiovascular systems and increasing risks in all groups of patients, from those with mild disease, to the young, to those without underlying conditions or pre-existing cardiovascular diseases.
As SpaceX charges forward with full and rapid rocket reuse, the company's stretch goal is to fly each "ship" every six to eight hours. These "ships" are the Starship launch system's upper stage, which is 50 meters tall and designed to carry payloads into orbit or be refilled there to fly to the Moon or Mars. The first-stage "booster" could fly even more frequently, as much as once an hour, he predicted. The first stage makes a six-minute flight to space and back and is intended to be loaded with propellant on the ground in just 30 minutes. //
SpaceX has unquestionably come a long way since 2016, when Musk first revealed the full scope of his plans to build a launch system that could establish a self-sustaining settlement on Mars. By his own estimates, such a venture would require 1 million tons of food, water, and construction materials. The settlers will need to build an entire industrial base to mine the red planet, and manufacturing consumer products will require a huge infrastructure base to refine and shape materials.
This is an incredible logistical challenge. Consider that throughout the last five decades, during the entirety of its Mars exploration program, NASA has landed a grand total of a couple of tons on the surface of Mars.
For his settlement plan, therefore, Musk proposed an unprecedented rocket and spacecraft. During a 90-minute speech in Guadalajara, Mexico, five years ago, Musk spoke of his “Interplanetary Transportation System,” or ITS. This was a huge and fully reusable launch system with a second-stage spaceship that could be fueled in low Earth orbit and then flown to Mars fully laden with supplies or dozens of settlers. Eventually, after more name changes, the ship would be christened Starship.
The 2016 speech was striking in its candor. Musk laid bare his entire vision for the first time for all the world to see. It was easy to criticize, and many did. The general viewpoint among the established space community at the time was that such a vision was preposterous.
And who could blame the critics? Only four weeks before Musk gave his speech, SpaceX had blown up its second Falcon 9 rocket in a year, losing the Amos-6 satellite on the launch pad on September 1. The company was also going to be years late delivering a Crew Dragon capability to NASA and its astronauts. And for all the talk of reusable rockets, SpaceX had not yet re-flown a single Falcon 9 rocket. Critics watched the Guadalajara speech and saw Musk the Charlatan—over-promising, grasping for government money, and spewing lies about the future when he couldn’t deliver in the present.
But in the five and a half years since Musk’s first Mars moment, the billionaire has answered those critics. SpaceX has not lost a single rocket since Amos-6. In fact, the Falcon 9 booster recently set the record for the longest streak of successful launches by any rocket ever. SpaceX also has become a reliable provider of crew transportation services to NASA, years ahead of its competitor Boeing, which NASA paid 60 percent more for the same service to low Earth orbit. And Falcon 9 rocket first stages have now flown 11 times, with no end in sight.
Even the Speaker admits her veto of GOP members is ‘unprecedented.’
When Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced her plan for a House Select Committee to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, she reserved eight members as her choice and left five for Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Well, scratch that. On Wednesday she vetoed two of Mr. McCarthy’s choices as unacceptable.
Germany is adding greater risk to its playgrounds. Some of its climbing structures are now three stories high. And who is requesting this?
Insurance companies. They want kids to grow up "risk competent." Ironically, "safety" culture is stunting kids' risk assessing abilities, in their estimation.
"This is fantastic progress in understanding childhood as the right time for children to learn to recognize and mitigate risk," says Gever Tulley.
Tulley should know. He's founder of the San Francisco Brightworks School author of 50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do). //
Perhaps out of fear of just that kind of thing, one school district—Richland, Washington— just plain got rid of its swings, arguing that "swings have been determined to be the most unsafe of all the playground equipment."
That's only because all of the merry-go-rounds, and see-saws, and monkey bars have already been uprooted.
Thus does American childhood remain, for the most part, a mulch-chip, no-slip, primary-colored plastic safe space. Or, as a German insurance exec might put it, a risk-ignorance breeding ground.
Democrats want to continue allowing private money to fund public elections. Republicans want to limit the practice, which they say gave Joe Biden an unfair and perhaps decisive advantage over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential contest.
So far, at least 10 Republican-controlled states have passed laws to prohibit or limit the use of private money in public elections. These include the swing states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Ohio. In another swing state, North Carolina, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed such legislation, as did other Democratic governors.
During 2020, nonprofits donated more than $400 million to state and local election boards to support their work and get out the vote. Most of the funding, about $350 million, came from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, distributed primarily through the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a Chicago-based progressive-led group that includes former operatives of President Barack Obama.
Democrats and others contend that such money is necessary to support the work of underfunded election boards facing the added challenges of the pandemic. Republicans assert that the private grants were disproportionately allocated to counties eventually won by Biden, a mismatch that hurt them in 2020 and, if continued, would damage their chances in future elections. //
The outsize private grants in 2020, however, were not covered by transparency laws governing federal spending.
The Capital Research Center, a conservative group that describes its study of election 2020 as “exposing how one billionaire privatized a presidential election,” estimates that in Georgia, the Zuckerberg-aligned center gave $5.06 per capita in counties that went for Biden and 98 cents in counties that went for Trump.
In Pennsylvania, another swing state, the group estimates that the center gave $3.11 per capita in counties that went for Biden, while Trump counties received 57 cents per capita. In Arizona, the group says, the breakdown was $5.83 for Biden counties and $1.29 for Trump counties. //
The private funding on its own is not as problematic as the appearance it creates, based on the originator of the money, said Ilya Shapiro, director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute.
“If just one group is providing the money, it has the look of being tainted,” Shapiro said. “Part of election integrity is the perception.”
I actually had an interesting conversation with Elon Musk about this. The question was, what would it take to build a self-sustaining settlement on the surface of Mars? It would take one million metric tons of stuff, propellant, the 3D printers, the stock for the 3D printers, food, agriculture, domes, wherever you're gonna live, all of it, to get to the point where you could have all that on Mars and those people could then survive without intervention from Earth. So one million metric tons, if you think about that, it takes a very large rocket and a whole sort of sophisticated spacecraft. The Curiosity mission was what, a couple billion dollar mission to get to Mars? And that Rover was one ton. That's the challenge we're talking about, sending one million Perseverances or Curiosities worth of mass to Mars. It's an enormous challenge. //
Right now we're focused on stepping one foot on Mars and then 10 and then a hundred, slowly building up to have a permanent human presence. There's no physics reason preventing us from inhabiting Mars, it's a matter of technology and engineering and patience, and most importantly, money. But there's no reason why we can't eventually be on Mars. Humanity will have a presence on Mars. Well, I'm not going.
The truth is, solar flares as large as the one that caused the 1859 Carrington Event happen fairly regularly. Since we started monitoring the Sun’s solar cycle, we’ve gotten lucky on a number of occasions — CMEs that would have hit us even harder than 1859 have merely glanced us due to a non-ideal trajectory. Meanwhile, the United States’ grid is more vulnerable to such events than ever before — our transformer grid is, on average, nearly 40 years old, high-voltage power lines are carrying far more energy than they used to on a day-to-day basis, and there’s virtually no way to quickly repair the damage such a storm would cause.
Mars bears little resemblance to the primordial planet it must have been. Mars’ atmosphere is a fraction the density of Earth’s — air pressure at the summit of Mount Everest (the highest point on Earth) is 4.89 PSI, while the air pressure at the bottom of Mars’ Hellas Planitia (a 23,465-foot deep crater) is just 0.168 PSI. In other words, the air pressure at the highest point on our planet is 29x higher than the air pressure at the lowest point on Mars.
There have been three main hypotheses for how Mars might have lost its atmosphere: It’s possible that Mars’ atmosphere was eroded by solar wind, that much of the atmosphere was torn away by a cataclysmic impact, or that the low gravity of the planet allowed atmosphere to blow off and dissipate over time. These conditions are not mutually exclusive, and it’s possible that all three of them played a part, but NASA believes it has found sufficient evidence to assign a primary cause. The culprit? Solar wind — particularly the types of energetic blasts emitted by the sun during periods of unrest.
Samuel Sorie Sesay, one of a dwindling group of West Africans who fought in the British army in World War Two, died last month in Sierra Leone at the age of 101. Ahead of his funeral on Friday, Umaru Fofana looks back at his life.
From this article at extremetech.com:
"The problem is, today’s Mars bears little resemblance to the primordial planet it must have been. Mars’ atmosphere is a fraction the density of Earth’s — air pressure at the summit of Mount Everest (the highest point on Earth) is 4.89 PSI, while the air pressure at the bottom of Mars’ Hellas Planitia (a 23,465-foot deep crater) is just 0.168 PSI. In other words, the air pressure at the highest point on our planet is 29x higher than the air pressure at the lowest point on Mars."
IOW, Mars' highest atmospheric pressure is almost 30 times lower than the air pressure at the top of Everest. Just think of how much gas you'd need to bring the surface of the entire planet up to just half the air pressure of Everest's peak - about 2.9PSI.
Spinal cord injuries are life-altering, as they prevent the transmission of nerve impulses past the point of injury. That means no sensory inputs make it to the brain, and no signals from the brain make it to the muscles normally controlled by the brain. But improvements in our understanding of neurobiology have raised the hope that we can eventually restore some control over paralyzed limbs.
Some of these efforts focus purely on nerve cells, attempting to get them to grow through the damage at the site of injury and restore a functional spinal cord. Others attempt to use electronics to bypass the injury entirely. Today, there was very good news for the electronics-focused effort: researchers have designed a spinal implant that can control the leg muscles of paralyzed individuals, allowing those individuals to walk with assistance within hours of the implant being activated. //
An alternative to that type of biological repair is what you might consider an electronic bypass. In its most sophisticated form, a bypass would involve an implant that registers neural activity, located either in the brain or in the spinal cord closer to the brain than the injury. This is then paired with some sort of hardware—potentially another implant—on the far side of the injury that stimulates the nerves based on the information read by the other implant.
A less sophisticated version of this is to simply have preprogrammed behaviors you want to control, such as the leg movements involved in walking. That is the approach used in the recent work. But, as will become very clear, "less sophisticated" leaves a wide-open space for some very sophisticated work. //
The results were astonishing. Prior to activating the implant, none of the three participants could initiate any sort of muscle activity when attempting to take a step. The same day that the model was trained, all of the subjects could take steps on a treadmill if they were supported. The model was able to generate the right series of currents to stimulate the leg muscles appropriately.
Out for a walk and more
With three days of fine-tuning, the participants were able to walk around a room if given sufficient support. Eventually, they were able to stand unaided and walk supported only by a walker—their legs were controlled via an implant in their abdomen, which responded to triggers on the handles of the walker. One volunteer was even able to go up stairs.
Separate programs were also developed that allowed the subjects to ride recumbent bicycles or to paddle a kayak.
One striking thing is that two of the subjects actually regained the ability to exert a bit of voluntary muscle control in their formerly paralyzed limbs. Apparently, a bit of weak connectivity was still present but unable to provide a signal strong enough to trigger muscle activity. With extended activity, those weak connections were gradually strengthened, providing a complete pathway from brain to muscle.
Some Mazda owners in the Seattle area are stuck with bricked infotainment systems after listening to a particular radio station.
According to the Seattle Times, the problem began on January 30 and afflicted Mazdas from model years 2014 to 2017 when the cars were tuned to the local NPR station, KUOW 94.9. At some point during the day's broadcast, a signal from KUOW caused the Mazdas' infotainment systems to crash—the screens died and the radios were stuck on 94.9 FM.
From there, the infotainment systems became trapped in a rebooting loop, never successfully completing the task. When afflicted owners took their cars to be checked at local Mazda dealers, they were told that the "connectivity master unit" was dead and needed to be replaced.
The snag? A new CMU costs $1,500—if you can find one, which you can't, because of supply chain problems.
The problem, according to Mazda, was that the radio station sent out image files in its HD radio stream that did not have extensions, and it seems that Mazda's infotainment system of that generation needs an extension (and not a header) to tell what a file is. No extension, no idea, and the system gets corrupted.
The left is rolling back the progress we have made in making discrimination unacceptable in our culture and society. //
They are the ones who have implemented a discriminatory racial-spoils system in government and academic institutions throughout the country. Democrats’ racial preferences have much more in common with Jim Crow than what Biden likes to call “Jim Crow 2.0,” referring to benign Republican efforts to ensure election integrity.
Let’s start with President Joe Biden’s announcement that he will consider only a black woman for the U.S. Supreme Court. This is something no private employer is allowed to do: disregard all other qualified job candidates to make a hiring decision based solely on race and sex.
In virtually every other context, such odious behavior would violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans racial and sex discrimination in employment and many other facets of everyday life, including education. That law not only made racial and sex discrimination unlawful, it helped change American society to make such discrimination morally unacceptable, as it should be. //
Many universities — American, Stanford, and Cornell among them — are now establishing segregated “black student-only” housing. Most of us thought the detestable separate-but-equal doctrine was discarded in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education. Apparently, we were wrong. Judging from its total inaction, the Biden Justice Department sees nothing wrong in reviving this aspect of a foregone era that we had successfully discarded. //
Modern “progressives” are rolling back the progress we have made in making discrimination unacceptable in our culture and society. They are teaching our young people that discrimination is not only acceptable, but laudable as long as the “right” sex and races benefit.
The next generation is learning that no matter how hard they work, no matter their qualifications, no matter their circumstances, they may be denied a college education, medical treatment, a job, and a host of other benefits based on the color of their skin or how many X chromosomes they have.
So, who is really closer to imposing “Jim Crow 2.0,” one of Biden’s favorite phrases? To answer that question, he and his cohorts need only look in the mirror.