A Crummy Commercial

A few recent pictures, first these from the cam: I've been keeping the cam relatively close to the house.  It dawned on me that the deer know about fruit trees, the volunteer crabapple tree sometimes will have a lot of fruit.  I don't see how they can stand the crabapples though.  I may try setting up the cam near some of the apple trees. The only thing about the crabapple tree is that it's hard to see them with the grass so high - that can be remedied, Chuck ! The Town recently repainted the lines on the road.   In addition they painted the four rectangles around the surveying benchmarks: I am suspicioning that these are meant for the aerial Door County photo property maps, previously mentioned here: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2026/06/surveying.html Finally I rode by the nearest DSL installation by the side of the road: And by the DSL stuff was this can which I *think* has the loading coils for the POTS (plain old telephone service).  That silver round thingy ...

I've mentioned Northlake and the Northlake Hotel before many times, for example: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2025/12/northlake-in-my-mind.html This short video popped up on my Youtube feed: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjV5KmQaGPI It mentions that a recent change was made to the southbound exit from the Tri-state Tollway (294) which accounts for the sealing off of the "jug handle" mentioned in the "Northlake on my mind" blog.  Now the southbound motorist exits 294 south on the county line road (between Cook and Dupage counties).  Here is the tollway map: This new exit is in orange on the map.  It's between the sportsmans club and McMaster-Carr.  There are also new traffic lights but the motorist can then get on Lake street to get to the former Northlake Hotel, now Concord Place.  Unfortunately Google Street View is stuck at 2022 so it doesn't have this new exit viewable yet :( Update: I finally found a video with views from the top of Concord...

"why'd you have to say that, impossible,  why'd you have to say that ?" source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC4efdAv1LM BTW, per Heinlein, strap on wings might allow humans to fly: on the Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Menace_from_Earth https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/SF/FSF/FSF_1957_08.pdf (note that The Menace from Earth is followed by a 1 pager from Asimov: A Loint of Paw :) Other than being fun, why mention this ? Because I've always found it much easier to do a task if I know that it has been done before.  The real pioneers will either fail or they'll spend a lot of time/money on a problem.  It was so much easier to write a keyer program for an 8 pin PIC microcontroller after seeing that the fellows at Embedded Research had already created the Tick keyers.  (I did add my old favorite, the potentiometer based speed control).  After Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth it was easier for NASA to send John Glenn around 3 times.  S...

https://www.pcmag.com/news/is-your-website-down-outage-hits-hosting-provider-namecheap Unfortunately, my email and website are hosted by Namecheap.  So I happened to try email and got this: Then I tried the WB9KZY.COM site and got this: Thinking maybe it was a browser thing I tried Edge instead of Firefox and got this: Namecheap did have some explanations up: Hopefully this isn't a huge problem for my business but customers have enough reasons to buy from other vendors, don't need this in addition ! Update: sometime between 6:00 PM and 6:47 PM on Thursday, August 13, 2026 both email and the web site are back. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm  

While pursuing a favorite activity, browsing magazines, I saw this cover: It's from the March 1934 issue of Radio-Craft magazine.  And the Phonosone article is by none other than Hugo Gernsback himself ! source: https://dn760003.eu.archive.org/0/items/Radio-Craft_1934_03/Radio-Craft_1934_03.pdf If you've never heard of Hugo Gernsback before try the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Gernsback photo scanned from the November 1967 issue of Radio-Electronics magazine (page 4) by Michael Holley Swtpc6800. The phonosone itself was basically one half of a pair of headphones that were modified to provide for better bone conduction. No, I have not tried building one although the man on the cover does seem to be really happy  !  :) The inflated price of Radio-Craft : I will have to look to see if Mann's Store still has magazines for sale the next time I'm in there. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm 

Baseball is complicated (skip to 10 minutes in): source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_f8KpkKczQ Apparent 4th out ?  Huh ?  Here is the explanation from The Athletic: What are 'fourth outs'? Let’s set the scene: It’s the seventh inning. Runners are on the corners. Toronto leads Boston 2-0. The center-field scoreboard shows two outs, so both runners go on contact.   Except there weren’t two outs. An earlier play was announced in the press box as a double play, but the hitter (the Red Sox’s Nick Sogard) was the runner on first. As Anthony Seigler crossed home plate, the scoreboard operator realized the mistake.   Watch the very top of this GIF, as the number of outs rolls back from two to one: Blue Jays pitcher Simeon Woods-Richardson and catcher Brandon Valenzuela pounded their gloves in unison, seemingly also believing it to be three outs.   Second baseman Josh Smith knew. But when he doubled up Sogard at first to end the inning, why did the r...

Keeping on the grade school in the 1960s theme, I was reminded of my encounter with the urban phenomenon: crossing guards.  We moved to Fox Point in fall 1961 where I went to first grade at Indian Hill School.  Here's the class picture (I'm at the lower right): source: https://archive.org/details/MapleDale/Maple%20Dale6/page/n3/mode/2up For some reason I remember Mrs. Smith as being really OLD  :)     I HATE the fact that 4 of those 21 kids are dead in 2026 :(   Now except for maybe one time (that was a civil defense thing where school was let out early and we walked home from Maple Dale) I usually rode the bus, at least in the lower grades.  The suburbs didn't have sidewalks or crossing guards or even that many stop lights.  So it was probably asking a lot for a 4, 5 or 6 year old kid to walk 1.8 miles unsupervised to school and back home. Bing chose this route to Indian Hill where I went to 1st grade . Bing doesn't like direct rou...