The silver particles in the film aren't very transparent and you can see this for yourself with a microscope. All tonal representations of B&W film, whether a scan or traditional enlargement, depend on limitations of resolving power to blur or alias the grain into a tone.
Correspondingly, you will see a difference in apparent grain from different scanners at different resolutions. If you think there is nothing to be gained by scanning on a drum or virtual drum, pick one of your best negatives and pay to have it professionally scanned!
I’ve definitely had plenty of medium format negatives drum scanned and I have found consumer scanners to not be great for color slide film. But, scanning a grainy/gritty film like HP5 or TriX doesn’t seem like quite the same kind of challenge.
And if you want to hear what morse telegraphy sounds like in 2022, you're in luck because it's still alive and well. Simply tune your shortwave radio to 7.028-7.045 or 14.028-14.045 MHz every Wednesday between 1300-1400z & 1900-2000z, and every Thursday at 0300-0400z & 0700–0800z. Or, try 7.050-7.060 MHz any evening to listen for operators using straight keys.
If you do not have a shortwave radio there are plenty online at http://websdr.org/.
I'm always curious about how long this will continue (e.g. see the recent post on how Gen Z never learned cursive).
I got my ham radio license (since lapsed a long time ago) when I was a kid, back when you still had to pass a Morse code test. I was totally infatuated by it, and remember the excitement of being able to communicate with folks all around the world. I just lost interest with it when the Internet became widespread.
Also, unrelated point, but another reason that what this guy is doing is so impressive is that he is using a straight key. When I was a ham radio operator, pretty much all the ham's I knew used paddle keys, where you press the paddle to the right to get the "dots", and to the left to get the "dashes", but the interrupts are automatically done for you (i.e. holding it to the right gives you "dot dot dot ..." and holding it to the left gives you "dash dash dash ...", and the speed is set with a dial setting on the key), no need to tap. I can't imagine being this fast with a paddle key, let alone a straight key.
It's very common to build your own low power (5 watts) transmitter and use code. No fancy electronics or computers needed. People do it out in the woods from inside their sleeping bag in the dark.
Well, I do radiosport contests, and most stations are sending around 30 WPM, the hot shots are faster of course. But anyway... I look at radiosport the same way that I look at sail boat racing. There is great fun in keeping the old skills alive, and nobody at your local yacht club thinks it is odd to learn a bunch of arcane knots and spend Saturday dashing around in circles. But nobody is suggesting that wooden ships powered by sail is a good way to bring container loads of merch from China. For me Morse contesting is the same — I would use FTP to fetch an ISO from Finland, but code is good humor on a random Saturday contest.
I got my license less than a year ago, but there is still an active amateur radio community. I'm apart of a few active amateur radio discords.
Between cw, digital modes, POTA/SOTA, YouTube, and everything that has been written in the last hundred years about radio there is a lot to learn. I joined because I like learning new things and radio has a lot to learn about.
That's a fair question. The time slots I called out above are occupied by learners in the CWops academy. The density of transmissions can be so high that the waterfall resemble the opening to the Matrix. But clearly demographics are stacked against this part of the hobby.
There was a bit of a resurgence of CW during the pandemic. I know a few people who took to learning it during that time. Will it continue? I don’t know but there seems to be more CW traffic than SSB some days. So it’s certainly not dying.
The modern replacement seems to be some of the new mesh packet radio systems. Hard to argue with the simplicity/resiliency of the current setup though.
I've been ready to take the HAM test for a while but just keep procrastinating on doing it.
I highly recommend HamStudy.org[0] - free online, or a $3.99 iOS/Android app. It keeps track of which questions you keep missing and will drill you on them. I found this approach was fantastic for passing the Technician exam, and also valid for the General, which I took a week or two later. The General license is worthwhile for the extra operating privileges, and not much more difficult than the Technician exam - just more stuff.
The Amateur Extra is much harder to cram for - more complicated questions, and more of them, and in the US, doesn't bring far more operating privileges than the General license. I did it so that I could convert it to a full German license, and it took a lot more studying for understanding than I did for the first two exams. I used "Amateur Radio Extra Class Licensing: For 2020 through 2024 License Examinations"[1] to understand the material, and "Pass Your Amateur Radio Extra Class Test - The Easy Way"[2] for shameless cramming.
Taking the exams online works out really well, as long as you have a room you can get totally clear and don't mind having three random but supportive volunteers watching you.
You can do CW entirely in software without learning it. I've been considering trying this out because the lower bands that technicians are permitted to use here in the US are CW and not voice.
Most of the software that decodes CW isn’t that great unless you have a consistent S9 signal and the keying is even (IE, not straight keyed). Once the signal wanders or is even partially in the noise the software will just spit out gibberish but a human would still easily be able to copy it.
It does, and FM isn't too much different, but then I would be surprised to find a simple AM/FM radio that can tune to bands where you would encounter CW.
I worked on a project once involving divination from texts and wrote Terry about this topic. Here's what he told me (2015):
"""The easiest way to pick a random passage is to read timer that is in the random 1-20Mhz.
If you have a faster timer, then divide by a number.
The Bible is 4Meg. You want a random number from 0 to 4 million.
The Bible is 100,000 lines of text.
If you have the Bible in memory being edited, broken down by line number, you can pick a random
line number from 0 to 100,000.
If you flip 17 coins, you get a random number from 0 to 120,000. I use that for picking a line number.
God can do pretty-much any technique. The simplest and best is probably just randomly opening the Bible by hand."""
I share your concerns. I created a dedicated-purpose Microsoft account by following Mojang's official migration link. The process went smoothly and I have not been asked for a phone number. I am using Fastmail with a custom domain and set up an alias. Everything works including the custom launcher. I completed the entire process on Linux.
I agree with other observations on this thread that individual accounts and phone number authentication would not be safe assumptions for many minecraft households. It will be difficult for Microsoft to tighten this process further.
I have for the past couple of weeks, tried making microsoft accounts , where I set up 2FA with TOTP, set up an alternate email, even pulled the account recovery code from the security section.
One was banned after a week, the other one hasn't been banned yet, but was made a little bit later than the first one's creation- so it might just be a matter of time.
Neither one has a phone number, but I did notice i was in a different location when the first one got banned, so I suspect if you play on a laptop or mobile device and the IP does not match up, you're considered gone by the system. If it's not a auto-timer as it seems to somewhat be.
This was on Windows in both instances.
The difficulty here is , if it does flag it- how would you recover it without giving them a phone number, since you couldn't access something allowing you to migrate to a different microsoft account at that stage.
Three extraordinary examples from the earlier days of the internet.
taxi1010.com. A veteran taxi driver (?) organizes his thoughts around "verbal self defense," creating a highly crosslinked database of adversarial conversational openers, and possible ways to deflect them. Reasonable starting point: http://www.taxi1010.com/stargate01.htm#sitemap
everything2.com: another free-form database mixing facts, fiction and personal notes written by an unusually literate subcommunity. Adjacent to slashdot and h2g2, even documents some early reactions to wikipedia. https://everything2.com/
My Boyfriend Came Back From The War: net artist Olia Lialina crafts a poem in the browser by exploiting properties of the medium. Remixed dozens of times by other net artists. Archived by Rhizome with a simulated slow load over Netscape. https://sites.rhizome.org/anthology/lialina.html
Background noise - that's one way to put it! The path loss is around 250 dB, so a practical amateur moonbounce station makes use of a very powerful RF amplifier feeding an array of yagi antennas, all mounted on an altitude/azimuth rotator - in other words, it's a radio telescope, and the receiving side hopefully has something similar. You can do a google image search for "moonbounce," the setups are kind of amazing. A lot of investment mostly to exchange morse and specialized low-bandwidth digital modes.
The upshot is that you can communicate with any station that can also see the moon - somebody on the other side of the planet, 12,000km away. Plus there is the unique experience of hearing your own transmission echo, two seconds after you cease.
This kind of setup is well within reach for a commercial enterprise but will never be practical for IoT owing to the laws of physics. On the other hand, there is SNOTEL, a system that bounces snowpack telemetry off of the ionized trails left by meteors...
In a way you are describing state of the art robotic arms, but computer vision in that domain is less about economizing and more about coping with everyday materials and objects that are difficult to characterize.
The OP is coming from the CNC milling world where positional accuracy is more or less solved: you use cheap steppers or servos but expensive, precision-ground ballscrews; then you swear on Machinery's Handbook not to drive your machine too fast.
The real demons in dimensional accuracy come from things like spindle runout, deformation of the tool, and flexing and vibrations of the machine, fixture and workpiece (that are often different going in one direction than another!). Certain operations like drilling can't be corrected in real time. There are additional concerns like minimum amounts of material that can be removed with each pass - too little and you are just burnishing the workpiece.
Machinists actually do solve these problems in software when they generate toolpaths and fixturing.
Correspondingly, you will see a difference in apparent grain from different scanners at different resolutions. If you think there is nothing to be gained by scanning on a drum or virtual drum, pick one of your best negatives and pay to have it professionally scanned!