Al's Blog-o-Sphere

Please take a moment and say a prayer for my friend Gabrielle Bouliane, who passed away today of biliary tract cancer. She had only a few months from the time of her diagnosis and left us far too soon. Here’s a video of her at a poetry slam, one of her favorite projects, shortly after she had become ill:

I met Gabrielle while I was doing my music podcast. Her interest is film-making and music brought her to many of the same shows I was attending. We were usually right in front of the stage, her with a video camera, me with my still camera. We both were avid fans of Buffalo Celtic-Rock band, Jackdaw, and often were at their shows. Continue Reading…

Yeah. It’s been that long. It’s that time of year when I get busy with another project and don’t have much time for blogging. It’s FIRST Robotics time.

I’ve been an advisor to a local High School team for six years, since my son was on the team. He graduated and is off in college, but I’m still on the team.

Every year, the students are given a new game to play and have six weeks to build a new robot to play it. We’re in the middle of that six weeks now and are well into the design and building of a robot that plays a game to be known as Breakaway. I’d try to explain the game, but here’s a video that does it better:

So, we’re building bumps and tunnels. Towers and kickers and trying to figure out how to build the perfect robot to master this game. Last year, we did pretty well, going all the way to the final field in the National – International, really – Championships in Atlanta. We won our local regional and did very well in another in Philadelphia. The challenge is to live up to our hard-earned reputation as a team and do it again. Continue Reading…

This post probably won’t be interesting unless you’re a Ham Radio operator, or really bored.

This is a story about two headsets – headphones with a boom microphone. Ham Radio operators use these for contesting and DXing or any time you’re using the radio while active and you don’t want to be stuck in front of a “normal” microphone. Because the microphone is mounted on the boom, it’s always near your mouth no matter how you move.

I first bought the Heil Proset many years ago for contest use. It has a special microphone that is tailored to voice frequencies and is supposed to increase intelligibility over SSB radio transmissions. It’s something that Bob Heil developed and has been one of his most successful products.

I used these all the time, preferring them to a desk microphone, but over the years, they got so they were showing their age. Continue Reading…

I mentioned Ninite a few posts ago as a useful site for setting up a newly installed operating system.

Google has a similar offering in it’s Google Pack. I was aware of it, but had never really looked at it. For some reason, I did today.

It’s similar in a lot of ways to Ninite, and offers a number of Google applications. But, since many of my favorite free applications do come from Google, it’s not a bad starting point. Continue Reading…