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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • Isn’t this extremely genre dependent? And regardless, this has been going on for a long time.

    The Supremes? Good looking gals (and great music IMHO).

    Grateful Dead? Sure, rough around the edges.

    The Doors? Um…ever seen a picture of Jim Morrison? Dude would make Derek Zoolander blush.

    Out of curiosity, I asked Spotify for modern metal music, and I got The Black Dahlia Murder — frontman looks like a regular dude who I’d grab a beer with.

    Yeah, modern pop places a ton of emphasis on looks, sure. But I think this has been pretty prominent in music for a very long time, be it the airbrushed R&B of the sixties, the androgynous glam of the eighties, or the metro sexual (guy)/model-esque looks of modern pop.


  • It can be daunting to get into the hobby, there are a ton of niches.

    To start: where are you? I’m in the USA, so that’s where my experience is.

    License: required to transmit on the ham bands; you can listen without a license.

    Range: are you looking to talk to people in your city/region? If so, a cheap “walkie-talkie” style (called “HT” in the biz — best avoid “walkie-talkie”) is a good place to start. These VHF/UHF (very/ultra high frequency) radios are affordable — something from Baofeng(~$30) or similar will work just fine, though they are often looked down on (I have one — for the price, it’s great). You will have the most luck if there is an active ham scene in your area, in large part because they may have a repeater, which can greatly extend your range. Many regions will have scheduled “nets” where you just go around and chat.

    If you’re looking for the ability to chat with folks on the other side of the world, you’ll want to look into HF (high frequency). This is much lower frequency, thus longer wavelength, than the handheld VHF/UHF HTs. So…the antennas take up a lot of space. Mine is 52 feet long, in the attic. And the radios are much more expensive (more like $1k new). ICOM 7300, Yaesu FT710 are popular entry level units (but you also need power supply, cables, and antenna).

    That said: if you just want to listen to HF, the antenna doesn’t matter as much at all, and you can use an SDR (RTL-SDR probably works?) for listening. You can probably also find a used shortwave radio that covers some of the HF ham bands.



  • When I took some astronomy classes in the early 2000s, Jocelyn Bell was absolutely credited. In her own words:

    It has been suggested that I should have had a part in the Nobel Prize awarded to Tony Hewish for the discovery of pulsars. There are several comments that I would like to make on this: First, demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too. Thirdly, I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them. Finally, I am not myself upset about it - after all, I am in good company, am I not!

    That said, yeah, I think she absolutely should have been awarded the Nobel prize. But while she did not, she has the admiration — rightly so — of many a budding astronomer.







  • Another fun trick you can play is to use a private IP on your public DNS records. This is useful for Jellyfin on Chromecast for instance — it uses 8.8.8.8 for DNS lookup (and ignores your router settings), so it wants a fully qualified domain name. But it has no problem accessing local hosts, so long as it’s from 8.8.8.8’s record.



  • I have set up local DNS entries (with Pi-Hole) to point to my srrver, but I don’t know if it possible to get certs for that, since it is not a real domain.

    So long as your certs are for your fully qualified domain there’s no problem. I do this, as do many people — mydoman.com is fully qualified, but on my own network I override the DNS to the local address. Not a problem at all — DNS is tied to the hostname, not the IP.








  • this was always bound to happen as we expand our presence in space.

    Yes and no — from a different article:

    Radiation associated with Starlink satellites was detected at observing frequencies between 110 and 188 MHz, which is well below the 10.7- 12.7 GHz radio frequencies used for the downlink communication signals.

    (The original article said 5M radiation, which should be around 60MHz.)

    So Starlink is emitting RF in spectrum where they shouldn’t, which is avoidable, but takes effort.

    My guess, and I could be wrong, is that this could be related to something other than the radio(s), such as switching power supplies finding opportunistic structures from which to radiate.