Broadcast television engineering related tech topics, rants and motorcycles!
Scott Adams wanted to make a topical comic about the recent iPhone 4G drama that’s been all the buzz recently and realized that his normal outlet (a newspaper) has a propagation delay of about a month. “I worried that the story would become stale before my comics would work through the pipeline.” His only option [...]
It’s been about five years since I bought into Sirius satellite (paid) radio. At the time, like many initial customers, I was spending a lot of time in a company truck. For me it was driving from hilltop-to-hilltop working on transmitters or to various studios within “driving distance” and I quickly became fed up with [...]
I’ve been a business user of BlackBerry phones for a few years now and, although I won’t get into a rant about which phone is the best phone to buy, I will say that in having these devices foisted upon me by my oh-so-wise-and-indefatigable employers I have found them capable e-mail devices and decent phones, [...]
I’m sure I mentioned before that I really like gadgets and a few months back I bought an eeePC 1000HA for under $400. This is one of the very first Netbooks to have the Atom processor and a 160GB hard drive instead of the paltry 4GB flash drives in the early models. I really wasn’t [...]
Not many people get inside Sutro Tower, so I consider myself pretty fortunate. My current employer doesn’t have transmit facilities or other interests at Sutro, so I was escorted through the gate and into the facility by a contract engineer, John Buckham, that our SF station has who also maintains a radio station there for [...]
Today I had a brief reminiscing with some fellow engineers about having to deal with the local news crews at former jobs and told a few tales of the regular stampede of useless, re-hashed content, multiple yet pointless liveshots and how they were more funny than informative. I believe that local news bloopers are one [...]
For a little something out of the ordinary, today we went down to San Jose and visited the Body Worlds exhibit on display at The Tech Museum. For those that haven’t gone to see it or know what it’s about; essentially it is a traveling display, which is the brainchild of Gunther von Hagens, consisting [...]
I have been a big fan of Sushi for years and when my wife and I were living in South San Jose we were very close to a very good (in our opinion) sushi restaurant where we consumed mass quantities of fish on rice. When I was first introduced to sushi years ago I really [...]
One of the cool features of the PS3 is that it is a serious computing device and Sony provided the option to easily upgrade its hard drive as well as install an alternate OS. So I did both. By far, the easiest HDD upgrade known to man (presently). Simply remove a panel and a screw. [...]
Today I made the plunge and finally got off the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray format fence and bought a PS3 system. There were several reasons for this; first I did NOT buy it because I love Blu-Ray. I like that it has multiple studio and vendor support as well as about 25GB storage per layer, but the hardware [...]