There was an article last week about a new shortwave radio card for PCs where the IF (intermediate frequency) and audio processing is software based. Typically a radio (TV, satellite, etc...) has circuitry which first takes the high frequency signal from the antenna and turns it into a lower IF frequency. The lower frequency is easier to deal with and the circuitry cheaper. Similar to breaking a complex math formula down into a series of addition and multiplication chunks that your calculator can handle. The IF signal is then demodulated, which means the "intelligence" (guess that depends on the type of radio you listen to) is extracted. In other words, the audio. Now Motorola has rolled out a "digital radio" chipset for capturing and processing plain old AM and FM radio signals into something approximating what digital radio has been promising all these years.
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email thisIt was a Mac attack weekend. Bought a Palm Serial-USB adaptor, installed Palm Desktop 4 on both of our Macs, downloaded the new iSync beta, and got everything up and running with my road weary Palm V and Faith's Palm III. This got me to thinking (stand back) about Faith's online Piano schedule, which was rigged up using MySQL and PHP. Surely there's a way to publish an iCal calendar on her webpage? Yep, PHP iCalendar. Needs a little costume retrofitting and a few bugs fixed before I put it online but this is a much cleaner way to handle the scheduling.
That's not to say there wasn't any Windows action. I've been spending way too much time lately trying to get a working printer on the network. Networking the printer in Windows (and printing from OS X) isn't the problem, it's the damn printers. Inkjets are totally and utterly evil. The "free" Lexmark printer (came with computer) has already consumed over a hundred dollars in cartridges since the first of the year and we rarely print. The cartridges dry out, get clogged, exhale vast quantities during cleaning, and generally suck (at their job and at your wallet). I took apart an old Epson Stylus and found that it has a huge diaper under the carriage. Whenever you clean the heads you are squirting into the diaper. Sad and sick. So this weekend I pulled the ten year old Microtek Truelaser out of the closet, blew the dust off, plugged it into the Win2k box and it worked. Sure, it still has a few paper feed problems but most of that can be fixed by going to a thicker stock. It has a huge toner cartridge that puts inkjets to shame and still costs less then thirty bucks. Obviously built before printer manufacturers sold their souls.
Have you tried:
http://fixyourownprinter.com/
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I ran into them while looking for Microtek information and found that it shares the same core engine as a couple dozen other laser printers from that era.
What we need is "fixtheprintercompanies.com"
Amen.