Category: Tech

TDS Telecom has been trying desperately to get in to the Nashville market. They are directly and aggressively competing with Comcast (whose customer service practices come from depths of Hell) and AT&T (who still think a land line is required for anything).

My mother has TDS service and is quite pleased with it. Fiber Optic straight to her new house. It’s pretty neat and uber-geeky. We’re hopefully moving soon and I was planning on giving them a chance.

Was.

After several months of throwing their mailers in the trash after briefly looking at them, I got this:

WTF? Why am I getting something from the BILLING office for TDS? I’ve never had service with them, ever. It’s addressed to me, so it’s not a delivery problem. Did someone steal my identity? WHAT IS THIS!?!?

Oh. It’s more promotional material.

Screw you guys.

Advertisements don’t come from the billing department. Bills come from the billing department, and not addressing bills you didn’t sign up for can have serious consequences. Which, I guess, was the point.

If you’re going to LIE to me when you’re trying to win my business, how badly are you going to treat me once you’ve already acquired me?

Little known fact: I got my private pilot license (VFR) about ten years ago. I’d always wanted to be a pilot, so when the opportunity presented itself I took it. Got 42 hours of instruction/flight time in 2 weeks for about $3,000.

I’ve flown twice since then, and my medical lapsed long ago. It’s a very expensive hobby, and I’ve had other priorities.

I’ve always been interested in flying. I had a plan to join the Army and fly Apaches, but unfortunately that wasn’t in the cards for me. As a teenager, I lived along a military training route so I got to see all kinds of rotorcraft flying about 1000′ overhead. There is nothing more terrifyingly awesome than 10 AH-64Ds and 5 OH-58s buzzing your house in formation.

For the last three years, I’ve lived within spitting distance of an Air National Guard installation. I get C130s doing touch and gos for hours. I get OH58s and UH60s just over the treeline. I also happen to be in “Long Final” for Nashville International Airport, so during congestion I get to see 5-7 passenger jets stacked up waiting to land. It’s pretty neat.

Last year, I saw an article on Hackaday that showed a guy using a cheap TV-tuner to decode aircraft transponder signals. HOW COOL IS THAT?

Unfortunately for me, like many really cool software projects this one was all Linux and C and Mac. I’m a geek, but not that kind of geek. Linux just HATES me. I bought two of the tuners anyway knowing that eventually the Linux guys would make it easy for us Windows folks to play along.

That day has come. Yesterday I got both of my tuners hooked up and receiving ADS-B signals. I’m using the stock antenna, and it’s poorly placed, so my results are not stellar but they ARE working:

Now, how did I get here? Well, first you need the correct tuner. If you want more technical details, google up “RTL SDR” and spend a few hours reading. If not, just get this tuner:

I have the slightly-less awesome version running the E4000 chip, but I’m ordering two of these shortly for another project that I’ll talk about at a later date.

You’re also going to need some software (download and uncompress to your desktop or some other folder):
The latest version of Zadig (and 7-zip to uncompress the download)
ADBS# (Project Page)
adsbscope (Project Page)

Got everything? Here we go!

1. Plug in the antenna to the tuner
2. Plug in the tuner to a USB port
3. Run Zadig and replace the driver, following the instructions here. Stop when you get to the section titled “Automated installer”
Note that the screenshots are for an older version of Zadig. Mine didn’t have “Bulk-In, Interface (Interface 0)” as an option. “RTL2832U” was what was presented to me. Also very important: You have to do this once, and only once, for every USB port you plug this in to.
4. Open “ADBSSharp.exe”, which is wherever you unzipped it after downloading. Keep the default settings and hit “Start”

5. Open up adsbSCOPE. It’s pretty far down in the folder structure where you unzipped it. I unzipped it to a folder called “ADS-B” on my desktop, so the executable is “Desktop\ADS-B\adsb_all\pc_software\adsbscope\26\adsbscope26_16384.exe”

6. Go to other->Network->Network Setup. Change your settings to match these:

7. Hit the inexplicably greyed-out and confusingly-named “start RAW-data CLIENT” button:

Now you’re reading data! But we aren’t quite done yet. You probably don’t want the map centered in Europe, and you probably want an actual map. To re-center, go to Navigation->goto Town or Airport and choose the closest large airport by it’s call letters.

Next, go to load Maps->Background Picture. That should load a rudimentary map with interstates, and major cities. Go to load Maps->Northamerica USA ex. alaska to load state lines.

That’s it!

 

Now, the thing about these signals is that they’re very sensitive to interference. I can pick up only very strong signals inside my office, but at home I pick up a lot more. It’s still not everything, though, because I have trees, buildings, and hills in the way. Also, the stock antenna is not designed for this radio band, so it’s passable but not great. Ideally, you’d want a specially designed antenna mounted on a pole at the top of a hill. There are some other really cool things you can do, like mounting all this stuff remotely and having the data streamed to you or to an online service that will do the mapping for you.

There are other programs you can use to decode the data that comes from ADSB#. I’m going to be testing out a few of them to see what works best for me. I’m interested in an Android app that can decode the signals as well, but my searches so far have been unsuccessful. I have a feeling that a better antenna is really something I should look at, but I’m not quite ready for that yet.

Stay tuned!

This is what’s known as “spinner” text. The spambot that attempted to leave this comment wasn’t properly configured, so instead of leaving me a semi-plausible quasi-english comment, I got the full text.

What I should have gotten was text from each set of curly braces. Phrases are separated by the pipe character “|”. Spinners allow spammers to write something like this and generate thousands of unique comments. Google penalizes you if it detects the same comment text on thousands of blogs.

Thankfully Akismet catches these things (including ones that are working properly) pretty easily.

Just a little inside baseball.

WP 3.5, updated themes….

Now my header’s gone. Working on that, but lilwizard’s starting to wake up screaming so it may be a bit. ETA: Fixed

Anything else amiss?

HostGator is 40% off today for all plans.

I moved from self-hosted on an error-prone hamster-powered nettop to Hostgator back in January. Couldn’t be happier. I’ve got the “Baby Croc” package and host about a million domains. Kidding, of course, but that’s what it feels like sometimes.

Please note that if you sign up using that link, I do make a commission.

As I’ve mentioned before, I listen to audio books while running or walking the dog. I’m currently listening to Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. I’m no fan of Apple or Jobs (Wozniak is another thing entirely), but I feel it’s important to understand one of the most influential minds marketers of the last 200 years.

He was a hypocrite and a sociopath, but there’s no denying he changed the world.

Anyway, today they covered the brief involvement of Ron Wayne in Apple Computer. The short story is that Ron went into a partnership with the Steves, but FREAKED OUT when Jobs started going around borrowing tons of money. Eleven days after forming Apple, he sold his shares back to the Steves for $2300.

In 2010, his shares would have been worth $2.4 Billion.

Which brings me to my tenuous connection to Steve Jobs. In 1998, I worked in a video rental store. The assistant manager was a woman in her early- to mid-twenties, if I recall correctly. The iMac had just been released, and another coworker and I were talking about it. This woman piped up and told us that her estranged father had briefly been involved in Apple, and was “basically the laughing stock of the computer world” for selling out because he was afraid of going bankrupt again.

I have no idea if her claim is true (Ron Wayne is gay, and I can’t find anything online to indicate he has children), but she wasn’t they type of person who I would have expected to know Wanye’s story in such detail.

So, two degrees of separation between me and Steve Jobs.

The Brother laser printer I bought 12 years ago no longer works. Well, that’s not entirely accurate.

The Brother laser printer I bought 12 years ago doesn’t have drivers that work with anything after Windows XP, and I no longer have any machines running Windows XP.

This presents me with an opportunity. You see, I discovered this site about real-world disaster preparedness sometime in 2006, and I’m a big fan of the idea that you should scan everything. Data space is cheap, so why not?

Well, this leads to rather large piles of documents to be scanned. For a while, I had a flat-bed scanner–but that was tedious and it, too, is no longer supported.

What I want is a sort of scaled-down version of this. We have those at work, and they’re awesome. I want something that is network-enabled (wired or wireless, I don’t care either way), and has duplex scanning and printing, with a document feeder for the scanner, and costs less than a 10/22. I thought this guy would work for me, but then I started reading the reviews for it.

My use case is that I’d drop the giant stack of papers my insurance company sends me* in the document feeder, hit a button, and a PDF magically appears on my server. That’s why the duplex scanning bit is important: I get lots of double-sided documents I need to scan.

So, anybody got one?

*I get these things electronically when possible, but even then it’s a pain to go to 37 different websites to get all the documents that regularly come to my physical mailbox.