A Crummy Commercial

This video popped up on my feed: source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n4pkaxKNLc Luc Lagace, the "lab guy" at Centre ACER, doesn't say how they can tell it's 50% cane sugar but I suspect it is done by using the quantity of carbon 13 in the syrup. A longer form video from Radio Canada is here (unless you can "parlez-vous" turn on the closed captions and autotranslate to English): source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9BzYm4yzg8 C3 versus C4 photosynthesis was mentioned previously but for fake honey: https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2025/07/this-isnt-honey.html   I'm not able to taste a difference between cane sugar versus maple sugar but I suspect, as with the honey, that the adulterated syrup is cheaper.  The bulging can shown is probably just fermentation, old Steve was a little careless with cleanliness or temperature ?  That's why I pressure can my maple syrup - it shouldn't ferment although I do get cloudiness (which settles out) and...

I saw this in the daily ad from Electronic Goldmine: $20 for a Germanium diode is a little high but the name Hoffman reminded me of this ad: Here is a Hoffman Solar radio KP706 for $289 on Ebay (and the solar cells don't work !) source:  https://www.ebay.com/itm/177777411535 The inflated price of the KP706: More info on the KP706 here: https://solarmuseum.org/cells/hoffman-rp-706-solar-radio/ Here is a picture of Les Hoffman of Hoffman Radio: source:  https://www.ebay.com/itm/306751529317 Basically everything associated with Hoffman is high in price :) Here is the wiki for Les Hoffman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Hoffman And what could be done with that $20 diode in a $289 radio ?  Maybe as a detector replacement ?  Here is the Beitman 1960 schematic: It's a nice radio but of a pretty standard design, I'll keep both my $20 and $289 in my pocket :) Best Regards, Chuck, WB9KZY http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm  

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