Category Archives: Uncategorized

Anything from Radio Shack


I received a flier from Radio Shack today, advertising Radio Shack as the ultimate toy store. As someone who grew up on electronic gizmos from Radio Shack, I find the recent decline, and inevitable demise, of Radio Shack, to be very sad.

When we were kids, my brother and I would put “Anything from Radio Shack” on our Christmas lists, and this meant electronics kits, soldering irons, resistors, capacitors, transistors, wire, breadboards, and other related electronics hobby items.

While RS still has this stuff, they de-emphasize it, and are pushing consumer electronics and toys – in other words, the very stuff that Walmart can undersell them on every time.

Now, I realize that the market for electronics kits is pretty small, and that computer “education” in schools doesn’t encourage kids to actually open up the computers and see what’s inside of them. I realize that Radio Shack is doomed. But for them to send me a flier rubbing my nose in this fact seems a little cruel.

Yes, I’d probably still be happy with anything from Radio Shack. But there’s very little at Radio Shack that I wouldn’t go somewhere else to buy.

Ironically, when I was looking for a radio, of all things, I went to Radio Shack. I couldn’t find one. (More specifically, a short-wave radio, not a consumer-grade boom box.) Apparently Radio Shack no longer carries radios. They could special order it, but they didn’t have any in stock, because people just don’t buy them any more.

Very, very sad.

Voting

I voted this morning. The line was about the same length as other years, but took probably 4 times as long. The voting machines were *significantly* harder to use than those we’ve had in previous years. Still fairly easy for folks used to computer UI widgets, but a lot harder than pressing squares on a ballot. And, what with the longer ballot, and the folks not deciding how they were going to vote until sat down in front of the ballot, it took folks FOREVER to get through voting.

The “new” voting machines had an RS232 port on the back labeled “Modem”. This doesn’t bode well.

Plazes

Plazes has become way cooler since the last time I looked at it. It includes one feature that I always wanted, but assumed was impossible – you can now pick up a marker on the map and drag it to its correct location, and this updates the coordinates. This way, you can put in approximate coordinates, and then fine tune them visually. Amazingly cool.

You should sign up and check it out. That way I’ll know exactly where you are, at all times. Mwuhahah!

I hate hardware

My main colocated server has started acting flakey. It can’t seem to keep up with the load.

My other server (the one you’re looking at) has started making very alarming noises that sound rather like fans getting off kilter.

I know I need to replace both of them, but don’t happen to have that kind of money laying about right now. I suppose I could move all my sites to some hosted solution somewhere, and pay a little less, but I really like the convenience of having a coloc’ed box, and having full administrative control of it.

Yes, I know, some of you are going to recommend some kind of VPS thingy, and I probably should do that. It’s just such an enormous hassle migrating from one server to another. I tend to wait for catastrophic failure to do that. Perhaps I’ll get that opportunity again.

NPR and Open Source

Wow. The editor of Radio Open Source responded to my post about his show. That’s very cool.

And his explanation of the name actually makes a lot of sense to me. I’ve often asked the question “what would the Open Source model look like when applied to X”, where X is politics, education, community, architecture, and so on.

That puts a whole new spin on your show, Mr. Greeley, and I’ll listen to it in that light. Thanks for the clarification. And, yeah, I am interested in helping out.