A Crummy Commercial

In the midst of an ice storm on the island so here is the Friday April 3rd blog post a day early before the power and internet go dead. I was thinking about this post: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2026/03/crystal-radio-is-still-relevant-in-21st.html I remembered that I had an unused roll of sticky backed copper foil: I got out a somewhat overly patriotic greeting card: Using a three chip card stack I cut it to shape: . Then a quick and dirty hack job applying the tape to the inside of the card stock: that tape has been sitting around for years, glad it still sticks And voila: Is it ready to protect against scanners and scammers ?  I don't really know - I don't have RFID / NFC capability to test it.  But per the Veritasium video, it could help just having the cards stacked on top of each other. The only bad thing is that it's too thick for the little credit card pockets in my wallet so I stashed it with the folding money. Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm ...

My aversion to these Collins radio machines was mentioned before: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/09/collins-s-line.html Saw these photos on the K9YA Face page: source:  https://www.facebook.com/k9ya.telegraph See those RCA jacks (3) and plugs (2), especially in the middle picture ?  All a bad actor has to do is lift the hinged lid and then unplug or swap the RCA plugs around and voila, radio not working.   That was a "welcome to the real world" moment :( Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm  

This was a weird video: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxUEOdC4VzU The weirdest thing to me is that data centers are rated by the power they use in gigawatts !  Here is a snip from a EE Times story about an OpenAI and AMD deal: . Lisa Su of AMD and Sam Altman of OpenAI A gigawatt is 1,000,000,000 watts or 1000 megawatts (nuclear power plants like Point Beach in Wisconsin are a pair of 625 megawatt plants). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Beach_Nuclear_Plant Maybe it's the QRPer in me, but why would anyone rate an AI Data Center by power rather than gigaflops or whatever the actual computing benchmarks are for AI, tokens ?  what are those ?  After viewing that video this Wisconsin data center seems sketchy to me: https://constructionreviewonline.com/openai-oracle-and-vantage-to-build-15b-lighthouse-data-center-campus-in-wisconsin/ It reminds me of this: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2023/03/foxconn.html They knocked down some houses, did a lot of land grad...

I didn't know about this: https://books.google.com/books?id=N0EEAAAAMBAJ#all_issues_anchor Nice !   I had seen this online: 6 packs of soda in returnable bottles ! But as usual, it's just not quite good enough to read the details.  Fortunately it does give the date of the issue, October 4, 1963.  BTW, it was the 1st ad inside the cover.  Here are the items I wanted to read: And why is Jed totin' his shootin' iron to the store ? I guess Jethro was supposed to eat all that food - certainly Jed, Elly May and Granny weren't gonna ! The ironic thing is that the tradition of cheap food here in the USA may be giving us a bad legacy: bad health from eating too much (of the wrong stuff) and resentment now that food is cheap no more.  I've also seen these 1970's Will Geer ads for cheap eats at Arby's: September 1974 - I remember those glass bottles with the Styrafoam sleeves May 1975   Will Geer died a few years later in 1978, just a coincidence ?  pro...

I tried checking on an online magazine, mentioned before here: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/11/that-time-hitlers-girlfriend-visited.html I apparently don't read that site very often: It's been over a year since my last visit ?  Here is the explaining link: https://hakaimagazine.com/article-short/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish/ And here is a new website done by the same  people: https://www.biographic.com/ The internet loves to change but only seems to get worse.  But Biographic looks like an interesting site with a bigger portfolio than Hakai.   One strange thought: the Littoral Combat Ship USS Milwaukee (some of the LCS ships were built in Wisconsin and tested near the island) also only lasted about a decade: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2023/09/lcs-yikes.html Operating near the shore like the LCS or Hakai must be trickier than people thought ! Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm  

Yes, I know that there's not much worth listening to on AM radio.  But it's still fun to build a crystal set,  mentioned here: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/01/alfred-p-morgan.html I recently saw this Superboy's Workshop Razor Blade Radio which I'd like to try:   Watching this Vertitasium video reminded me of crystal sets: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSJY3DvnybE It showed multiple places where the concept of a bare bones crystal radio (basically a diode and a tuned antenna) was used by the CIA for bugging the Soviets.  It is also used in RFID tags to provide power.  And it is used in credit cards and debit cards to power the chip. One thing they didn't do too well in the video was differentiate between credit cards and debit cards.  About the only place I use a credit card on the island is at Mann's store.  But somewhere I do have some thin sheet metal - might be hard on the wallet though.  I think I will also stop carrying m...

I became aware of an adjustable voltage regulator IC, the LM338K, which is a 5 amp adjustable regulator in a TO-3 can: Yikes, over $100 ?   The LM338T is the same part in a TO-220 package: The only reason I can see for offering the part in the expensive package is that the TO-3 steel case is probably hermetically sealed (hermeticity requires metal, glass or ceramic) - this is important in certain commercial and military applications.  I suspect that these are for repair / spares only - although it's surprising that they still offer the chip at all in this package.  The TO-220 packaged chip would be fine for me :) Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm