The headquarters for the National Association for Amateur Radio happens to be located right here in my home state of Connecticut! They invited me up for a tour yesterday that we are currently editing together for an upcoming video.
The photo above is ARRL CEO David Minster and me.
It’ll be another busy week here at Lon.TV!
Tomorrow we’ll have the already completed review of the solar powered Eufy camera. It works pretty nicely and is already up to 100% charge just sitting out in my yard. You can see the review on Amazon if you want to watch it now.
Today’s projects will consist of me shooting the Wrapup video and a review of the Google Pixel 6a. I’ve been playing around with the phone all weekend and like it quite a bit.
Tomorrow we’ll be spending most of the day at the national headquarters for amateur radio here in the US! It happens to be located less than 45 minutes up the road from me in Connecticut. We’ll get a tour, play with some of their crazy radio gear, and learn about why amateur radio is still relevant in our broadband internet age! Look for that video later this week.
Also this week will be my monthly sponsored Plex video. It’ll likely be about managing audio books with Plex based on a viewer suggestion unless they drop a new feature before the week is out.
Lots to come so stay tuned!
I’ve really enjoyed playing around with the live streaming auction and sales platform WhatNot over the last two weeks. It’s crazy addictive both for buyers and sellers. I sold and gave away a trunkfull of stuff this weekend!
Even with a small number of viewers I’m finding retro games selling at or near market prices. They’ve done a good job of building small niches of collector communities so there’s always buyers lurking. They tapped into the FOMO aspect of collecting for sure.
This weekend we did a cost of shipping giveaway with viewers that was a ton of fun. I’ll likely do another one soon so be sure you are signed up for my store alert email!
I’ll likely do a video on Whatnot this week. In the meantime sign up with my affiliate link and you’ll get $15 to spend on the site. Be sure to follow me there too as I’ll be doing more of these sales and giveaways !
The other day I posted about a Texas-based meteorologist who misinformed his viewers about a photograph he claimed was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope but actually came from an artist interpretation of another mission.
That same photo is popping up all over Facebook, with the same verbiage, getting shared thousands of times. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been seen by millions of people at this point.
Many of the accounts sharing it are fake accounts pretending to be Neal DeGrasse Tyson and the James Webb Space Telescope itself.
Twitter is not the only platform with a bot platform.
I tried to correct the record on the post. See it here and then read all of the toxicity that follows. This is what Facebook profits from – the dumbing down of humanity.
I am getting in the new Pixel 6a a little later this morning so I figured I’d do a livestream unboxing it and testing it! From the specs this has much of the same guts as the regular Pixel 6 phone.
So far the only differences I can see in the specs on the 6a vs. the more expensive regular 6 is a lower resolution wide angle camera, no wireless charging, gorilla glass 3 vs. the more advanced victus on the regular 6, a 60hz vs 90hz display, and 6GB vs 8GB of RAM. Check out the full spec comparison here at GSMArena to see if I’m missing anything.
The new phone sells for $449 here in the USA unlocked and at similar prices worldwide. Pretty reasonable I think given its capabilities.
Look for the stream around 2 p.m.ish eastern time both on my Youtube channel and Amazon!
ATSC 3.0 Video Coming Tomorrow Night
My video on ATSC 3 will be coming up tomorrow! It was a fun experiment that involved a huge antenna tripod I bought for my new amateur radio adventure. The video is shot and ready to go but I’ve found videos published on Friday night do very poorly here on my channel so you’ll have to wait a day :).
I have a lot of tech gear I’m looking to get rid of. I used to do “cost of shipping giveaways” that required a ton of logistics on my end to manage but I think I’ve found a new way of doing it that might be kind of fun too.
I recently came across a new platform called “WhatNot.” It’s a live streaming auction and sales platform that is beginning to get some traction in the retro gaming and collectors communities.
How I’ll be using WhatNot is putting up products for sale at a marginal $5ish price + shipping and the first click gets it. I have asked them to implement a random selection process for the buyer and once that’s implemented we’ll switch to that model.
If you sign up for Whatnot using my http://lon.tv/whatnot affiliate link you’ll get a $15 credit that can be used on any seller’s livestream.
WhatNot might ask you to become a “verified buyer” using a government issued ID through their Stripe payment processor. For the cost of shipping giveaway streams I will not require that so you can skip that step. Other sellers may require that verification, however. I will be requiring verified buyers on streams where I’m selling items vs. doing these cost of shipping giveaways.
The Lon.TV Store is not going away – I plan to use WhatNot mostly for the items that were provided free of charge to the channel for review.
If you follow me on WhatNot you’ll get notified of upcoming streams. I will also be announcing the dates and times of streams in my Store Alert email blast.
I may pop on with a test stream selling off some retro gaming stuff to that community later this afternoon. I’ll look at doing the first giveaway stream later this weekend.
Looking forward to seeing how this experiment works out!
In a follow up to Sunday’s post on the weatherman who should have known better, here’s what Jupiter really looks like through JWST.
You can see more on NASA’s website.
..Has been their business model relying on borrowing against future subscriber revenues. CNN business has a good synopsis of how critical this week’s earnings report will be for the company.
Unlike their studio-backed competitors Netflix started with less than a decade of content they actually owned, and they lost a lot of their most popular content when studios clawed back the streaming rights.
Retention, therefore, is key to maintain the company’s value. And to retain they need a constant stream of quality content. But to get more content they need to borrow more money against future revenues.
Given the company has reached a critical mass with hundreds of millions of customers, it’s hard to grow the revenue without raising prices. Which they did multiple times. But now the subscribers are leaving because it’s too expensive.
Netflix is not a takeover target, yet. But they’re going to have a hard time competing against studio streaming services that cost less with much deeper catalogs of IP.
Another week is upon us! I have two videos pretty well planned out so this will be shot first. The first is a review of the new Thinkpad X1 Carbon from Lenovo with a 12th generation Intel i7-1260P. It looks like a nice revision over previous models.
I’m also going to continue a topic I started two weeks ago regarding CableCARD. My local broadcasters are now transmitting on the same tower (and same frequency) making it possible for me to finally get everything over the air. We’ll hoist up an antenna and see what happens!
I have a few other things in the hopper including a smart smoke detector and air quality sensor, that Hollyland microphone system, and a solar powered camera from Eufy that just came in.
I’m also likely going to move the shorter Weekly Wrapup to Sunday evenings as I think a weekly preview is best posted on Sunday vs. Monday.
Stay tuned!
On the scale of things this misinformed post by a local meteorologist won’t impact the scope of world events. But members of the media have a responsibility to get it right and correct the record – even if their incorrect post goes viral and gets them thousands of likes and shares.
“Chief Meteorologist” Ken Johnson from KAUZ TV in Texas shared this picture depicting a storm on Jupiter on his Facebook page and said it came from the James Webb Space Telescope.
The problem is the image didn’t come from Webb, nor was it even a photo. A quick Google search took me to this Smithsonian magazine article from 2020 where a caption describes it as an artist’s depiction of what a storm might look like on the gas giant.
As of the time of this writing the post has over 23,000 reactions and over 7,300 shares. Thousands of people are believing this trusted voice and getting misinformed.
It just goes to show how fast false and misleading information can spread especially when shared by a trained member of the media with a scientific background who could have taken a few minutes to fact check it first.
Now the question is – will he correct the record? Let’s see.
UPDATE: The post has been deleted, but not corrected. Better to pretend that it never happened vs. being accurate?
Got some new radio gear last week. I’m learning the art of “weak signals” that send tiny bits of data through the air over very long distances – no Internet required.
Using the 10 meter band (the lowest frequency I’m allowed to operate on with my license) I managed to be heard all the way in Australia! Somebody in Hawaii also picked me up.
As many of you know I use Vmix to produce my videos here on the channel. It’s by far the most efficient and highly optimized piece of Windows software ever made. It’s absolutely incredible.
My appreciation of it went further this week during one of my Prime Day live streams. I figured I would do an evening overview of the three TV boxes on sale this week (Fire TV, Roku and Apple TV) and I wanted to get all three running together in 4k simultaneously along with my three 4k studio cameras. You can see the stream here.
My current production machine is a home-built i9-9900KF based Intel machine with 32GB of RAM and a recently added RTX 2080ti GPU. For video capture I have a Blackmagic Decklink Quad HDMI card which can capture four 4k sources simultaneously. I brought the cameras and the Apple TV in through the Decklink card.
But Lon, you had 6 sources! Yes and thanks to the modern miracle of NDI I was able to bring in those additional two sources using a Newtek Spark box and a Kilo U40 (affiliate link). These boxes take HDMI video in and output a lossless video signal that can get ingested into Vmix with minimal latency. Those two sources generated about 500 megabits of bandwidth but Vmix easily kept up.
The most amazing thing about this set up is that my system still had plenty or room left for more. I also connected a 4k display to the back of my GPU and was able independently switch what appeared on that screen. Check out this short I made once everything was set up.
I just ordered a bunch of stuff to begin my amateur radio station. I still only have a technician license which limits a lot of what I can do on lower frequencies but there’s still plenty to explore.
For the base unit I went with the Yaesu FT-991A. I like it because it integrates HF, VHF and UHF bands all in one unit and its powerful enough for the things I want to do. There’s room to grow here as it also works on the frequencies I’m not currently licensed to operate on. For power it can do 50 watts on UHF & VHF with another 50 on the HF bands. Because my HF interests are mostly in the “weak signal” domain that’s more than enough power. And the 50 watts on the UHF/VHF side should be more than fine to do some of the local packet stuff I’m interested in exploring.
Somebody told me that in photography you can’t have enough lenses and in amateur radio you can never have enough antennas! In my case I’m limited to the UHF/VHF bands and a small sliver of the 10 meter HF band. So that helps a bit to narrow things down.
For UHF/VHF I went with what DX Engineering suggested – a Diamond X50A. It’s a simple vertical fiberglass antenna. For HF I found a great blog post from Tom Costello who’s doing exactly what I want to do on HF with a technician license. He built a simple dipole using a pair of MFJ-1610T antennas to make 10 meter contacts. So I bought exactly what he is using.
Because I am not all that handy I will be hiring somebody to mount the antennas and run cable into the house. In the meantime I bought a portable antenna tripod that I’ll set up when I’m exploring the spectrum. I am eventually going to get the UHF/VHF antenna up on the roof but will keep the HF closer to the ground as I’ll be needing a different antenna after I get my General license for the lower bands.
My plan is to try and reach out to a few viewers using the weak signal FT8, JS8talk, and whatever other protocols might work over 10 meters. If you think you are in range let me know and I’ll add you to the list! I’d love to do a few livestreams experimenting with it.
I don’t care if Elon Musk owns Twitter or not. But he’s correct on the Bot issue. It permeates the platform and has bifurcated the user base into those with a blue check and those without. Twitter decides who gets a voice on their platform and who does not.
As such Twitter denies independent content creators an equal voice to those the platform has arbitrarily decided gets the mark. They move the goal posts constantly and deny people opportunities to grow their audience.
Blue checks get all sorts of benefits the rest of us don’t: monetization opportunities, longer video uploads, the ability to communicate with other blue check marks, etc.
This is in stark contrast to YouTube. Despite all of their faults, YouTube designed their entire ecosystem around discovery and independent creator opportunity. Arguably Instagram and TikTok do this too but they don’t compensate their creators fairly.
Musk said from the get-go that all users would get verified on Twitter. This would immediately level the playing field as it would make the blue check mark unnecessary.
YouTube already does a similar verification process if you want to monetize. YouTube’s most influential creators are verified real people who earn 55% of the revenue YouTube brings in. And their platform is designed as a market-based pipeline to move aspiring creators to that level vs. an arbitrary system of picking winners and losers.
If Twitter didn’t have a bot problem why split the user base into verified and unknowns?
Virtual Set technology is moving in some exciting new directions. It all began with the Mandalorian and their use of the ILM “Volume” to merge virtual sets with physical ones. What makes these virtual sets so unique is that the images are not added later in post-production but are there in realtime with the actors during the shoot. It adds new levels of realism as the light from the volume reflects off of costumes and other props naturally. The set also aligns with the camera’s point of view allowing for camera movements and depth making the background look almost three dimensional.
ILM documented the use of the Volume technology in this YouTube video.
But Star Wars is not the only production making use of this. According to this Twitter post, Star Trek Strange New Worlds has a volume of its own to do similar effects. This might be why the production looks so much more expansive than the other recent Star Trek shows on Paramount+.
What I’m most excited about is this technology making its way to small creators. Many of us with gaming PCs have the processing power already – it’s just a matter of packaging this display technology into something smaller and affordable for us basement dwelling YouTubers.
Rarely do my predictions come true but this time I might be on the right track! On May 2nd I suggested Twitter was overstating its value because of its bot problem – an issue that Elon Musk says is a material breach of his purchase agreement with the social media company.
Musk did them a favor by releasing this in a Friday night post-market news dump. This is going to gut their stock price on Monday as it raises serious doubts about the actual number of real, non-bot active users are on the platform. This was an issue I also covered in the May 2 video, where Twitter was forced to disclose that they overcounted actual users by about 1 million due to a software issue.
They really have no way to measure bots on the platform. Why? Because Wall Street demanded user growth. There’s no way engineers would implement any impediment to that growth – it’s engrained in the code and the culture there.
Ultimately user growth is a poor measurement. Twitter’s value I think comes from the weighty influence of the “small” number of actual users it does have. As @davewiner pointed out a few months ago Twitter really is a big newsroom/cocktail party.
My new prediction is this deal is still going to close – but perhaps closer to $25-30 billion which is probably what the company is really worth.
The M1 Macbook Air largely ushered in the ARM Mac transition and pushed the PC industry in a new direction. In my review of it I was blown away by its performance and power efficiency.
It was so good I retired the 2016 Macbook Pro I was using for my daily driver (including channel video edits) and handed it over to Producer Jake as he was still using my decade old prior Macbook Pro Retina for his work.
The Air worked great for 4k and 1080p video edits along with everything else I was doing for my day-to-day work. Even after I bought the 14″ Macbook Pro I still used the Air quite a bit as I left the Pro mostly docked in my studio office. And then my wife took the Air when her 2016 Macbook Pro 13 died.
So today I ordered the new M2 Air (affiliate link) to fill that secondary role. I much prefer to travel with a less expensive laptop so this will also fill that role. I ordered the “midnight” color which reminds me of the original Intel Macbook I owned back in 2007. I can’t wait to see what it looks like in person.
We’ll have a livestream and review coming up on it as soon as it arrives!
One of the things I talked about recently in my Gigabit Pro update video is that even though you have the bandwidth you likely will never make full use of it on any single task.
Sure it’s possible to run a speed test to fully saturate the connection as I have done many times, but when doing real world tasks things work differently. So even though I have a full six gigabits available, I’m usually only getting about half a gigabit to each location I’m sending data to.
The image above was taken from my Unifi app as I was uploading an 8.7 GB video to YouTube and Floatplane simultaneously. Each can only take about 500-600 megabits per second.
Remember the Internet is not one network. So it’s possible that within Comcast’s infrastructure I can utilize the full bandwidth. But once we cross outside the network it depends on how different networks interoperate and what kinds of bandwidth they allow across those crossing points. In some cases there are multiple networks to traverse!
Strange New Worlds just completed its first season. I like it.
I’m a few episodes behind but it’s great Trek. Oddly I don’t think the traditional trek formula being used here would have worked if they launched this as the first new series in 20 years. We needed Discovery & Picard first to know we really wanted this.
And if you like the “problem/planet of the week” formula you’ll love The Orville. Season 3 is now on Hulu and I hope it gets renewed in the future.
Apple Insider reports that storage device maker Drobo is filing for bankruptcy.
Drobo’s were once a popular direct (and later network) attached storage device. They simplified the process of adding storage to an array which allowed for expansion without having to offload all of your data first. You can see an early review video of it here from Luria Petrucci who used to be known as Cali Lewis.
I owned one of their early Firewire based devices that took four drives about a decade ago. I liked it quite a bit but its fan and drives were quite noisy sitting on the desk. Because it was a direct attached device it had to be plugged into my computer for it to work.
They later came up with an expensive network add-on (and later integrated networking into the product), but they were leapfrogged by competitors like Synology who built better and less expensive NAS devices with far more features.
I ended up moving to a Synology network drive that was just as fast over gigabit ethernet and could be located in my equipment closet where I wouldn’t hear it. Synology also has a fairly simple array expansion process that doesn’t require a full rebuild and there’s a much more robust app library.
Drobo could have been a contender.. They blamed the pandemic for their woes but they just could not keep up with competitors. It’s a shame because the product really solved a lot of problems that plagued storage arrays at the time of its release.
