Say what?

Indeed.

You've Come A Long Way Baby!

[credit to: http://craphound.com]

Minor changes to thejonas.org

I modded the theme a little. I just keep seeing too many of the same set of themes. I'm too much of a contrarian to leave that alone, so here we have the Minima base with a few color and font changes. Not much else.

Simple 802.11a/b/g Antenna Mod

There are scads of 802.11 antennas available commercially, and many home-brew variants floating around as well. What does mine have that the others lack? Nothing really, just another alternative. However, I do recycle some stuff and do it all with no special equipment or calculations which is nice.

So I happen to have a bunch of old torchiere lamps that the HR department discarded. Some work, but they are electricity hogs. The bulbs are getting hard to find, and they really aren't in style any more. What to do? I often need to access a wireless AP that is marginal, and it occurred to me that a simple parabolic dish and a USB wifi stick would do the trick. Mentally the two came together and voila!

So to explain further, I stripped the dish part off and took out the bulb assembly. It is left as an exercise to the reader to find a use for the base and shaft. The center of the dish in this case was partially plastic, but that wasn't a deal-breaker. I used some of the original all-thread and some zip-ties to attach a USB extension cord to the dish. Once it was more or less secured I inserted the wifi stick and it was done. I used some soft 1/4" aluminum wire I happened to have for a hook/stand and wrapped a loop around to fill in the empty spot from the plastic piece. It doesn't have to be solid, just smaller aperture than 1/4 wavelength of 2.4GHz (a little over 2 1/2 cm).

Well, almost. I know that there is an optimal focal length for a parabola, but had no desire to measure and calculate it. I also know that not being close to the optimal focal length can lose you several dB of gain. Well I want to get it fairly close, so I tested.

I used a laser pointer to "spot" the focal length. This worked better than I thought it would, see the pic. Unfortunately I discovered that the dish is not a true parabola at all; the focal length changes at different distances from the center. Oh well. All things considered it should still boost my gain a few dB.

I have tested this design a little and it does improve the reception and more importantly the transmission enough to make the difference between barely having the AP visible and getting a pretty decent connection.

Speed Tests AllTel Vs Sprint

I had the opportunity tonight to test Alltel's EVDO vs Sprint's EVDO (actually both are 1x here).

I used a Franklin Wireless CDU 550 from Alltel, my trusty Samsung m500 from Sprint, and hijacked my neighbor's wireless (AT&T FastAccess DSL) for a control. I didn't move the laptop or anything else during the testing. The results show an average of three tests to the same Speakeasy site.

Carrier:	Down	Up
Alltel:	134	52
Sprint:	130	67
Nicked Wireless:	807	115

Conclusion? If you want bandwidth, steal your neighbor's wireless.

Why My Math Teachers Were Evil

Or more precisely "Why I Hate Arithmetic But Love Math."

I was required at a young and impressionable age to do something it took me years to overcome. I didn't even understand it then, I only knew that it felt wrong. Even after I could prove that it was "incorrect", I still had trouble grasping why it was "wrong".

I was required (like my classmates) to commit to memory that the ratio 22/7 is equal to pi (3.14159265358...). It isn't, of course. (It's 3.142857143 exactly if you are wondering.) It didn't take long to recognize that the numbers didn't match, i.e. that the ratio was incorrect. It took years to understand that 22/7 could never be correct, nor could 45/14, nor 91/28, etc. pi is an irrational number. Transcendental to be precise. By definition it could never be expressed as a "ratio" of rational numbers.

I was hampered for years by this seemingly innocuous misunderstanding. I can't just "memorize it for the test," my mind doesn't work that way. And I'm not special, there are plenty of others who suffered the same type of obstruction.

Math as a school subject is very poorly taught and understood. It is a waste and defrauding of students to fail to teach them so badly.

My New Shack

I got a 12x24ft storage building a few days ago. Since then I put in a dividing wall to separate a storage area from a work area for me. I' have insulated, added AC, wired, and put in spot lights and worklights at strategic locations. Plus moved most of my stuff in. I still need to run one more 120VAC line to the "front" wall.

I put in a moveable ladder to the loft.