GPS devices are both cool and useful. You know what's even more cool? Building your own GPS device from scratch. Excerpt:

The block diagram of the described GPS receiver is shown on Fig. 13. In the microwave frequency range, at L-band, the antenna needs a direct visibility of the satellites. Therefore it has to be installed outdoor, on the vehicle roof or on top of a portable receiver. Due to its excellent performance, a half-turn quadrifilar helix is used as a circularly polarized, hemispherical-coverage antenna. The LNA is installed directly under the antenna. Using two inexpensive GaAs FETs it achieves 30dB of gain making any following (reasonable) cable loss almost unimportant.

Circuit diagram image.

The GPS receiver includes a fixed-tuned downconverter to a suitable IF, an IF amplifier and limiter, a dedicated DSP hardware, a MC68010 based microcomputer with a small keyboard and a LCD display and a single master crystal oscillator for all frequency conversions and sampling rates. The downconversion from the GPS L1 frequency (1575.42MHz) is made in two steps for convenient image filtering. The first wide IF is in the 102MHz range and the second wide IF is in the 10MHz range. The wide IF bandwidth is set to around 2MHz. The actual value of the wide IF bandwidth is not critical, since filtering is only required to prevent spectrum aliasing in the signal sampling circuit.

6139kHz was selected as master crystal oscillator frequency of the described GPS receiver, since the best TCXOs are usually available for the frequency range between 5MHz and 10MHz. The output of the 6139kHz master oscillator is used both as the sampling frequency for the IF A/D conversion and as an input to a chain of multiplier stages to supply all of the frequencies required in the downconverter. Limiting the temperature range from 0 to 30 degrees C, as encountered during normal receiver operation, the TCXO was replaced by a much less expensive conventional crystal oscillator in all of the prototypes built.

Sampling the 10MHz wide-IF signal with 6139kHz produces a third downconversion to a 2303kHz nominal center frequency. The latter is the final carrier frequency that needs to be regenerated in the dedicated DSP hardware. The dedicated DSP hardware is designed as a microprocessor peripheral with read and write registers and is interrupting the MC68010 CPU once every millisecond to match the GPS C/A-code period.

In the portable, stand-alone GPS receiver, the operating software is stored in a compressed form in a 32kbytes EPROM. After power-on reset, the software is decompressed in 128kbytes of battery-backed CMOS RAM, which is also used to store the system almanac and other data to speed-up the acquisition of four valid satellites. For the same reason the CPU also has access to a small battery-backed real-time clock chip.

A small 8-key keyboard is used to select the various menus of the operating software and manually set some receiver parameters if so desired. The portable version of the GPS receiver is using a LCD module with integrated driving electronics and two rows of 40 alphanumeric (ASCII) characters each, to display the receiver status, the almanac data or the results of the navigation computations.

There's a lot more at the article. Go there now.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 01:40 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 542 words, total size 4 kb.

No nasty downloading and burning ISOs, where you find that your handy dandy DVD burner will not correctly burn a Linux Live CD image. You absolutely need a CD (only) burner. A CD-RW/DVD-Read only will work fine, but if the drive also burns DVDs, you will be SOL when it comes time to boot your Live CD. Trust me: this is the voice of ugly experience. Anyway, How To Forge has an article that details the use of UNetbootin, which allows to install various Linux distros onto your computer. It even creates real partitions so that you have a working dual boot system when you've finished.
"In the end, you have a dual-boot system (Linux/Windows or Linux/Linux). "

Very cool.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 10:22 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 130 words, total size 1 kb.

Falko Timme installed OpenSUSE 10.3 in the hopes of creating a full-fledged Windows replacement. Did he succeed? You be the judge. Excerpt:

This tutorial shows how you can set up an OpenSUSE 10.3 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

I want to say first that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

Falko lists all of the software he needs for his desktop to be considered Windows replacement worthy. It's a long list, so I won't reprint it here. I'll simply mention that it's quite comprehensive. Also, he goes through a step-by-step tutorial which will get your new system completely installed. The result? it looks pretty darned good.

Related links, if you're so inclined:

• The Perfect Desktop - Fedora 7
  
• The Perfect Desktop - PCLinuxOS 2007
  
• The Perfect Desktop - Mandriva 2007 Spring Free (Mandriva 2007.1)
  
• The Perfect Desktop - Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn
  
• The Perfect Desktop - Debian Etch (Debian 4.0)
  

Posted by: Physics Geek at 10:12 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 242 words, total size 2 kb.

Those tricksy Linux developers. They've created more distros than you can shake a stick at, one variation for pretty much any need or desire. I think that the multitude of distributions is both a strength AND a weakness (newbies get overwhelmed trying to figure out what to testdrive). Pretty much any niche has its own favorite. This time though, some developers filled a need which I believe doesn't currently exist: Vixta, which attempts to duplicate the Windows Vista look and feel. Yeah, I don't get it either. Emulating an OS that vendors are currently selling a downgrade for isn't something that I'd bother to work on. To be fair, the need may exist at some point.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 09:55 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 120 words, total size 1 kb.

Lots of people talk past their political opponents with regards to the current US troops still in Iraq. Gerard reposts an excerpt from his 2004 pre-election column and adds some more insightful comments. While it's entirely possible for reasonable to read Gerard's analysis and remain unconvinced, he does present a compelling argument for his case. Excerpt:

Given these five reasons derived from the facts on the ground in late 2004, it would be suicidal for the United States to withdraw militarily from Iraq for at least ten years and probably 20. The level of forces needed to maintain control can fluctuate as the situation dictates, but the presence of significant forces is a necessity.

This is not to say that the United States will not withdraw, but only to underscore the price of such foolishness. The United States has, through bad politics, misdirection and clouded thinking, made monstrous errors of judgment in the past and is certainly capable of doing so in the future. It is only to say that should we, through a posturing for mere political power at home, cede military control of Iraq and hence the Middle East before the matter of Islamic fundamentalism is settled, and the Islamic cultures fully assimilated into the 21st century, departure early would only require our subsequent return. And that return will be far more bloody and necessary than anything seen to date in what is still a brush-fire war.

I'm certain that John Cole will posit that this post is more proof that the center/right side of the blogosphere has gotten dumber since he left it.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 11:22 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 272 words, total size 2 kb.

Our lovely hostess at Everyday Stranger gave birth to the Lemonheads via emergency C-section. Be sure to stop by and congratulate our newest MuNu mother.

Helen, here's a long distance electronic hug from me to you.

In honor of the Lemonheads, I present the following:
more...

Posted by: Physics Geek at 01:48 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 53 words, total size 1 kb.

Harvey posted a quip that I plan to file the serial numbers off of, take across state lines and use as my own:

Coworker: It all depends on whether you see the glass as half-full or half-empty.

Harvey: The glass is chipped and I cut my lip on it.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 12:57 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 55 words, total size 1 kb.

Via Gerard comes this little SNL clip on YouTube. Truthfully, if the voice were more grating, and the smile a little more I-eat-live-babies chilling, I'd think it was Hillary. Money quote:

"And you, John Edwards, you phony, two-faced, ambulance chasing little rat bastard."
more...

Posted by: Physics Geek at 12:53 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 49 words, total size 1 kb.

Colleges and university endowments, that is. Gregg Easterbrook, in TMQ this week, makes one of his usual detours into a non-sports topic and, as usual, makes a pretty good analysis. Excerpt:

At Least Harvard Hasn't Demanded a Seat on the G-8 -- Yet: According to last week's Wall Street Journal, Harvard's endowment is up to $34.9 billion and Yale's has risen to $22.5 billion. To put those numbers into perspective, the Harvard endowment now exceeds the gross domestic product of Sri Lanka or Kenya and the Yale endowment exceeds the GDP of Costa Rica or Iceland.

It's wonderful that such great institutions of higher learning are funded so well, with assets that seem to assure their continued existence for centuries. But as Tuesday Morning Quarterback asked last year when Harvard's endowment hit a mere $29 billion, why does anyone pay anything at all to attend this school?

Conservatively managed investments using low-risk strategies yield 5 to 7 percent per year; federal law requires many types of philanthropies to disburse a minimum of 5 percent per year or lose their tax-exempt status. At 5 percent, the Harvard endowment would throw off $1.7 billion annually. That's $104,000 for each of the 16,715 undergrads and graduate students currently attending the university. Yet according to College Board figures, the average undergrad who lives on campus at Harvard this year will pay $37,900, that being the official price minus average financial aid award. Can Harvard seriously expect us to believe it is spending $144,000 per year per undergraduate? (That's the actual payments from students plus 5 percent of the endowment.) Shifting Harvard's endowment spending from empire-building to reducing tuition -- either lower prices for everyone, or, say, eliminating all costs for students from families that make $200,000 or less -- would be a tremendous progressive step without jeopardizing Harvard's legitimate desire to hold a rich endowment into the indefinite future.

Instead, Harvard just keeps charging an arm and a leg and the endowment keeps empire-building. One result of the extremely high cost of private colleges is that many graduates feel they must go into high-paying professions to justify what was just spent. If Harvard were free for students whose families aren't rich, or cost much less for all students, perhaps graduates would be more likely to become public-school teachers or Peace Corps volunteers or work for the U.S. Public Health Service or in legal-aid settings. Rather than use its colossal financial assets to educate a generation of smart people willing to serve society in thanks for a great education at little cost, Harvard continues to soak parents, teach money obsession and set an example of hoarding.

Update: Uh uh. I bet that Mr. Easterbrook won't be invited to any TNR reunions anytime soon.

Exaggerating the Case Against Bush Only Lessens the Focus on His Real Faults: There's a lot to dislike about the George W. Bush administration -- the Iraq war, lack of action on petroleum waste, wiretapping -- but in the rush to make Bush seem as bad as possible, the establishment media consistently have distorted his domestic environmental record, which is basically fine. Air, water and toxic pollution have declined since Bush took office; all U.S. environmental indicators except greenhouse gas emissions have been positive for 20 to 30 years, which you'd never know from opening the morning newspaper.

A problem is that environmental journalists are genetically programmed to spin all stories as bad news while ignoring progress. A classic example is stories expressing horror and outrage that environmental prosecutions initiated by the EPA or filed by the Justice Department are declining, as they have been since the middle of the Clinton administration. But it's good that environmental prosecutions are declining -- the reason is that pollution is declining! As pollution declines, there are fewer violations to prosecute. If speeding declined, police would write fewer tickets: Would we be glad speeding was declining or express horror over the shocking, shocking reduction in prosecution of speeders?

There the canard was again as the Sunday lead-headline story of The Washington Post: "The Environmental Protection Agency's pursuit of criminal cases against polluters has dropped off sharply during the Bush administration, with the number of prosecutions, new investigations and total convictions all down by more than a third," the story began. Of course environmental prosecution is declining, there is less to prosecute every year! The Post's banner story ran 38 paragraphs but never mentioned that all forms of pollution except greenhouse gases are declining, and because greenhouse-gas emissions are legal, there's nothing to prosecute. Mention that pollution is in long-term decline, and Sunday's front-page banner story in The Washington Post goes "poof."

Honesty. It's something that The New Republic seems to have forgotten.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 12:08 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 794 words, total size 5 kb.

Where Aren't They Now? over at Cracked offers some post-sitcom career roundups of people who you probably don't remember anyway, except maybe Danica McKellar. I second their comment below:

more...

Posted by: Physics Geek at 02:23 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 52 words, total size 1 kb.

The GABF is once again about to kick off in Denver, Colorado. I will be there-again- for my 9th trip in the last 10 years; I took off one year when my daughter chose the GABF weekend to be born. Such is life. In any event, I'll be there Thursday thru Saturday. If anyone wants to meet up for a brew or 1200, look for me in the Mountain section. Or is the Mountain West section? I forget. In any event, I'll be pouring Thursday/Friday/Saturday evening, leaving Saturday afternoon for my free drinking session. And I'll end each day with a Thai pie and a Fat Tire at Old Chicago's, which means that I'll start each day with a ginormous fart. Hey, it's worth it, to me anyway. My roommates might disagree. In any event, see (maybe) some of you there. Drop me a line if you're interested in some real life geekery.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 04:43 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 161 words, total size 1 kb.

1 All beer is Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. All else is stamp collecting. Well, okay, I like Fat Tire well enough. Little sweet for my taste but it's all right. In a pinch

Posted by: Ken S, Fifth String on the Banjo of Life at October 01, 2007 08:59 PM (Yh9SA)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

I wasn't feeling well, so I went to see my doctor. He told me that I needed to eat better to feel better. He said that I should visualize my foods as colors- red, yellow, green- and that I should eat those colors. So I went home and ate a big plate of M&Ms. Sure enough, I felt much better.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 02:30 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 64 words, total size 1 kb.

Jay Pinkerton, over at Cracked, runs down which movie version Batman is the baddest of them all. Excerpt:

#5. ADAM WEST - Batman: The Movie (1966)
...
Ass-Kicking Ability
BatWest fights like someone having a stroke. To be fair, Batman: The Movie's supposed to be campy. To once again be unfair, it looks like they didn't so much choreograph their fights as just run around flailing their arms like the set just caught on fire:
...

#4. GEORGE CLOONEY - Batman & Robin (1997)
...
Posse
BatClooney sees no problems whatsoever with suiting Chris O'Donnell and Alicia Silverstone up in benippled costumes and enlisting the idiots in his war on crime, despite the fact that no right-thinking person would trust Chris O'Donnell or Alicia Silverstone to lick stamps without turning purple and asphyxiating themselves.
...
#2. MICHAEL KEATON - Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992)
...
Smoothness with the Ladies
For a short guy with no muscles, BatKeaton scores positively epic amounts of ass during his Bat-tenure in Batman and Batman Returns, including Kim Basinger and Michelle Pfeiffer in a catsuit. Must be that impressive wingspan on the cape.

Plus, unlike other Batmen (who refuse to get involved in relationships because it would distract from their war on crime), BatKeaton's all about the pussy: That crime stuff can just chill out for a night, he'll get to it tomorrow. He freely reveals his identity to his girlfriends, romances them with candle-lit meals at Wayne Manor, and then makes them watch him sleep upside-down after he's bedded them. That's a little creepy, admittedly, but one could argue that after you've managed to bed '80s-era Kim Basinger, you can pretty much go ahead and do any goddamn thing you'd like.

The rest, gentle readers, I leave for your perusal.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 11:07 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 300 words, total size 2 kb.

Geekks, dorks and dweebs, too. A 49-disc collection of the entire ST:TNG will be released for the low, low price of $440. Excerpt:

The definitive DVD collection features all 176 classic episodes from the series' 1987-1994 run along with all-new special features including "The Next Generation's Impact: 20 Years Later," "The Next Generation's Legacy: 2007" and "Star Trek Visual Effects Magic: A Roundtable Discussion." The collection is encased in an incredible collector's packaging and includes an exclusive poster. Each season also includes additional bonus features exploring memorable missions, crew profiles, behind-the-scenes and much, much more.

Time for a Deep Space Nine collection.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 07:26 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 108 words, total size 1 kb.

I almost never check my Sitemeter statistics because (a) I blog because I enjoy it and (b) the low numbers are usually depressing. In any event, I clicked to see my traffic levels for the last week and saw an enormous abnormality: I had over 1,400 visitors on Saturday, September 15. Now when I almost never get such large numbers- I don't do porn, although I will post the ocassional naughty picture of some hot women- and, since I don't have the premium Sitemeter account, I have no way of knowing from whence this traffic came. Can anyone out there help me? Is there some way to track down where the boost in traffic came from? Sitemeters only goes back 100 clicks.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 01:46 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 134 words, total size 1 kb.

It doesn't bother me that wrinkled, bitter old Dan Rather filed suit against CBS. It doesn't bother me that he's going to prove ::ahem:: that the documents were, in fact, real. It doesn't even bother me that his partner in crime, Mary Mapes, is going to the mat for Danny boy. After all, her reputation is shit because of this too, so I expect her to stick her fingers in her ears while going LALALALALALA at the top of her lungs. What does disturb me are the bugfuck crazy commenters at the H.R. Puffington Stuff, who claim that -finally!!!- the truth will be revealed. Other than the fact that these loons are overdue for their meds, I mean.

I won't link to the Huff-and-puff-and-blow-your-house-down site, but Jim Treacher does, so go read his post. And especially follow the link to this story as well.

Update: From Slublog's comment in Allah's post comes this link to Jonah. Excerpt:

In 2004, at the height of the Dan Rather Memogate story, I wrote in National Review: “Across the media universe the questions pour out: Why is Dan Rather doing this to himself? Why does he drag this out? Why won’t he just come clean? Why would he let this happen in the first place? Why is CBS standing by him? Why ... why ... why?

“There is only one plausible answer: Ours is a just and decent God.”

Posted by: Physics Geek at 12:11 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 245 words, total size 2 kb.

All you need is a can of Coke and a chocolate bar. Oh, and something to set fire to.

I'm more of a gallon of gasoline and a Spaceballs- the Flamethrower- sort of a guy, but whatever gets you going.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 12:00 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 50 words, total size 1 kb.

Have you been reading DM of the Rings? If not, you are seriously missing out. Young has taken the movies and, well, here's the introductory paragraph:

Lord of the Rings is more or less the foundation of modern D&D. The latter rose from the former, although the two are now so estranged that to reunite them would be an act of savage madness. Imagine a gaggle of modern hack-n-slash roleplayers who had somehow never been exposed to the original Tolkien mythos, and then imagine taking those players and trying to introduce them to Tolkien via a D&D campaign.

Alas, 144 episodes later and the D&D trek through the LOTR books and movies is complete. However, he's got a new project, which I'm certain you'll find entertaining as well.

Update: I'm such a moron. I'm been clicking through DM of the Rings so long that I didn't realize that I hadn't actually added Twenty Sided to my blogroll. Consider that fixed.

Speaking of the blogroll, I'm going to start pruning some names real soon. Not because I want to exactly, but some of the links and domains no longer exist. Sure, I held on for a couple of years until Rachel Lucas started blogging again, and it was a small matter to change A Small Victory to A Big Victory when Michele Catalano started blogging solo again. And I don't drop people for not blogging. What I do drop them for is when their domain no longer exists, or has become a porn site. In any event, some dead wood will be removed.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 08:02 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 272 words, total size 2 kb.

Via the Corner comes this history quiz of 60 questions. Here is my result:

You answered 57 out of 60 correctly — 95.00 %
Average score for this quiz during September: 75.2%
Average score since September 18, 2007: 75.2%

The 3 questions I missed shall remain nameless. In any event, how did you do?

Posted by: Physics Geek at 08:26 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 58 words, total size 1 kb.

Since I didn't want to pay $200 for Microsoft Office Pro a few years back, I loaded Open Office onto my wife's new computer. It took a little getting used to, but she's quite happy with it. Whenever someone sends her a Word document, she simply opens it in Writer, saves it as an ODF and then moves on. However, if you had lots of documents to convert, you might not want to migrate them one by one. XLM.com has a script that converts a single file from Word to Write and it's an easy task to create a .bat file or a shell script file in Windows or Linux, respectively. Also, SearchEnterpriseLinux links to several 3rd party utilities to perform the same task.

Anyway, check it out, if you're so inclined.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 02:19 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 146 words, total size 1 kb.