The Avalanches list of favorite videos on YouTube

The truly awesome Electricity helicopter video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXnvj00ZEw8

The classic soccer girls Everyday video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0i2SKySR6fs

The updated version of the soccer girls video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yas6kzPYF0

The just awesome Because I'm Me video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu0KsZ_MVBc

The BBC essential mix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycFxOhLZYFw&spfreload=1

The full Electricity EP, including three songs I'd never heard before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-lsd4mhvPA

Inns in Annapolis

Historic Inns Of Annapolis is clearly the best experience, but often booked up: http://www.historicinnsofannapolis.com/

Interestingly, they have their own Wikipedia page which is actually a pretty helpful one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historic_Inns_of_Annapolis

David Gerrold's Star Trek memories.

Some great first-person recollections from the writer's room and set:

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10208690082621815&id=1003624962

Favorite twitter feeds and why

Parabolic Arc's twitter: For some reason he does this full time and is interested in the same things as I am: https://twitter.com/spacecom

Sim Gretina's twitter: To keep track of when he drops a new track: https://twitter.com/simgretina

Lifeboat's twitter: A news feed even more full of woo and optimism than IFLS: https://twitter.com/lifeboathq

Rocketlab's twitter, because it would be great if they launched something soon: https://twitter.com/RocketLabUSA

Twitter of the guy who wrote Toadrider, in case he ever starts publishing his own work again instead of art tutorial links: https://twitter.com/ComicArtYeah

Honey I shrunk the Pi image

A post just on the topic of creating a shrunken pi image backup and then reinstalling it and expanding it.

Adafruit's article which shows the new process for copying a live SD card PI image to another card with automatic shrinking: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/another-update-raspbian/

The nice instructible on the topic that was written before the implementation of the SD card copier: http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-BackUp-and-Shrink-Your-Raspberry-Pi-Image/

Fun test equipment

Just some links to different types of fun and expensive lab equipment that I had to look up the price for during inventory.

Rohde & Schwarz SMA100A RF Signal Generator: https://www.testequity.com/products/1478/

The Total Verification System: https://ingenionllc.sharepoint.com/Pages/Products.aspx

34470A Digital Multimeter, 7½ Digit, Performance Truevolt DMM: http://www.keysight.com/en/pd-2520154-pn-34470A/digital-multimeter-7-digit-performance-truevolt-dmm?cc=US&lc=eng

Agilent 34420A Nanovolt / Micro‑Ohm Meter: http://www.keysight.com/en/pd-1000001296%3Aepsg%3Apro-pn-34420A/micro-ohm-meter?cc=US&lc=eng

SMA Cables: https://www.digikey.com/products/en?keywords=415-0029-036

Teledyne LeCroy PCIe Protocol Analyzer: http://teledynelecroy.com/protocolanalyzer/protocoloverview.aspx?seriesid=467

Interposer for Teledyne LeCroy Protocol Analyzer: http://teledynelecroy.com/protocolanalyzer/protocoloverview.aspx?seriesid=118&capid=103&mid=511

All the protocol analyzers: http://teledynelecroy.com/shopper/requestquote/configure_small_step1.aspx?catid=19

Protocol Analyzer overview: http://cdn.teledynelecroy.com/files/pdf/pcie_interposer_datasheet.pdf

Datasheet for the Gen2 x8 interposer: http://psirep.com/sites/default/files/gen2_x8_active_interposer.pdf

Here is the 1982-era spectrum analyzer that Nga is using: http://www.thinksrs.com/products/SR760770.htm

Holy Crap, Rhode & Scharz makes an oscilloscope! I think it's made of solid gold. They also have a handheld scope that is like something from the next decade: https://www.rohde-schwarz.com/us/products/test-measurement/oscilloscopes/pg_overview_63663.html

Here are a couple of links to the fun-looking but ultimately useless Zed Board that we attempted to do some VHDL development on:

Here's the overview: https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/1-8dyf-11.html#overview

Here's the datasheet: http://zedboard.org/sites/default/files/documentations/ZedBoard_HW_UG_v2_2.pdf

Here's a search for ideas on how to get the LVDS lines out of the FMC connector: https://www.google.com/search?q=FMC+LPC+to+LVDS

selection 13 postal workers cancelling staps at the university of ghana post office

I was listening to the new BBC1 Avalanches Essential Mix, which is awesome, when something just jumped right out at me. It was an announcer voice saying "Selection 13: postal workers cancelling staps at the University of Ghana Post Office," followed by the most absolutely beautiful song. Thank goodness for the Age Of Google; I was able to find out more about this right away. It turns out to have been part of a series of audio recordings that a researcher made while travelling across Africa, and it was later reused in a variety of ways including as part of some "world music" CD.

Links:

The Essential Mix:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycFxOhLZYFw

My favorite recording of the song on YouTube, directly lifted from the research without the announcer's voice added: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=por5SopwHDc

Part of the original recordings, actually a different song recorded at the post office by the same researcher. This is also a fantastic piece of music! https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:146670/

Some kind of weird search results which contains links to nearly a dozen videos, some of which are the song from the Essential Mix, including some with and without the announcer's voice, and also other recordings including other tracks from the original recording and also part of a documentary that I guess goes back to the same post office, which doesn't have quite as good a song but the video of the mail sorting is neat to see. https://wn.com/ghana_post_office_workers_music

The page on WFMU which apparently first spread this recording to a wide audience by mentioning the World Music CD. Includes a link to the first YouTube video. http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/12/work_song_from_.html

From the WFMU page, a student's fact sheet about the recording, created as part of a school project. http://faculty.weber.edu/tpriest/FacetsMdl_files/Postal%20Workers.html

DXF to Visio converter

There aren't a lot of "free" converters for converting between autoCAD DXF or DWG file format and Visio drawings, because Visio already reads in AutoCAD files and does the conversion. This makes my situation of wanting to do this without having a copy of Visio sort of funny.

You can almost hear Microsoft sighing in this article as they explain how to open menus and click on options: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Open-insert-convert-and-save-DWG-and-DXF-AutoCAD-drawings-60cab691-0f4c-4fc9-b775-583273c8dac5

Another "just open it in Visio" answer: https://superuser.com/questions/186122/how-to-convert-autocad-file-to-visio

Again, this one with a shutterstock photo of a hipster guy with a laptop: https://www.techwalla.com/articles/how-to-convert-dwg-to-vsd

Supposedly TrueView can do a conversion to Visio, but after so many hints to just use Visio, I gave up and sent my AutoCAD drawing to a coworker who has Visio instead: https://www.visiozone.com/?p=26

Here is where to get TrueView from: http://www.autodesk.com/products/dwg/viewers

Alternatives to Contec PCIe Analog input/output cards

Looking for multichannel DAC and ADC cards for our PCIexpress bus CPU, a company called Contec has a wide assortment of options. Unfortunately, the technical support for the company is so poor that just getting the two boards we've bought , the AI-1616L-LPE and AO-1616L-LPE, installed and evaluating has been an unexpected struggle. Sadly, this has turned out to be yet another product niche that there aren't a lot of suppliers for. Contec is really the only one producing scientific interface boards with the type of options and variation similar to National Instruments which does this type of thing great but just for older PC buses or for their PXI systems.

Info about Contec:

Contec's nicely self-sorting product page: http://www.contec.com/products/daq/analog/product-list.php">http://www.contec.com/products/daq/analog/product-list.php">http://www.contec.com/products/daq/analog/product-list.php

The support page for the AI-1616L: http://www.contec.com/product.php?id=1694

The support page for the AO-1616L: http://www.contec.com/product.php?id=1923

This reseller's page nicely displays just how many options Contec produces: http://www.dpie.com/daq/pcie-low-profile-analog-io/

Alternative PCIe Analog I/O boards found:

National Insturments sells basically one board which is a giant mix of analog I/O and digital I/O options: http://www.directindustry.com/prod/national-instruments/product-5074-981755.html

It turns out that this board is iterated through several options which just seem to be the same board with more and more features populated to a maximum of 32 analog inputs, 4 analog outputs, and many different digital options that I don't care about: http://www.ni.com/datasheet/pdf/en/ds-152

This french company makes this one board which has a giant mix of analog and digital IO: https://www.acquisys.fr/en/product/pcie-6208v-gl/

These guys seem to be reselling the french company's card. It is curious why there is no attribution to the original company: https://www.circuitspecialists.com/pcie-6208v-glg.html

The previously unheard-of Measurement Computing has a few options, although mostly for PCI and for PCIe mostly digital I/O. Like for all other finds so far, this company's options basically boil down to one board with mixed analog output and input: http://www.mccdaq.com/data-acquisition/PCI

Advantec is a recognizable name and they have a few PCIe cards. As usual they have a lot of PCI card and the PCIe cards are mostly digital I/O. http://www.advantech.com/products/daq-cards/sub_gf-50hh

netgear N300 WiFi USB adapter

Trying to install my N300 WiFi USB adapter, (Netgear prefers that you search for it by its full model number, which is WNA3100 as shown on the sticker on the bottom box that otherwise says N300 all over it). The box comes with an antique style installation CD or a wired network connection, but my system doesn't have a CD drive so I was hoping to just download the driver from Netgear onto a thumb drive and install it that way. Which I did, but after installation the driver just couldn't recognize the adapter at the point in the installation where it says to plug it in. This is despite the adapter clearly showing up in device manager. This left me with the possibility that the problem installing the driver was either the driver or my system. I was about to experiment with trying to install the earlier versions of the driver, which Netgear also has on their site, when somebody loaned me a USB CD drive, so I tried using the installation CD and of course it worked fine. So the driver from Netgear's site is broken somehow but now I have my adapter up and running.

Here is Netgear's support page for this adapter, as near as I can tell. It says both WNA3100 and N300, but it could still have been the wrong page. It is suspicious that the photo of the adapter on this page doesn't look anything like the one that I was sold, so this must be the wrong driver somehow. https://www.netgear.com/support/product/WNA3100.aspx?cid=wmt_netgear_organic

I tried the steps shown on this page, which sort of boil down to trying to uninstall whatever old driver might already be present before trying to install the new driver. https://kb.netgear.com/20025/Unable-to-install-USB-wireless-adapter?cid=wmt_netgear_organic

PXI octal analog out

Trying to find a solution for needing 20 low-current power lines to a device that will fit in my National Instruments PXIe chassis and work with Labview.

Trying the PXIe-4322 octal analog output card. It's a beautiful design, with all outputs fully isolated from chassis ground and each other, nice voltage ranges, not a lot of current sourcing capability but I don't need that. However, the card does not include the capability to monitor the output voltages and currents, I guess that's too much to ask for a 1U PXI card that already has 8 outputs!

The support page for the PXIe-4322. Disappointed by the lack of Labview example code listed. http://sine.ni.com/psp/app/doc/p/id/psp-1224/lang/en

The PXIe-4322 top-level page: http://www.ni.com/en-us/support/model.pxie-4322.html

The user manual: http://www.ni.com/pdf/manuals/373754a.pdf

Marvin Test Solutions has an awesome power supply card with 8 outputs. It's actually just 3 separate power rails, and it's not clear what the isolation between them is, although it is interesting that each power rail can be externally supplied. But, again, no output power monitoring. That's what I get for trying to get a cheap multi-output power supply by cheating.

MTS's catalog page for the GX1838 card: https://www.marvintest.com/Product.aspx?model=GX1838+Series

Pickering has a bunch of kick-ass power supplies and battery simulators. Given that these haven't been fully investigated yet, here are some links for me to check later to figure out what kind of output isoloation and monitoring they might have:

Power Supplies: http://www.pickeringtest.com/en-us/products/pxi/chassis-instrumentation/power-supply-battery-simulation/power-supplies

Battery Simulators, including their popular 6 battery simulator: http://www.pickeringtest.com/en-us/products/pxi/chassis-instrumentation/power-supply-battery-simulation/battery-simulators

Recycling VHS tapes

Yes, VHS tape are a landfill nightmare and are made of such mixed materials that they are very hard to recycle. Here are my options at the time of this writing as I discover them.

The earth911 website seems to have cornered the niche for referrals to local recycling centers. It does a good job of returning localized results, but does not do a good job of sorting the results by what percentage or kind of recycling is done. Many of the results for my local search were for operations that only cater to government or business, charities that either resell or give away things, or disposal services that don't actually do any recycling (in my case they just toss the cassettes into a shredder, which admittedly at least reduces their landfill footprint). It is good that all these options are gathered together by location and type of material, but the only way to figuring out which one to select is to manually read through each description to find out how it applies.

earth911's search tool: http://search.earth911.com/

Here are a variety of links describing the dilemma of trying to recycle VHS tapes:

http://earth911.com/eco-tech/the-vhs-and-cassette-tape-recycling-dilemma/
http://www.greencitizen.com/how-to-recycle-vhs-tapes/
http://earth911.com/recycling-guide/how-to-recycle-cds-tapes/

Interestingly, from the comments to these articles, there are a few interesting but generally unrelated things that can be learned:

"Green Citizen" is only in Berkeley San Francisco only. They charge 10 cents a tape which is an awesome deal.http://greencitizen.com/berkeley_computer_electronic_recycling_center.php

An Oreo Separator Machine is a thing which exists. https://biggeekdad.com/2013/03/oreo-separator-machine/

Green Citizen used to ship the tapes to Sims Metal Management which probably just shredded them. Then that "downstream processor" folded and now Green Citizen doesn't even take tapes anymore.

Toronto has a dedicated recycling service for VHS tapes. They fully dismantle components for renewal usage!!! For some reason, this hasn't spread to anywhere else, why? http://www.ProjectGetReel.com

GetReel is part of a larger collective called Red Propeller which interestingly enough also recycles child safety car seats. They charge 40 cents/tape, which is still a fair deal. https://www.redpropeller.ca/getreel

One possible solution to processing the coated mylar tape is Thermal Depolymerization (TDP). This would produce a light crude oil, and separate out the coating for potential further processing. It's perhaps not the best solution in terms of recycling since it produces basically a one use product, but could be very useful in terms isolating the potentially environmentally hazardous material. And I have heard of research into changing the resulting products of TDP that may be able to produce more monomers instead of just a fuel product.

Not at all unrelated, there appears to be a recycling company that lets you mail stuff to them. So far looking at their site it seems like the price structure looks reasonable. http://www.greendisk.com/

Results returned from my earth911 search:

Securis has many offices in the Maryland area including one right in town. The search result showed they accept residential dropoff but they are obviously an IT disposal business that caters mostly to big clients and promise no more than to shred videotapes.
http://securisfortmeade.com/

The lovely-named TurtleWings is an electronics disposal company in DC that seems to be better focused on doing good than most. earth911 claimed they do residential including videotapes, but their site doesn't mention either of these directly. https://turtlewings.com/

"Savers" near Towson is a charity distribution center that earth911 claims takes VHS tapes but they also promise to just throw out things out that aren't resellable. http://search.earth911.com/location/Q1RQNVRcXllAUQ/?what=VHS+Tapes&where=201234&max_distance=25&country=US&province=MD&city=Laurel®ion=Howard&postal_code=20723&latitude=39.129694252223&longitude=-76.855985681053&sponsor=&list_filter=all

The earth911 info page for Advanced Med IT promises that they will take all kinds of stuff from both residential and business, however their site makes it clear that they really just cater to businesses. http://www.amitrecycling.com/

Lots of links to new old Steve Reich music

The folks who commented on this cute iPhone based joke know a whole lot more about Steve Reich than I do.

http://boingboing.net/2017/03/07/steve-reich-ian-iphone-rington.html