After getting licensed, you'll probably get frustrated with the UV-5R and look into a more capable hand held unit, or a mobile radio. These start at around $150 and go up from there (plus antennas, power supplies, etc).
Thanks! I'm well aware I'm not legally allowed to transmit and don't plan to either. I'm just fascinated by the prospect of receiving invisible waves and having them translated into sound in my hand.
Can I read somewhere about which frequencies are used by ham operators, and descriptions of things like UHF and VF and narrowband and such?
I roughly split spectrum in my head as "longer waves" (kHz, AM radio, needs impractically large antennas), "HF" (thousands of miles of range, largish antennas), "VHF/UHF" (line of sight, 25 miles, walkie talkies), and "microwaves" (1GHz+, short range, tiny antennas for wifi).
Someone already mentioned the Baofeng style of cheap Chinese radio. They're good enough but they also produce pretty dirty signals that there's a chance they aren't legally compliant. That being said, everyone seems fascinated with them right now so they get away with it for the moment. I wouldn't let that stop you since if you stick with it, you'll move up soon enough and it'll become the backup/beater radio.
I'll add on that $25 RTL-SDR (get a "TXCO" one like a Nooelec Blue) is also a pretty cheap entry into listening to absolutely everything. With that, you can start making antennas, listening to satellites, running your own FlightAware ADS-B scanner, etc. To listen to HF, you can add a $75 upconverter.
Will do wonders for what you'll be able to hear(and send). I've got a similar Diamond one on my VX-8DR and I can pick up the repeaters ~20mi away. Can't hit them though, but that's what cross-band is for :).
I'm able to run a pretty resonable APRS setup w/ BF-F8HP + above and a mobilinkd for ~$120.
If you don't have any interest in transmission (for now) you should probably pick up an SDR dongle since they can tune a much wider range of frequencies, and are cheaper.
I bought an rtl sdr before I started studying for my license. It is a great entry point into the hobby. GQRX and SDR# are great applications for browsing and visualizing. Another fun thing to do is get weather data from commercial outdoor wireless weather sensors in your area with RTL 433 https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433
Was this done using the DVDs? I'm curious about any potential licensing issues with the screen caps and subtitles. Did you have to get permission/sign something - or does this fall under fair use?
No way this is licensed (no copyright notice, even; not even a mention of Fox), and no way it is fair use. It has frame-by-frame, full resolution images and full transcripts of every episode up for browsing. This is textbook mass copyright infringement. Short of offering unlicensed video downloads for a fee, it could hardly be more clear-cut.
Yeah, it's cool, I get it, but you can't just steal and redistribute content en masse for your cool project. Well, he did, but I expect he'll be hearing from Fox's lawyers soon.
It is arguably fair use in the U.S. I don't think there is enough case law to be sure. It's hard to predict how it would go in litigation. I think you're right that the defendants wouldn't have a particularly strong case, but they wouldn't have the weakest.
The courts have generally judged significant "transformation" of the source material to be powerful in determining fair use. I think that would be in their benefit. Also it could be argued that this has very little effect on the market for the original copyrighted material, which would be in their favor. Of course, the copyright holder would see and argue it differently if they choose to sue. And the "the amount and substantiality of the portion taken" would not look good for the defendants -- but even though some common belief focuses on this factor almost exclusively -- thinking as long as you copy only 10 pages or whatever you're good, and if you don't you're definitely not -- that's not how it works, it's just one factor, and one that the courts in the past couple decades have somewhat de-emphasized.
But I don't think we can say "no way it is fair use", or "it could hardly be more clear cut." It could go either way. Fair use in the U.S. for novel things, not already well established as fair use or not, almost always looks like this.
Counterpoint: copying every single page of every book and making it searchable can be fair use. It just takes only 10 years of litigation and appeals to determine that. See Authors Guild v. Google.
https://www.eff.org/document/ruling-appeals-court
Point is, the law is hardly clear cut and never is with new technologies. Without someone willing to take a risk and develop a potentially infringing technology we would never have had VCRs, MP3 players, YouTube.... I applaud the creators for making an incredibly useful resource and I hope if they do face legal threats they get a zealous pro-bono defense from someone like the EFF or Larry Lessig.
I'm skeptical how a small form factor oven like this could provide even heating that is required for many kinds of baking, even if it has convection fans. Also, having such a small volume means that most of the heat will escape when the door opens making it difficult to get that crucial "oven spring" for bread baking.
It seems like a perfectly acceptable (albeit pricy) alternative to a toaster over, however.
> Also, having such a small volume means that most of the heat will escape when the door opens...
Supposedly, there's an air curtain to help with that problem.
> It seems like a perfectly acceptable (albeit pricy) alternative to a toaster over, however.
It may be an alternative to a toaster oven, but is that a good thing? Even the best toaster oven isn't very good, if you go by testing by Cooks Illustrated for example. I don't see how this one can perform any better given, as you point out, the physics limitations of a small oven.
Lucene has had this capability for a while now. A regexp query (as defined by the RegExp class) is compiled into an automaton for quick comparison with the inverted index, also represented as an automaton. Automatons and FSTs are used extensively by Lucene these days. Out of curiosity, I did some playing around with Lucene's RegExp class when it first came out (or rather, when I first learned about it). It provides a really interesting way to build regular expressions: https://gist.github.com/mumrah/6104234
It's got a much different API than java.util.RegEx, but it let's you work with Automatons as first class things instead of operating just with regexes. Being able to compute intersections, unions, shortest match examples, from multiple automata etc.. can be really useful.
For .NET / SQL Server people, check out GuidCombs if you want better Primary Key performance.
These are a great way of making GUIDs sequential for database use, giving indexing performance close to ints on SQL Server.
I imagine this approach could also work on Postgres and other dbs that have made GUID/UUIDs a first class data type.
You'd just have to understand how that database applies its indexing algorithm.
Ok, Less likely than the chance your computer will spontaneously catch fire while running your code. Less likely than the chance the sun will emit a colossal solar flare and engulf the earth in a firey death.
Right, but that's the point of a GUID. Claiming no chance makes it sound like its distinct from other GUID generators in that way. I think the intended claim is "here is a scheme for roughly timestamp-ordered GUIDs", which makes it clear that the timestamp-ordering is the interesting part.
Actually it can. As long as they aren't randomly generated. UUID4s are random, lots of them including the mongodb use a timestamp/mac address as the first n bits of the guid. Not sure whether they have "no chance of collisions" but it is very possible.
Its an infinitesimally small chance. You'd need a mac collision, must be generated at the same time, and a uuid collision. Even at the largest scales (Google et all) the probability of that happening is effectively 0.
Neat! I made one of these in Java a while back after reading the snowflake Twitter post (which has since been removed). Looks like Twitter has retired Snowflake: https://github.com/twitter/snowflake
But you're giving up the freedom to decide what content you consume. Chromecast is the media equivalent of AOL. I know what I want to watch/listen to, so let me decide, instead of hamstringing me with apps, or making me jump through hoops to circumvent the restrictions.
Plus, if you're watching a movie, or otherwise streaming for a considerable length of time, you're on wall power anyways, so whats one more cable?
