Cell phones have become a fact of life, though. A necessity that we can’t live without. So we pile on features to make us think we like them. My phone is a camera, a web browser, an email client, a personal assistant, a toy and lastly, a phone.

The funny thing is, it’s not very good at any of those things…

I just ordered a bluetooth earpiece. You’ve got to have one or risk a ticket in your car if the phone rings. I don’t talk much while I drive, but it is safer than even the corded earpieces on the rare occasion that I do.

The problem is, it’s the third earpiece I’ve bought. I haven’t found one yet that I really liked. Every one has been a problem. They are uncomfortable. About as comfortable as if you put a clothespin on your ear. And less secure. Even with the hook around your ear, I’ve had them fall out. None of them are loud enough, especially while driving. The last on I had was so smart I couldn’t use it. It was supposed to have voice commands so that all I needed to do was talk to it. All I ever got out of it was “Say a command.” My phone has voice recognition as well. I never knew which one I was talking to and never did get the commands memorized. You shouldn’t need to learn a set of voice commands to make a phone call.

So did I get rid of them because I didn’t like them? No. I just ignored the voice commands and dialed all calls on the phone. That kind of defeats the purpose of having the headset while driving, but I just pulled over to dial. Answering was okay, when I could find the button to press by feel…

No the reason I just bought a new one – I lost the last one. I can’t walk around like a Borg with it on my ear all the time, so I take it off when I get out of the car. I end up sticking them in my pocket. Usually along with my keys. The hook that goes around your ear is like a grappling hook to keys and I guess I lost it pulling the keys out of the pocket later. It’s twice now that his has happened and I’m getting tired of it.

My last one was fancy – voice commands and noise cancelling etc. – a mistake I won’t make again. From now on, since I’m going to lose them anyway, I’m getting the cheapest I can find.

I’ve found that the cheap way to buy cellphone accessories is online. The stores, even the kiosks in malls, really live off the markup on the accessories. $30 for a car charger? Or a new battery? Not in my budget. Battery life is an issue with my new smart phone, so I looked for another one. The result? Another battery and a charger to charge it without putting it in the phone for $12. Sure, it came from China, but so do the ones sold in the shops. I just cut out the middlemen.

I don’t know what inspired me to do it, but I have undertaken the construction of a portable antenna for my Ham Radio operations. Probably just for something to do, or curiosity to see if such a small antenna can really be effective.

I usually use some method of shooting a wire up into tall trees for this type of operation, camping or just operating “Field Style” for fun. I’ve been pretty happy with the fishing-reel-on-a-slingshot method and I built a Pneumatic Launcher that can be very effective at putting a line over even the tallest of trees. I’ve also acquired some telescopic fiberglass masts (fishing poles) that work quite well as supports for vertical wires. But this design caught my eye and I decided to try it and see.

The idea come from a web page that I saw mentioned on the QRP-L email list: VE3GAM. There are commercially-made antennas that are similar, but this looked easy to make. It might be fun to try.

The idea consists of a shortened dipole on a portable mast and tripod that can be disassembled when not in use. The central portion of the antenna is built using a plastic electrical box and some aluminum tubing. Loading coils are made out of plastic PVC conduit and tapped for the various bands. Further tuning from band-to-band is done by varying the length of the ends of the dipole, which are made out of long telescopic whip antennas. Think of rabbit ears or a transistor radio antenna, but longer.

The materials were an eclectic collection. I wasn’t going to find them all in one place, that was for sure. I started researching where I could acquire them online and once I was certain I could get them, began ordering the parts. My first assumption about what would be hard to find and what would be easy was pretty much 180 degrees out of whack, as usual.

I was concerned about finding a small quantity of the aluminum tubing. I envisioned having to buy 20 foot lengths and paying an outrageous amount for shipping such a large item. It turned out to be no problem. I found an outlet online that would not only sell me exactly what I needed, but would cut it to length and ship it to me. When I got to the shipping part, they had an option to pick it up at the nearest store. Even four-foot lengths were going to cost me $24 to ship, so I checked out where the closest store might be. It turned out to be in Buffalo. I can drive to Buffalo for a lot less than $24, even at current gas prices, so I did and combined the trip with a stop at Harbor Freight for a tool I would need, a pipe threader to groove the PVC for the coils.

7 Band Portable Dipole Antenna from Bob Rice on Vimeo.

Some things I thought would be easy weren’t, of course. The PVC plastic electrical box for the center of the antenna was something I thought I could just walk into Home Depot and pick up. Of course, it wasn’t. I ordered one online from Grainger, along with a few minor hardware things, nuts and bolts mostly. They were delivered very quickly. The box turned out to be useable, but just fit. The video warned about boxes where the conduit openings were too low to clear the bottom of the box. This one was useable after I ground out a few bumps in the plastic. I got lucky. The video showed one that was totally unuseable.

A source for the telescopic whips was given in the video, but no longer carried them. I found I could order some slightly longer (Longer is good. Shorter would be a problem.) ones from the Ham Radio standby, MFJ. They had a larger base (3/8-24) and had a male end, rather than the female end on the ones in the example, so I adjusted the purchase of bolts to fasten them to the ends of the coil. I would use some coupling nuts to joint the bolt to the threaded end of the whip. Another item I could pick up at Home Depot. Not! They didn’t carry the fine thread, only 3/8-16. I had a online source and resigned myself to waiting for them to arrive. On a hunch, I went to Sears Hardware and I found two of them in their nut & bolts department. They were charging over $3 each, but I had them in my hand now. So I was ready for the whips. Of course, I got an email from MFJ telling me they were on backorder and might take two weeks to arrive….

It seems like every step of the way there is some problem that challenges the completion of this project. Of course, this is not unexpected. In fact, it’s kind of the challenge that makes these projects interesting. The change to the 3/8 bolts to attach the whips meant that the plugs that fit inside the end of the coil forms won’t be large enough. No problem, I’ll use a PVC cap that fits over the end instead of inside. As soon as I can find some. All I can find are threaded, no press and glue caps in Home Depot. I may just use the threaded ones, now that I have a pipe threader. I’ll just thread the 3/4 PVC. I already threaded the entire length of it to form grooves for the wire coil, but with a 1-inch die shimmed down a bit. It just made shallow grooves for the wire, but the full pipe threads should line right up.

The article called for some 10-24×15/16 standoff spacers in the box to attach the aluminum pipes. The closest I could find was 10-32×1. Not a big difference and I should be able to make them work, but that changed all the small hardware from 10-24 to 10-32. There was so much to get right before I ordered anything at all. Even wire had to be ordered as it required 33 feet of 20ga. wire for each coil. More than I had around, but less than a full spool by a lot. I found a place that sold a 160 ft. roll. Perfect, but I’m still waiting for it to arrive from a small place that looks like a CB repair shop.

But progress has been made and as the rest of the parts arrive, it will all go together. I’ll let you know how it works when it is done.

The commercial equivalent product (seen here) costs $400. I’m well below that, but already more than I expected to spend. We’ll see how badly I do in that department later as well. But the fun is priceless!

Found on Facebook…

Wow! Has Facebook ever riled people up?!? All you see today is complaints about some changes they made and announcements/stories about changes they have just announced.

I know people don’t like change, but everyone complains about Facebook. You’d think they’d be happy they were trying to change the service that everyone loves to hate.

Part of the problem is the endless, ever-changing settings that affect your privacy and security. Not only do they keep changing them, they keep moving around – getting harder to find, as well as it’s always a 50%-50% chance that the default setting is what you want/safe/secure/convenient (pick one.) No matter what they do, it seems like almost everyone complains.

So here’s a bunch of graphics I found – all yesterday and today – that I found funny. Hope you do too.

You’ve probably already seen lots of these postings on Facebook. They really annoy me because in all probability, the person who it looks like sent it, didn’t. The game either forces them to send it to all their friends, or at least makes it so easy to do that they don’t realize that they are spamming their friends.

I wouldn’t mind one advertisement (because, that’s really what they are.) for a game when someone joins it, but when it tells me someone has a new high score every five minutes, or that they earned 1000 “Coins” every thousand meaningless coins, I have a problem.

To compound the problem, it’s possible to block these app invitations, but it’s not easy. Facebook has a vested interest in you seeing them and clicking on the links in them, so they don’t give you a quick one-button way to do it.

But, I hate these things soooo much, I’ve made it a vendetta to block each and every one, despite having to go through these steps for each one…

First, I click on the link, the name of the game in the post. Since I don’t want to lose my place in my reading, I usually right-click and open it in a new tab. Of course, most of the time, the game refuses to work because I am using secure browsing…

Now that really burns me, that I would have to use a less-secure browser to give my permission to use my data for a game…

The next page, of course is loaded with Javascript and my NoScript plugin warns me. I have to temporarily allow the scripts to even see the games’ page. Arrrghhhh….

Finally, we’re getting somewhere. This is the page where, if you actually wanted to play the game you would have to give it permission to access all your most private Facebook information and allow it to pester all your friends. Most people don’t think about this, they just want to play the game and click the Allow button.

But I don’t want to play their game and definitely don’t want to give them access to my personal information. What I do want from this page, and it’s not available anywhere prior to this point, is the link to the Games home page. They hide it at the top where your eye is drawn away from it by the picture and the big Allow button below it.

Finally, we’ve gotten to the place we wanted to go, the one spot where we can actually request that the application be blocked.

Where is the magic Block button? Well, they don’t make it easy. It’s hidden down low, along the left sidebar. I circled it to help you find it…

Facebook finds it inconceiveable that you would want to block this game, so you must reaffirm your decision in this pop-up box.

You’ll get another pop-up that tells you that the app has been blocked. That means, go ahead and close the tabs that you’ve opened and go back to reading your friends postings on Facebook knowing that you won’t be bothered by that pesky game app again. It’s a shame that it requires at least 5 steps to block each one, but a couple have been brought on by my own security obsession. If you don’t use secure browsing and don’t use NoScript, it will go a bit quicker. But don’t call me if you’ve been hacked…

I’ve recently found an easier way to shield my sensitive eyes from these apps. I’m using another plugin called Better Facebook. you might have noticed the blue background on the screenshots. BFB is the cause of that, but it does a lot more. Too much to get into here, but the one thing I’ll mention is it’s filters.

Filters is an advanced feature of BFB. I found out how to filter games from my stream using a BFB filter. That stops them from appearing before I ever see them! I’m not bothered by them, but I lose the satisfaction of blocking them individually!

I requested an invitation only a few days ago and received it last night. I’ve been playing with it today. I’m sure there is a lot I haven’t discovered about it yet, but I thought I might mention what I have learned so far.

First of all, what is it? As a subscription service, it supplies music over the internet to your computer or iPhone, iTouch, or Android phone. If there are other devices supported, I’m not aware of them yet. Royalties are paid by advertising in the free version. The pay versions are ad-free. At this time most of the ads I’ve seen were for Spotify itself, even if they suggested a particular artist.

You can type in a title of a song or an artist name, and many results will come up. I had to really try hard to stump it. The speed is quite fast, almost letter-by-letter, which is quite nice.

It also will scan and catalog your local drives for music files. It’s interface is very reminiscent of iTunes and immediately found all the music on my C: drive. When I plugged in an external drive with over 100k mp3 files, and told it to search that drive, it took some time to scan it, but not an excessive amount. Once done, searching through that large database of songs was extremely quick. It is the fastest at finding songs of any program I have used, better than iTunes, Winamp or Songbird, all of which are painfully slow once you reach that number of files.

Spotify only allows the program to work with iPods, iPhones and Android devices in the paid versions. This is curious to me, as I’d think the sooner you get people hooked into using one service on their phones, the better. I would have allowed the phone interface, but limited the on-demand music, but who am I?

I’ll admit, my interest in Spotify is probably rather different than their intended audience. I have a large collection of MP3 music that I prefer to manage, rather than pay to hear the songs. I also don’t listen to music at all on my phone. I’ve never plugged earbuds into my Incredible. It has some music on it, but it’s mostly left from my previous phone and lives on the micro-SD card. I’ve never bothered to delete it.

As for finding new music with Spotify, from what I see, there is no suggestion mechanism, like say Pandora or Grooveshark other than some “New Music” lists at the top page. Instead, it seems to need to have you develop a network of “friends” who share their playlists. Very social, but too much work for me at this point. A search of friends on Facebook only turned up one friend using Spotify. This may get better as more people get their invites.

That then leaves me to using Spotify as a interface to my music collection. I already mentioned that I liked the speed of searches in a large library. That’s about as far as it goes. As a player, it’s pretty weak. You can find your songs. You can make playlists. You can play songs and enque more to play. I was having some fun queueing up a list of songs using the search. It was going well and I had a couple hours of music set up to play, then it abruptly stopped. For some reason, all my queued songs vanished and I was left with an empty list. No idea why.

Another annoying thing is sometimes when you search for a song and play it, it adds an entire album to the Now Playing list. There is no way to remove the unwanted songs, either. All I could do was keep queueing songs ahead of the unwanted ones.

When it comes to playing songs, it’s very bare bones. Winamp is far better.

Another thing it really could use, since it’s good at finding songs for your mix, is a crossfade between songs to fill in the silence. There was a very noticeable pause between songs, way more than normal. It was distracting.

If I had no MP3 collection, or if I intended to use it on my phone a lot, Spotify might be useful to me. As it is, it’s main use to me is a player with a really quick search feature. Other then the fast searching, it’s just another in a long list of music players that don’t do what I want or need.

Why can’t someone make a good digital music player? Here’s a quick list of players I love to hate:

Winamp: My favorite, but far from perfect. Plugins and addons make it customizeable, but AOL’s relegating it to a poor stepchild status has left it high and dry. If they had spent as much effort on the player as they did on visualizations and skins, it would really be something. But I really don’t want a player that looks like some steampunk console out of a Jules Verne story.

Windows Media Player: Forget it. Microsoft is clueless and as a music player, I’ve never gotten comfortable with it. It’s the only player I’ve ever seen that defaults to an icon view with album art as the icons. I know some people who do like it, but I don’t like how it wants to go online and download “information” to retag your music. It’s a little better as a video player, but I still avoid it.

iTunes: No. That simple. The windows versions are crap.

Real Player: Another overbuilt, do-it-all, but do-nothing-well program.

Foobar 2000: Open source player that is the rival to Winamp for my top choice. I can do things with Foobar I can’t do with anything else, yet it’s spartan interface and endless versions that are all slightly different annoy me. As does lack of a good media management scheme.