Click to go to the 'New' radio.McDougallsHome.net web site of Amateur Radio Station K7JM

I am in the process of creating a new web site for my Amateur Radio activities.  It is in the very early stages, and will probably change often; but you can check it out by clicking HERE.  Eventually, I will be moving all of my Ham Radio posts over to that site.  The site address is:  http://radio.McDougallsHome.net .

John

Click the picture to see more of this Montgomery Ward Airline Radio

I love to collect old radio items. I don’t really go out of my way to find them, but when they find me, I am very interested in picking them up if they are not too hard on my bank account. I found this beauty at a garage sale today. There were a couple of other radios there also, but I have a family to feed so I purchased only one. The radio was from Montgomery Wards and has the label “Airline” on the back. I have not had a chance to really dig into the innards or look for information about the radio yet. The radio is a dual bander consisting of the broadcast band and the shortwave band from 5.75 to 17 Mhz. Click the picture to see a slide show of the details. If you know anything about this radio, please leave me a comment.

73,

John - K7JM

My old Toshiba comes back to life with Xubuntu Linux

My Xubuntu desktop. Clean, pretty, slow on my old computer, but very usable.

(Updated - Original Post Sept 1, 2008)

I have a quite old Toshiba laptop. Carol and I are going on a missions trip to Moldova in October.  Many on our team to Moldova are bringing a laptop computer along so they can check e-mail, use Skype, and other stuff. My old computer had Windows 98 on it and has never been connected to the Internet. I decided I would try to breathe some new life into it so I can send e-mail and post to this web site from Moldova. It was quite a challange since it only has 128 MB of memory and I have about 2 Gigabytes of hard disk storage available. I decided to try a trimmed down version of Ubuntu Linux. I run Ubuntu on our desktop computers at home and there is a derivative of it called Xubuntu (Zoo bune too) that is supposed to be ideal for older computers. It requires 196 MB of memory and I only have 128 MB. I searched the internet and found a procedure to do the job.

I scratched my head for a couple of days trying to figure out how to do it, and with many failed attempts, I finally succeded. If you are a computer guru, this is what I had to do. I have an USB WIFI adapter that I had to plug into the only USB slot in the computer. I installed a command line version of Xubuntu. That means NO graphics, no desktop, no menus, etc. Once I had that installed successfully, I had to do some manual changes to some files so it would recognize my WIFI USB plugin. Then I had to install the graphical desktop and modify some other files. In the end, it worked!

The computer is very useful, but with such limited resources, I have to push a button and wait for the screen to draw all of its pieces, but it DOES work. In fact I am writing this post on it right now!
I am also testing out an e-mail system that I can use to send this to my blog and it will be posted. So really, you are reading an e-mail message I sent to the blog. Pretty nifty eh?

To see more information about our trip to Moldova, go to www.McDougallsHome.net/moldova . Click the blue and white box on the upper right to check out our daily posts about our preparations and trip to Moldova. John

Leo’s Six Rules for Safe Computing

1. Don’t open email attachments; even if it’s from someone you know. If you do get something from someone you know, make sure that they really sent it to you. Email attachments are the number one way viruses and trojan horses get into your email. You might also want to turn off HTML email in Outlook and other programs. HTML emails are just as dangerous as rogue web sites, and can spread infections just by previewing them.

2. Don’t click links in email. That link could lead you to a phishing site, or the link may lead you to install malicious software. Copy and paste links into your browser, or type them in by hand instead. Another reason to disable HTML email - the HTML hides the real destination of that seemingly innocuous link.

3. Don’t download files from places you aren’t absolutely sure are safe. Stick with the well known sites. Teeneagers who use filesharing software like BitTorrent, Azureus, Kazaa, Morpheus, Grokster, and Limewire, often unwittingly download spyware and trojans. If you must, quarantine all downloads then scan them a few days later with an updated anti-virus.

4. Update your OS regularly! Turn on automatic updates in OS X and Windows. Apply all critical updates immediately. Criminals often create hacks within 24 hours of Microsoft’s patches (these are called zero day exploits), so you need to protect yourself the day the patches appear.

5. Use a firewall. The best firewall is a hardware router - the kind you use to share an internet connection. Even if they’re not billed as firewalls, they are, and they’re quite effective. I also recommend turning on your operating system’s firewall - even if you have a router - but I don’t recommend third-party software firewalls. They cause more problems than they solve.

6. Never run as an administrator in any operating system. Administrators have way too many priveleges that malicious people/code can take advantage of. Run as a limited user as much as possible. Windows Vista, Linux, and Mac OSX allow you to run a majority of features, but with some additional safety, as a limited user.

We have used the X10 system for several years to control lamps, Christmas lights, and decorative fountains.  The X10 system sends and receives signals that are put onto the power lines inside the walls of the house.  There are also wireless modules that will detect a radio signal, and upon detection, it will send the proper X10 ON or OFF signal through the house’s power lines.  I devised a combination of these devices to turn on a simple homebrew oscillator that we put in our bed room.  When our child gets up, it turns on the alarm in our room, and we can short circuit our child’s plans.  Over time, he is slowly learning that he can not be successful in getting up in the night, and will stay in bed and fall back to sleep.

This is the setup:  We put a wireless motion detector above our child’s head on the wall.  It will not detect anything during his normal tossing and turning but if he gets up, the detector will detect his motion and send a radio signal to a receiver.  The receiver is plugged into an outlet in the hall; and transfers the signal it received to the house wiring where it is sent to our bed room.

In our bedroom, we have a module plugged into an outlet, that is constantly monitoring the house wiring for signals.  When it receives the appropriate signal, it turns power on to the outlet on the bottom of the device.  I have an AC adapter plugged into the module that powers a small alarm that sits on my bed stand.

The alarm, is a simple NE556 dual timer circuit.  It is wired up in a fashion that emits a BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP, on and off at half second intervals.  The frequency of the BEEEP is about 700 Hz.  Not too high pitch, and not too low. The circuit is built inside an Altoid Mints tin.

When the alarm goes off, one of us will get up and put our child back to bed.  We then use the remote control to send a wireless signal to the radio receiver in the hall outlet.  The receiver then sends the signal over the power line again back to our bed room, and shuts off the alarm.

I built an LED into the Altoid’s tin as a visual indication when the alarm is on.  I also put a switch on the tin to shut off the speaker in the tin.  This is because we don’t want the alarm to be tripping all day long whenever someone is in the bedroom.  Also, the motion detector will send an “OFF” signal if there is no more motion in its range within a certain amount of time.

Click HERE to see a larger slide show of the setup.

73, John

Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”  John 8:31b-32

John

NASA Sponsors Course on How to Talk to Aliens

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Yes—it is true. If you’re an American, your tax dollars are being used by a government agency to teach a course to students on how to talk to aliens! This is serious stuff. We’ve never seen aliens, never had any messages from them, never heard from them. They have not visited earth, and we don’t know how to reach them. But we are using tax dollars for this blind-faith idea!

However, if tax dollars were used to teach students on how to talk with God, who stepped into history in the person of Jesus Christ so we could see Him on earth, who gave us a whole book (the Bible) to reveal all we need to know about the universe, who did visit earth as a man, who tells us how to reach Him through prayer—well that would not be allowed! That would be called religion—and you know, the “separation of church” and stuff!

It’s okay to have faith in aliens—just don’t have faith in an infinite God who has communicated to us through His Son and through His written Word! The article on this begins:

English students at the University of Wyoming are being encouraged to consider the possibility that humanity might one day make contact with aliens and then not know what to say.  “Interstellar Message Composition,” a creative writing class, is believed to be the first of its kind to engage writers in a potential cosmic conversation, say its founders. “We’ve thought a lot about how we might communicate with other worlds, but we haven’t thought much about what we’d actually say,” Prof Jeffrey Lockwood, the course leader, told ABC News.

You can read the rest of this article at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/1989062/nasa-sponsors-course-on-how-to-talk-to-aliens.html

There is so much talk going on about aliens, one wonders if this is all meant to prepare people for some great delusion!

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,

Ken

Besides making frames around the photos, and putting a watermark on them,  FSResizer also does them in BATCH mode, that is, a bunch at one time.  FSResizer also will resize the photos, rotate them, crop them, change the canvas, color depth, and color adjustments.  It will change the number of dots per inch that the photo is made up of.  Give FSResizer a try, it is a real slick lightweight program that I couldn’t do without.

Click the picture to see more.

I enjoy collecting old radios of any kind.  I came across this little gem today at a garage sale for only fifty cents.  It is a simple transistorized AM radio with a leatherette case that snaps closed on the back.  It runs on 110 Volts or with batteries.  The only marking on it is “Passport”; and I can find no model number or brand and internet searches come up with nothing.  It is a cute little radio that includes 6 transistors and 2 diodes.  I thought it was clever that they even listed the two diodes in their count of solid state devices. :)  Click the picture to see more pictures of the radio.

See http://www.transistor.org/ for a real nice collection of transistor radios.