When you ground a hot dog to an AM radio tower, it generates plasma.

While the hot dog's flesh is getting vaporized, a tiny plasma arc moves the air around it back and forth. And because this tower is an AM tower, it uses Amplitude Modulation, where a transmitter changes the amplitude of a carrier wave up and down. Just like a speaker cone moving up and down, the plasma arc from the hot dog turns that modulation into audible sound.

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Six years ago, I replaced the old HVAC system that came with our house, a central forced air system installed in 1995¹.

The new system is a Trane XR AC paired with an S9V2 96% efficiency forced-air gas furnace. And it ran great! Better efficiency, quieter, multiple fan speeds so I can circulate air and prevent stale air in some parts of the house... what's not to love?

Well, apparently the engineering:

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The Arduino Uno Q is... a weird board. It's the first product born out of Qualcomm's buyout of Arduino.

It's like if you married an Intel CPU, and a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller—oh wait, Radxa's X4 did that.

Arduino even tried it before with their old Yún board, which had Linux running on a MIPS CPU, married to an ATmega microcontroller.

The Uno Q isn't quite a Raspberry Pi, but it looks like one when you squint at it. And it's not quite an Uno, but it does a pretty good job masquerading as that, too.

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One day on my drive home, I saw three towers. One of them had a bunch of blinking white lights, another one had red lights that kind of faded in and out, and the third one, well, it wasn't doing anything. I'm lucky to have a radio engineer for a dad, so Dad: why do some towers blink?

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My normal process for transferring video footage from my Sony cameras to my computer is as follows:

1. Run a sonydump script that copies all video files from my SD card to my local computer, then runs rm *.MP4 in the folder on the SD card, and ejects it.
2. I copy the files onto my NAS, which has an hourly ZFS snapshot and also backs up that snapshot to my 2nd on-site backup server.
3. At the end of the day, I run a sync command that synchronizes all my working set of files to an external Thunderbolt drive I always bring home with me.

Unfortunately, as it was the end of the day yesterday when I got back from a video shoot, I had the folder on the external drive open, and not the folder where I copy the files to on my NAS. Thus, after I thought I had copied all the files to the NAS, I deleted the local folder on my computer. Then I ran the sync command, and apparently I have that sync command set to delete files that don't exist in the source.

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Earlier this year, I inherited a bunch of old Macs and computer parts, including the PowerBook 520 pictured above. And, for the past three years I've been trying to visit VCF Midwest up in Chicago, where there's this odd blend of old computers, radio, broadcast gear... Honestly, it's hard to pin down exactly what it is.

And I also had no idea how overwhelming the two-day event would be. Overwhelmingly awesome, that is.

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