Technology: October 2023 Archives
W. Jason Morgan, discoverer of plate tectonics (1935-2023)
"In 1967, Jason Morgan presented a groundbreaking paper at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington DC. It showed that Earth's surface consists of about a dozen rigid plates. They are created at mid-ocean ridges, destroyed in subduction zones where they converge, and move past one another along great faults, such the San Andreas Fault in California. Other papers followed, explaining that volcanoes occur where plates subduct, mountains rise where and when continents collide, and earthquakes result from jostling and shearing at plate margins."
Rob's tips for uncovering radio station stream URLs | The SWLing Post
Many radio-listening apps and some old-time internet radio appliances need a stream URL to find a station. This article describes how to use diagnostic tools in your desktop browser to dig through all the Javascript to find the actual stream URL for a radio livestream.
RELATED: radio-browser.info is a crowdsourced database of over 40,000 radio streams around the world. A GeoMap makes it easy to browse for streams in a particular part of the world. You can add map entries: I just added one for 4RPH Reading Radio in Brisbane. In turn, apps like RadioDroid use this database to find streams for listening. Unfortunately, some radio megacorporations s use stream-hopping techniques to force listeners to use their apps.
A 2014 article (updated in 2020) suggests using packet-sniffer tools to grab URLs and has a list of frequently used streaming domains, media types, and file extensions to look for.
Long gone, DEC is still powering the world of computing | Ars Technica
"In 1977, DEC introduced the VAX, a new line of minicomputers that featured a 32-bit instruction set architecture and virtual memory. Its operating system, VMS, was a multi-user, multitasking OS that provided features we now take for granted, including virtual memory, file sharing, and networking. It amassed a wide variety of third-party software packages that made it the most popular system in its class."
In 1982, 6.001, MIT's first-semester computer science course, used a DECsystem 20 running TOPS-20, with Emacs for the editor. In '89 I had to adapt code from a PDP-11/55 to a PDP-11/70 on a British Airways 737 ground maintenance simulator and hope nothing clobbered the brute-force entry I stuffed in the memory map; I carried the software with me from Oklahoma to England on a 20 MB disk pack the size of a large pizza. In the early '90s, we had a machine running VAXeln (a preemptive RTOS) as host computer for a human centrifuge. The same model computer and OS was used for years to run Oklahoma's Pikepass toll tag system, something I spotted when visiting the Pikepass office at the Tulsa end of the Turner Turnpike. 1993 was probably the last time I touched anything DEC except perhaps for the occasional VT100. When I graduated, Digital Equipment Corporation was a major employer along Boston's Route 128 beltway, but they were overtaken by the PC revolution.
