HOW TO PHLOG AT A DISTANCE
What a wonderful Saturday morning. Sitting here by my old Pentium 1
with XMMS (the original, not that over-complicated XMMS2 nonsense)
shuffling its way through my collection of tracker modules by
"Josef Jahn". I've got a few of my DIY electronic novelty gizmos
blinking away with a combined total of 464 individual 5mm LEDs (and
one 10mm). Perhaps I should finally be writing up the design for
one of them for my website (and show off the torturous soldering
involved in building it), but getting all of the schematics, parts
list, and pictures nice and neat is just such a pain, and for the
sake of perhaps the one human a month who breifly looks at the page
before deciding it's too complicated (being filled with lots of
discrete analogue and digital ICs, the way I like it, instead of
just some boring microcontroller) to bother trying to read.
That's where my Gopher hole, and particularly this phlog, is
winning out over my website. I'm not obliged to present something
useful, or do so with any complicated type, or layout of, content.
Also I don't have to worry about who's going to be viewing it, or
maintaining some consistency in quality. Plus as I mentioned before
I don't have the knowledge like I do with my website that bugger
all people ever view all but a few specific pages.
Orphaned paragraph that I don't want to delete:
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I started off the morning learning/reaffirming a few more useless
facts from that Pears Cyclopedia - apparantly in the thirties
colour photography existed for slides (hence the availability of
colour movies as well I guess), but for developing colour photos on
paper you needed three negatives each taken through a coloured
filter, so that the photographic paper is exposed for each colour
(RGB, I guess) individually. Or of course B/W photos can be
manually colourised through a process called... nope sorry
forgotten already, something to read again next time at least.
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On this theme, I today followed recent references to ROOPHLOC:
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/announcing-roophloch-2019.txt
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/%7esolderpunk/roophloch
and of course got my mind churning (in between playing with an old
"Bubble Sextant" from WWII which sits beside me here - still
nowhere close to figuring out how to use that) with ideas for how
I'd attempt some off-site phlogging. I'd even have a good chance of
doing it near a mob (I won't call them a "flock") of roos.
I'm not a radio ham, at least beyond a little bit of Rx-only SDR
via a USB TV tuner picked up for $0.50 at a garage sale and a home
made VHF antenna mounted on my roof. If I was though, the idea of
setting up a microwave link to the top of a nearby mountain would
be pretty appealing.
Following that thought, light could also be used for short distance
directional communication. A laser pointed at a light detector at
night might be enough, with a slow enough baud rate to allow for
use of a cheap laser.
Still a bit to clean and sane for my taste though. For years I've
wanted to build a carbon arc light. Sure it's basically just a case
of attaching some carbon rods to a welder, but I want to build a
proper one enclosed in a metal housing and with a reflector to make
a genuine old-school spotlight, ideally even with an automatic
adjustment of the gap between the rods (probably using modern
electronics rather than the special current transformers and motors
that they used back in the day - yes I've really looked hard into
this). Now the light itself couldn't be turned on and off easily
because you need to strike the arc, but like the old signal lights
you could have shutters over the end, and connect them to some sort
of electronic actuator that is controlled by the computer to slowly
transmit the message (ideally from the mountain top, a few
kilometers away) to a sensitive light sensor mounted on my house
(there aren't many neighbours around here to notice/complain). Now
that would be impressive.
But the crazy factor still wants to be turned up some more, and I'm
wondering what distance you'd get from X-ray or gamma radiation.
Now I'm in the fun world of not knowing enough about my topic to
realise what isn't remotely possible. I've got the head from an
X-ray machine (of course, you say, why wouldn't anyone?). I do know
that X-rays and gamma rays (10nm - 10pm wavelengths, according to
the book I've got here) aren't focusable, so that prevents
concentrating them in a certain direction/point like you might with
light. Simply by blocking off their exit in all but one direction
though, as is already done in the X-ray machine by its lead
shielding, what distance can those rays that escape travel in air?
Probably not far, but then any distance at all would be enough for
ROOPHLOC. Presumably you can turn the high voltage on and off to
control the X-ray tube without upsetting it too much...
Now there's actually a bit of gamma radiation leaking from some
parts of my WWII collection (don't worry, so far I haven't got my
hands on an actual nuke yet, just a little bit of surplus Radium),
but I don't think it would get very far. I wonder what the distance
would be for a really potent sourse of radiation though? Even
better if you could actually use it to mess with the chips in
computers, which don't like radiation exposure (especially the
high-tech modern ones), then you'd have an anti-computer ray - now
there's a real defence against drones. Well I'm getting off-topic,
but who cares it's fun.
I wonder if X-ray or even gamma ray communications could be
practical in space? Sensitive things already need to be protected
against cosmic rays so there might be less trouble from
interferring with the computer that you're trying to send data to.
If a radioactive material generated the actual signal, then power
would only be required in order to interrupt that signal (move a
bit of lead in front of the beam). That's hardly ideal, but maybe
there would be situations where it would be more energy efficient
than a radio transmitter. In terms of reliability, it would always
be a sure indication of where something was, so long as the
radiation emitted is distinct from the background.
Oh well, I guess planning an off-planet ROOPHLOC might be a bit
over-ambitious anyway. Of all the above thoughts, I don't see me
comitting the effort required of them just for the sake of a silly
little competition. Not when I have so many genuinely productive
things that I could work on, some of them also potentially
enjoyable. If I do have a go at ROOPHLOC 2020 it will probably be
via the exact same mobile broadband modem that conveys these posts
from my house already.
But, always desperate to avoid the boring solution, I'm now
thinking of ways to "cheat" on the key restriction "Without the
*direct* use of permanent infrastructure for power or
communication". I mean it's kind-of easy. If you can charge a
battery off the grid to power a device used to write the post, then
you could as well save the post to a storage device and take it
home to upload. Or maybe a phlog post is only a phlog post once it
is uploaded, before that it's just text, in which case you need to
be at the remote location when it's uploaded and first available at
your phlog. So then you could arrange with someone else to receive
a message stored on a physical medium and then upload it while
you're in the remote location.
Possibilities:
*Carrier Pigeon - needs to be a short post though.
*Print/write it on paper, fold it into a paper plane, then launch
it towards someone nearby to upload - probably limited to backyard
ROOPHLOCers.
*Some sort of remote-controlled vehicle/craft is the obvious next
step following the above. - If you're really clever have the craft
transmit the post to a computer at home wirelessly when it gets
there.
*Back to my WiFiLeach thinking in the Ideas section - hide a
computer with WiFi on a stranger's car and have it transmit the
message when it gets to a place within range of a free WiFi
network. - Though I guess you wouldn't know when that had happened,
so wouldn't know when you could leave your remote location...
Though at that point I don't suppose anyone would complain about
that.
*You could just go hand it to someone and then return to the place
where you wrote it at the time when you've arranged for them to
upload it. That's hardly in the spirit though.
- The Free Thinker
P.S. Sound. How far can you transmit data with a megaphone pointed
at a mic. attached to the receiver at your house? Use telephone
dial tone encoder/decoder ICs? I do get some pretty darn quiet
nights out here.