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Monday, December 8, 2003
A good read
Stepper switch recollections by former NZ switch tech Stephen Crowsen. Click here to give it a glance. I haven't illustrated it yet, nor linked it to all things Strowger at this site, but do give this article a read. Not just on switching. Gives other good comments on telecoms. Thanks, Stephen, for contributing and letting others learn from your experiences.
Site re-do work continues and this morning I am off to the vet to get my cat looked at. Again. Arrgh.
Sunday, December 7, 2003
"A day that will live in infamy . . ."
Installed a form to let you send comments( internal link) without requiring you to have an e-mail account. Perfect for when you are on a public machine at a library, internet cafe, or using a friend's computer. Also good for those who don't want to disclose their e-mail address. If you don't need me to reply then just leave the return e-mail box blank.
Saturday, December 6, 2003
Rain, rain, rain
Got up at 5:00 this morning to make sure I didn't miss an out-of-town hike that started at 8:15 a.m. No rain most of the day until the drive back, which was in darkness with heavy rain. Good hike along San Francisco Bay. Had lunch with the hiking group afterwards in El Cerrito and then I went into Benicia to visit an art exhibit. This was the first showing a friend of mine had ever had. Good day but I did not get to do any web work. Perhaps tomorrow, when I try to finish or at least post the stepper page I describe below.
Friday, December 5, 2003
More mobile, adding and revising pages
Click to view the larger image (internal link to a bigger picture)
"Tom. I hadn't seen this Ericsson photograph before. I recognize that car interior, it's an early 1960's (or late 1950's) Mercedes Benz 190 or 220 sedan. We had several. Those had a curious speedometer, it's a vertical stick which goes higher the faster you go, like a thermometer, and changes color from green to yellow to red as well as having stripes on some of the colors. That's why the speedometer housing sticks up so far." Geoff Fors (internal link)
New pages:
Cell phones and privacy (internal link)
That lady in the pool (internal link)
Revised page:
Digital Wireless Basics: Mobile Phone History: Mobile Telephone Photos (internal link)
Transistor page (internal link)
Thursday, December 4, 2003
Cell phone privacy
Q. Is it possible for someone to listen in on my cell phone call?
A. Possible but not practical. Today's digital cell phones are nearly impossible to monitor. Certain federal intelligence agencies and the wireless carrier itself might be able to listen in but even then it would be extremely difficult. Let's not consider, then, targets of the FBI or CIA. What about ordinary folks?
Wireless to wireless calls
All digital phones like GSM/PCS types, ones that use a smart chip, are essentially impossible to monitor over the air. They use a strong encryption scheme which encodes voice traffic flowing between the mobile and the cell site. Two people communicating with each other, each using a GSM/PCS phone, should have little to worry about. Older analog cellular telephones, though, can be easily monitored with a scanning radio or another cell phone, one that's been modified to do that. This brings up a problem: you both may have a digital phone, but they may not be operating in digital mode. (continues here -->)
Wednesday, December 3, 2003
Image searching
Q. Is there a way to look through all the images at your site?
A. Hmm. Go to Google's image search engine:
http://images.google.com/ (external link)
Then enter this line of text into the query field:
site:www.privateline.com privateline.com
Doing so returns 801 images! It's really interesting, you can visually browse through the site, instead of seeing it from a text based, web page point of view. Click on any of the images and you get put on the page that graphic is located. In The Future I'll try to have a page at my site that opens this search page. As Alice would have said, "What's a website without pictures?"
Tuesday, December 2, 2003
Busy, busy, busy
I'm stopping original writing this month to concentrate on building a new site for privateline.com. The tube and transistor article I wanted to write must wait until January. I simply cannot keep working on this website in this way, with its maintenance hours out of control. But this means good things for everybody. You'll get an easier to read and navigate website and I will lower my maintenance time by over 90%. More on this later.
Speaking of controlling hours and costs, did everybody see this image three months ago? You might think it's a cellular radio tower on fire. Nonsense, this is Greece trying to control their Olympic costs by constructing an alternative Olympic torch. :-) Click on this link or the image itself to bring up a bigger picture.
Monday, December 1, 2003
After the holiday weekend
Welcome back. Hope you had a good weekend. In Northern California we had some rain and snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Kind of gloomy and dark. Indoor days. Didn't do any hiking but I will on Tuesday or Wednesday.
Here's a good way to browse design patents. Put in what you want to look for and then add the important phrase: ornamental design. Select the quick search option at the patent office:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/search-bool.html (external link),
and you'll see this form:
Put in what you are looking for, even if it is garbage disposals, the words ornamental design, and then your date range. Only patents from 1976 on can be searched this way. The patents before then haven't yet been made keyword searchable. Try as many different keywords as you can. For public telephones try COCOT, payphone, paystation, and so on. It's great fun looking but it will take the tools I describe below and much time. Save this task for when you do have time to fool around. Like at work.
Saturday, November 29, 2003
Yuch
Tests inconclusive on cat. Have to wait for more time to go by. Major computer crash yesterday; I may have lost all e-mail for the last three months. Re-send your message if I did not reply.
 Click image to enlarge (94K)
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Click image to enlarge (157K)
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Telecom images
Patent illustrations are free and copyright and royalty free! From the U.S.P.T.O. (external link) they come as 300 d.p.i. tiff files so you have enough detail to publish in hardcopy. These images show an early Motorola two way. Click on the left hand image for a "before" illustration and the one on the right for an "after" look. The right hand image was converted in Photoshop to a duotone, selecting a dark blue color. I then changed that duotone into a RGB file, to apply an "extrude edges" filter. Pretty neat, eh?
Searching takes the most time, not the processing, and these files require a broadband connection since they're so big. You may need QuickTime installed in your browser to accept the .tiff files the USPTO generates. You'll need a good graphics program, too, one that can do duotones and handle .tif files. But you need all of these things if you're interested in illustrating.
Friday, November 28, 2003
Post-Turkey Day
Hope you are all well and well fed. My cat is having some problems after its operation on Monday and I will probably have to take him back to the vet. That's a forty minute ride each way over twisting Delta levee roads. The cat will probably throw up once or twice on the trip. But go we must. On a more pleasant subject, I will be re-doing the site in December, with a new launch date set for January 1, 2004. Upgrade your browser if you can before this time. Any bookmarks you've have will still work, all links to this site and its pages will be maintained. E-mail me with any suggestions.
Thursday, November 27, 2003
Happy Thanksgiving!
I'm working on writing about electron tubes and doing site maintenance. I think during December I will convert the site from HTML to CSS. That means an easier to maintain website. With CSS technology one can replace text and graphics across a site by making a single change to one file.
If you want to change text from Times Roman to Arial you can do so by making that change in a root page which will then effect all the other pages on the site. To do that now, with HTML, I have to change each page one by one. All 342+ of them. It will save days and days of time for each major change. Even if it takes a month to construct a new site I will save time in the long run.
[In reality this proved too much t
While I am re-doing the site I can also put in things I've wanted to have, like a contact form box on each page, not just an e-mail link. And a Google.com search engine for the site. Any requests from my readers? Hmm. Much to do. On the negative side, my cat seems to be having a little setback from its Monday surgery. It's worrisome since it is happening on a holiday. I hope for the best. Have a great holiday, and for those of you lucky enough, a great four day weekend.
Pick up your phone! You have a mobile call from Sweden. She's been dialing since the mid 1950's. Click to enlarge and to see the whole photo. (internal link to bigger picture)
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