Randy Rathbun dot org

I have just put the finishing touches on my Do-it-yourself solar power story. If you have ever wanted to run things with free electricity, this should be a good starting point. I would love feedback, so be sure and write me if you have any questions or comments.

Solar Power: Parts1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 -6

A few weeks back I had the opportunity to see Phil Anderson of MidnightScience talk about one of his new toys - a ultrasonic receiver. What the heck is that? Read on!

Breaking it down to its most basic level, it allows you to listen to things that you can not hear. Our range of hearing as humans is from about 20 to 20,000 cycles per second. That’s on a good day, of course. However, there are all sorts of things that make sound above what we can hear. Bats, for instance, use sound in the 20,000 to 160,000 cycles per second range for echolocation. Mice sing to their babies and their potential mates in the 20,000-30,000 cycles per second area. Insects make all sorts of noises as well. 

Phil happened to have some of his Ultra RX-1 kits available and I picked one up. It is a very reasonable $70 and comes with everything you need except the 9V battery. 

The build was very non dramatic. The entire project went together very smoothly and I only discovered one problem in the manual that I would have been able to get past had I actually read through the instructions first. Totally my fault and the problem was corrected on my end.

That said, everything went without a hitch and I had a fully functioning ultrasonic receiver about 3 hours later. Most people should be able to do the entire thing in about 2 hours, but I like taking my time along the way to admire my solder job. 

At the time I built it, there were really no insects out to listen to, and I have not seen any bats in my neighborhood yet this year. Usually there are a few that show up just after sunset and they fly and swoop between my house and the one next door eating all sorts of mosquitos. They are a lot of fun to watch if you can see them. 

Now that the weather is nicer for bugs to be out, I will start taking this thing out at night and recording sounds. Any good ones I get I will stick up here. May even try to shoot some video with the ultrasonic receiver on the audio input.

“In the old days, comics were often full pages,” he says. “Now, they’re squeezed down into tiny little boxes that don’t give much more room than what it takes to do a talking head. It’s sad to see something that was so important to cartooning becoming marginalized.”

The Times notes that The Oregonian announced plans to drop 10 strips, The Washington Post is dumping five and the Florida Times-Union, eight.

To fight back, some cartoonists are trying to generate revenue online to survive, the paper says, but many are skeptical they can make a living there.”

For any cartoon collectors out there, can you imagine if Little Nemo in Slumberland had been printed today? 

The newspapers are doing all this to themselves. They still don’t realize it. 

Besides, is anyone REALLY going to miss Apartment 3G?

“A tech-savvy New Zealand 3-year-old won an earthmover in an online auction, giving her mom the shock of her life.

Pipi Quinlan bought the $12,400 Kobelco backhoe on the site Trade Me while parents Sarah and Reid were fast asleep. The girl’s mom had made the mistake of not logging off the site after bidding on some kids’ toys.”

Good thing this kid did not get a 419 email from some Nigerian Minister.

A while back I purchased two nixie tube clocks from TubeClock.com, a wacky place to get some of the most worthless (after all, let’s be honest here - they are using nixie tubes, but not near as worthless as the Chronulator which I still want to get as well) yet most awesome clocks on the planet. 

There are actually a lot of different sites that sell nixie clocks, and you can find lots of tubes on ebay, for instance. However, the clock I use the most is Peter’s IN14 6 Tube Kit with the GPS attachment. I have it prominently placed in my amateur radio station and it is set for UTC. The GPS puck, a Garmin unit, is sitting on the sill of a window nearby. With this set up, the clock maintains absolutely perfect time. 

Once a day the clock sets the minutes and seconds, then the rest of the day the clock uses the second pulses from the GPS satellites to keep the seconds ticking. 

I have had this particular clock running for about a year and a half now. In that time, I have only seen the clock glitch one time - for some reason it ended up being 35 seconds off. I am not sure if RF interference did something or what, but it did reset itself. Same with the leap second that was injected into the time stream at the end of 2008.

A while back I got an I-SOBOT. Very cool piece of plastic that really does do quite a bit for what I paid for it. However….