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Showing posts from November, 2013

Receiving FM radio without an antenna

I've started experimenting with my TV & radio tuners. One of them gets perfect reception on 15 of the 17 nearby FM radio stations in the area. It gives acceptable quality on the remaining two talk radios. It's an Asus 3in1, supporting hybrid PAL/DVB-T/DVB-S/FM. My UHF TV aerial is just a bare wire of proper length at the end of an extension cable. FM reception gets a bit weaker on some channels after disconnecting it. I've tried to disconnect every cable except the display, power and keyboard to no effect. A proposed explanation is coupling through the power lines and/or improper grounding. Three of the broadcasts are high power regional transmitters with nearby origin. The rest are local ones with reduced power that also transmit from the surrounding hills. I made a script that uses fmtools to scan and tune in channels. It also coordinates digital audio capture and playback from the card's ADC. I've also experimented with gnomeradio. Unfortunately, I ha

Beating the averages - succeed in business

"Back in 1995, we knew something that I don't think our competitors understood, and few understand even now: when you're writing software that only has to run on your own servers, you can use any language you want." Paul Graham describes how they had great success with webshop SaaS  a decade before the concept became mainstream. They stayed ahead of the competition by not shooting themselves in the foot, adding: "We were just able to develop software faster than anyone thought possible." The end result speaks for itself: "The people who understood our technology best were the customers. They didn't care what language Viaweb was written in either, but they noticed that it worked really well." Although the story is from two decades ago, the lessons learned seem to be evergreen, so it's a good reading:  Beating the averages (2001)

Minification is not enough, you need tree shaking

This is one of the reasons I advocate improving your tools before you start to solve complicated projects. ECMAscript was created in the past millennium for messing around with your cursor and making text blink. Any serious use is a kludge . Big respect for people making superhuman efforts to develop working web applications, but why make your life more difficult than it needs to be? "If I had eight hours to cut down a tree, I would spend six hours sharpening my axe" - attributed to Abraham Lincoln Check out  Minification is not enough, you need tree shaking on Seth Ladd's google engineer's blog

Entrepreneur who recycles everything

I have been advocating all along that those who produce, shall be mandated to take care of the whole life cycle of their products. It's refreshing to hear that a brave individual has successfully built a viable business model behind this concept. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/30/terracycle_n_3678691.html