HOW TO PHLOG AT A DISTANCE What a wonderful Saturday morning. Sitting here by my old Pentium 1 with XMMS (the original, not that over-complicated XMMS2 nonsense) shuffling its way through my collection of tracker modules by "Josef Jahn". I've got a few of my DIY electronic novelty gizmos blinking away with a combined total of 464 individual 5mm LEDs (and one 10mm). Perhaps I should finally be writing up the design for one of them for my website (and show off the torturous soldering involved in building it), but getting all of the schematics, parts list, and pictures nice and neat is just such a pain, and for the sake of perhaps the one human a month who breifly looks at the page before deciding it's too complicated (being filled with lots of discrete analogue and digital ICs, the way I like it, instead of just some boring microcontroller) to bother trying to read. That's where my Gopher hole, and particularly this phlog, is winning out over my website. I'm not obliged to present something useful, or do so with any complicated type, or layout of, content. Also I don't have to worry about who's going to be viewing it, or maintaining some consistency in quality. Plus as I mentioned before I don't have the knowledge like I do with my website that bugger all people ever view all but a few specific pages. Orphaned paragraph that I don't want to delete: ----------- I started off the morning learning/reaffirming a few more useless facts from that Pears Cyclopedia - apparantly in the thirties colour photography existed for slides (hence the availability of colour movies as well I guess), but for developing colour photos on paper you needed three negatives each taken through a coloured filter, so that the photographic paper is exposed for each colour (RGB, I guess) individually. Or of course B/W photos can be manually colourised through a process called... nope sorry forgotten already, something to read again next time at least. ----------- On this theme, I today followed recent references to ROOPHLOC: gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/announcing-roophloch-2019.txt gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/%7esolderpunk/roophloch and of course got my mind churning (in between playing with an old "Bubble Sextant" from WWII which sits beside me here - still nowhere close to figuring out how to use that) with ideas for how I'd attempt some off-site phlogging. I'd even have a good chance of doing it near a mob (I won't call them a "flock") of roos. I'm not a radio ham, at least beyond a little bit of Rx-only SDR via a USB TV tuner picked up for $0.50 at a garage sale and a home made VHF antenna mounted on my roof. If I was though, the idea of setting up a microwave link to the top of a nearby mountain would be pretty appealing. Following that thought, light could also be used for short distance directional communication. A laser pointed at a light detector at night might be enough, with a slow enough baud rate to allow for use of a cheap laser. Still a bit to clean and sane for my taste though. For years I've wanted to build a carbon arc light. Sure it's basically just a case of attaching some carbon rods to a welder, but I want to build a proper one enclosed in a metal housing and with a reflector to make a genuine old-school spotlight, ideally even with an automatic adjustment of the gap between the rods (probably using modern electronics rather than the special current transformers and motors that they used back in the day - yes I've really looked hard into this). Now the light itself couldn't be turned on and off easily because you need to strike the arc, but like the old signal lights you could have shutters over the end, and connect them to some sort of electronic actuator that is controlled by the computer to slowly transmit the message (ideally from the mountain top, a few kilometers away) to a sensitive light sensor mounted on my house (there aren't many neighbours around here to notice/complain). Now that would be impressive. But the crazy factor still wants to be turned up some more, and I'm wondering what distance you'd get from X-ray or gamma radiation. Now I'm in the fun world of not knowing enough about my topic to realise what isn't remotely possible. I've got the head from an X-ray machine (of course, you say, why wouldn't anyone?). I do know that X-rays and gamma rays (10nm - 10pm wavelengths, according to the book I've got here) aren't focusable, so that prevents concentrating them in a certain direction/point like you might with light. Simply by blocking off their exit in all but one direction though, as is already done in the X-ray machine by its lead shielding, what distance can those rays that escape travel in air? Probably not far, but then any distance at all would be enough for ROOPHLOC. Presumably you can turn the high voltage on and off to control the X-ray tube without upsetting it too much... Now there's actually a bit of gamma radiation leaking from some parts of my WWII collection (don't worry, so far I haven't got my hands on an actual nuke yet, just a little bit of surplus Radium), but I don't think it would get very far. I wonder what the distance would be for a really potent sourse of radiation though? Even better if you could actually use it to mess with the chips in computers, which don't like radiation exposure (especially the high-tech modern ones), then you'd have an anti-computer ray - now there's a real defence against drones. Well I'm getting off-topic, but who cares it's fun. I wonder if X-ray or even gamma ray communications could be practical in space? Sensitive things already need to be protected against cosmic rays so there might be less trouble from interferring with the computer that you're trying to send data to. If a radioactive material generated the actual signal, then power would only be required in order to interrupt that signal (move a bit of lead in front of the beam). That's hardly ideal, but maybe there would be situations where it would be more energy efficient than a radio transmitter. In terms of reliability, it would always be a sure indication of where something was, so long as the radiation emitted is distinct from the background. Oh well, I guess planning an off-planet ROOPHLOC might be a bit over-ambitious anyway. Of all the above thoughts, I don't see me comitting the effort required of them just for the sake of a silly little competition. Not when I have so many genuinely productive things that I could work on, some of them also potentially enjoyable. If I do have a go at ROOPHLOC 2020 it will probably be via the exact same mobile broadband modem that conveys these posts from my house already. But, always desperate to avoid the boring solution, I'm now thinking of ways to "cheat" on the key restriction "Without the *direct* use of permanent infrastructure for power or communication". I mean it's kind-of easy. If you can charge a battery off the grid to power a device used to write the post, then you could as well save the post to a storage device and take it home to upload. Or maybe a phlog post is only a phlog post once it is uploaded, before that it's just text, in which case you need to be at the remote location when it's uploaded and first available at your phlog. So then you could arrange with someone else to receive a message stored on a physical medium and then upload it while you're in the remote location. Possibilities: *Carrier Pigeon - needs to be a short post though. *Print/write it on paper, fold it into a paper plane, then launch it towards someone nearby to upload - probably limited to backyard ROOPHLOCers. *Some sort of remote-controlled vehicle/craft is the obvious next step following the above. - If you're really clever have the craft transmit the post to a computer at home wirelessly when it gets there. *Back to my WiFiLeach thinking in the Ideas section - hide a computer with WiFi on a stranger's car and have it transmit the message when it gets to a place within range of a free WiFi network. - Though I guess you wouldn't know when that had happened, so wouldn't know when you could leave your remote location... Though at that point I don't suppose anyone would complain about that. *You could just go hand it to someone and then return to the place where you wrote it at the time when you've arranged for them to upload it. That's hardly in the spirit though. - The Free Thinker P.S. Sound. How far can you transmit data with a megaphone pointed at a mic. attached to the receiver at your house? Use telephone dial tone encoder/decoder ICs? I do get some pretty darn quiet nights out here.