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In 1947, the Heathkit company – a formerly-bankrupt aircraft manufacturer – introduced its first electronic kit. The $39.50 oscilloscope became a best seller, a dozen years after the company’s new owners bought Heath for a whopping $300. Back then, hobbyists built ham radios, black-and-white TVs and hi-fi sets from vacuum tubes, soldering fiberglass circuit boards together with glowing guns from Radio Shack, hunched over basement workbenches, surrounded by a haze of blue-gray flux smoke. It was long before the days of microscopic surface-mount components, squirted from machines at tens of thousands of parts per hour.

Not long ago, I wrote here about the atrophy of amateur radio, and inquired (unsurprisingly, unsuccessfully) if there was any hope for that pastime. Most things ham trigger a lot of nostalgia in me – recollections of dad-chauffeured car trips to the city for radio classes with Jason; of my “Elmer”, Ed, N2EH (now a silent key); of good times spent with the other hams at the RIT Radio Club, who were among the best of my college friends; and of countless growing-up hours spent tinkering, building things, and un-building things. For a long time, I thought this spirit of geek tinkering was similarly waning, but recently I’ve had a few reasons to change my tune…

First off, the pieces and parts. In the golden age, resistors, capacitors, coils, tubes and transistors were the parts du jour – and you could do some pretty cool things with them. The 70s and 80s brought integrated circuits – and my generation of tinkerers dove head-first into logic gates, op-amps, newly-commodified microprocessors and LED displays. But as the demands of the tech-buying public called for more miniaturization and richer feature sets, things got more difficult. Ball grid array packages – unsolderable by all but the most-dedicated and well-funded (or craziest?) hobbyists – ushered in an age of inaccessible parts. But now, thanks to projects like Arduino, and companies like Bug Labs and Gumstix, pluggable modules and microcontrollers are becoming basic building blocks in themselves.

But more than just the evolution of what’s available to build with, there has been a renaissance in the builders, too. People like Diana Eng and Jeri Ellsworth, and groups like the recently-formed Interlok Rochester – or, hell, the entire readership of Make Magazine – remind me that the spirit of tinkering is alive and well. Maybe hobbyists aren’t exactly making the next iPhone – though they’re certainly trying and in some cases, succeeding! When you’re faced with the immense complexity that’s possible via today’s gadgets, it’s easy to get discouraged about the potential for electronics as a hobby. But it’s also easy to be hopeful and inspired when you look at what these folks are doing. To the tinkerers: keep up the good work! And to those who’ll bring us the next generation of electronic building blocks, I can’t wait to see what you’ve got in store…

…if you drive a blue car, since it’s about to look completely fugly:

Yes, friends and neighbors, that’s what we get to put on our cars starting in Spring 2010. Adorably-retro, don’t you think? No? Didn’t think so.

If you live near a city of just about any size, or manage to take in a newspaper or local newscast on occasion, you’ve probably heard about “gun buybacks”. Operated with the intent to “take dangerous guns off the streets”, they’re an opportunity for politicians to hand out tax dollars (usually in the form of Wal Mart gift certificates or pre-paid debit cads) in exchange for voluntarily-surrendered guns. While the proponents of so-called buyback programs (how can the government “buy back” something it never owned in the first place?) are quick to extol their theoretical virtues, it’s been proven time and time again that cash-for-guns programs are really only useful for political grandstanding and headline-grabbing.

With DaveRea.com being headquartered near Rochester, NY, we decided to take a look at just how well these gun trade-in programs have worked here. As far as one can determine by combing the web, the City of Rochester held at least two “buybacks” during 2008: 159 guns were collected at an event in May and 133 were turned in on June 23rd. Assuming Rochester tracks the national per-capita average for firearm ownership, then these two events (combined) took about 0.15% of the area’s guns “off the street”. Of course, that assumes that they’re all “on the street” to begin with; the majority of guns collected through buyback programs are actually legally-possessed and not involved in any sort of criminal activity.

So how did we do? According to the good folks over at SpotCrime.net, Rochester had 100 shootings on-the-nose in 2008, for a rate of one every 3.65 days. So far in 2009, we’ve already chalked up 64 – that’s one every 3.25 days! I know the stats are pretty coarse, but still: our elected officials spent taxpayer dollars to take almost 300 “dangerous weapons off the street”, and all we have to show for it is a 12% increase in the gun crime rate?!

Update, 8:30AM: According to this morning’s news, we can add two additional (and, unfortunately, fatal) shootings to the count above. This brings Rochester to 66 shootings for 2009, one every 3.15 days, or a nearly-16% increase over 2008.

I know it’s a lot to ask, but here’s a thought for our area’s politicians: In the face of mounting deficit, instead of wasting tax money on so-called “buybacks” where two-in-ten of the guns collected from people who aren’t criminals don’t even work, how about we focus on putting actual law-breakers behind bars where they belong? The city’s politicians are quick to blame our violent tendencies on gang and narcotics-trafficking activity – so how’s about we put that cash into gang and drug enforcement, rather than collecting dusty muskets from the law-abiding?

Still want to hold a “buyback”? Why not take it a step further? With gun values at an all-time high, it seems like a shame to just throw away all those taxpayer dollars buying valuable items for pennies on the dollar.

Rochester simultaneously chalks up almost 3,000 violent crimes each year (and that’s only within city limits) while offering some of the finest training opportunities East of the Mississippi for those who actually want to learn to protect themselves. So why not help some folks out? After all – when the median household income is only a shade over $27,000, not everyone can afford to go out and drop $600 on a defensive firearm. Take those “bought back” guns (well, at least the ones that work), mark them up to 50% of their fair market value, and sell them legally through area FFLs. The city pockets the difference, and in some cases the extra pistol permit fees as well.

Hmm… Everybody wins! The politicians get their photo opportunities, the good people who don’t want guns can get rid of them legally, the good people who do want guns can get them legally, and a few bad people might even end up on the business end of those guns as a result… Bonus!

Despite the flurry of activity here since last November, I’ve managed to let the better part of March go by without a single post … so I figured now’s as good a time as any to chat about a few trends I’ve been noticing lately in the blogosphere. These trends have been annoying me. Maybe I’m not the only one they’ve been annoying?

1. Multiple-page entries
One of the nicest things about web pages is the fact that they can be as long or short as their content needs them to be. What’s the point of splitting your blog entry into 4 pages?! Not only does this annoy me when I have to locate the “next page” button, it interrupts the flow of your entry and messes up those who might actually want to print the thing out onto something that doesn’t have infinitely-variable length: a sheet of paper.

2. Registration-required comments
Don’t make me jump through hoops to comment on your blog. Moderating comments is all well-and-good (heck, we do that here at daverea.com for first-time posters) but demanding that commenters complete a registration form and wait for a confirmation e-mail is annoying. Not to mention by the time I’ve gone through all the hassle of registering, I’ve probably forgotten what I was going to write in my comment in the first place…

3. Lists of little-known Linux apps
Why is everyone publishing lists of obscure Linux programs that “you absolutely must try” all of a sudden? Did someone on the blogosphere put out a call for every grammatically-challenged geek to publicly extol the virtues of their favorite apps – as long as no one else knows about them? Enough already.

4. Hyperbolic, backwards titles
This week alone, the following titles came across my feedreader: “Firefox May Already be Dead”, “Command Line Terror!”, “Top 10 Reasons I’ll Never Use Ubuntu”, “Programming languages that melt your brain”… And the list goes on. In every case, the content of the entry in question actually contradicts the title – which leads me to believe it was nothing but an eye-catcher to begin with. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to think the headlines we author should reflect the credibility we seek. I’m tired of “X is Dead, Long Live X” titles, and I’m tired of hyped-up, sensational headlines that lead to blog entries whose only extravagance is in their mundanity.

Think we can live without these? I thought so.

Mobile World Congress 2009 has come to a close, and as far as most Android fans are concerned, it was a pretty big disappointment. Billed by many as a “coming out party” for Android, with no shortage of high expectations for unveiling of new handsets, the Barcelona event ended not with a bang, but a whimper. There were a handful of chipset and software announcements, and only one new functioning handset was shown – which is destined for Europe. As far as I’m concerned, Chinese ODMs showing non-functional handsets under glass don’t count. Whining that “we’re working on it” or “we’re not late, we just never intended to announce at this show” doesn’t count either, nor do scribbles in some booth jockey’s notebook. Unfortunately, these were the only headlines that comprised over 1,000 Android-related articles that crossed my feedreader in the last five days.

Few would debate that Android has no shortage of potential. Some bloggers have claimed it stands a chance to unseat the majestic iPhone, and others have asserted that Android has Microsoft running scared and clamoring to hold onto its market share. But potential is just that – and in the fast-paced, compressed time-to-market world of mobile phones, potential can siphon down the drain with frightening speed. If Google really mean business with Android, they need to get it onto a major US carrier’s network.

There were plenty of high-hopes (my own included) that an announcement – or even a rumor – along those lines would hit the wire this week at MWC. I have no doubt that thousands of other eager-eyed early adopters were scanning the headlines right alongside me, searching for any mention of Android in the same breath as Verizon or AT&T. But none came, and MWC ended leaving the tech-heads wondering just what the holdup is. Are the phone manufacturers throwing enough resources at Android integration? Are the carriers resisting the super-flexible but, ultimately, freedom-laced OS? Is Google’s support of OEMs falling short? Maybe the tough economy is putting a pinch on Android budgets. Or maybe all the industry players are waiting for each other’s next move…

I’m no product strategist, but I’ve managed to be involved with at least a few product launches in my short engineering career. I know how much effort goes into bringing a product to market: it’s easy to get 98% of the way there, but the effort to achieve the last 2% of market-readiness is exponentially higher. That’s where Google is today: they’ve got a product that’s on the cusp of being ready, if only their customers (the handset manufacturers, not the end users!) would take it and run. As the poor Android showing at MWC this week has demonstrated, if this symbiosis is happening, it’s not happening fast enough.

When Google released Android as an open-source stack, they short-circuited a lot of the closed-ness of the mobile phone world. They opened up opportunities for developers, phone manufacturers, carriers and end-users alike … so long as the gift was received, incubated, used and released to the market. But in a market this fast-moving, I believe that’s not happening quickly enough to insure Android’s survival.

It’s time for Google to short-circuit the status quo once again: It’s time for Google to start releasing Android builds for popular phone hardware that’s already out in the wild, already in the hands of early-adopters, and (most importantly) already certified to operate on the major carriers’ networks. No, this probably wouldn’t be kosher. Granted, it might not even be possible given the image-signing requirements of many handsets. Yes, it would probably require the users to break something that’s spelled out in fine print somewhere. Yes, people’s warranties might even be voided. Hell, if the Android image was intended to run on a certain shiny messiah-phone, it might even require a little risque jailbreaking. But would it be worth it?

Let’s just say, if our friends in Mountain View ever did unleash an Android image for a mass-market, major-carrier smartphone, I’d be first in line to buy one and make it my daily-driver. I’m sure there’d be a lot of others in line behind me, too.

“You know you want one! You just admitted it!” Kelly hit me with her you know I’m right stare.

“Well, I don’t necessarily want one – it’s a little on the extravagant side right now. I just figured I’d see what it’s all about.” My pitiful attempts at feigning disinterest were failing miserably.

The truth is, when I stood in the showroom at our local AT&T store, playing with their demo iPhones as the sales rep showed me one completely-sweet app after another, I did want one. Looking at all the cool stuff the shiny little slab of telephonic sexiness could do, I would have been happy to take one home. Hell – the whole reason I was there was to look into getting an iPhone for Kelly as a Valentine’s day gift. But I stayed strong. My willpower (and intentionally-empty wallet) prevailed. I gathered all the info, totaled up all the discounts I could muster, and left the store with nothing but a scribble-laden brochure and a business card.

If you’ve ever gotten real excited about something, then had your hopes deflated like a scuba tank shot with a 7mm rifle, then you know roughly what happened next. Before investing a hundred-ninety-nine of my hard-earned clams in an iPhone or two, I wanted to make sure it would work with my PC, my music player, and some manner of PIM syncing software. After all – my trusty iPod mini works just fine with all these things. But alas, in no particular order, the answers were “no”, “no” and “no”. Gee, thanks Apple.

As it turns out, in order to manage your iPhone’s music collection with anything other than the vendor-locked iTunes software, you’ve got to go through a process called jailbreaking. It’s a somewhat-shady but ingeniously-developed process to crack Apple’s lockdown on what apps you can run on your iPhone. With an out-of-the-box iPhone, you can only run apps that come from Apple’s App Store walled-garden – but a jailbroken phone can run other apps. Apps that Apple doesn’t want you to run. Apps that (one would have to surmise) awaken Steve Jobs in the wee hours of the morning, beaded in cold sweat at the prospect of giving iPhone owners a choice.

As it turns out, Apple’s not too keen on people managing their music with anything but iTunes – because (horror of horrors!) people just might not buy all their music from iTunes. They’re also not too keen on third-party GPS applications – which is why the iPhone still doesn’t have a turn-by-turn navigation app. Want to use your iPhone’s camera to capture videos? You won’t find an app to do the job in the App Store, because Apple won’t allow it. Want to tether your iPhone to your laptop to enjoy the 3G Internet connection? Don’t plan on doing it unless you jailbreak – and risk voiding your warranty, bricking your expensive phone and contracting syphilis.

Yes, Apple has their reasons. They want to ensure a seamless user experience – for most users. I have my reasons too: I don’t want to run Windows – an insecure, bug-infested operating system – on my PC, nor do I want to shell out premium coin for Apple’s sexier-than-it-is-useful fare. What I do want is a smartphone that adheres to some effing standards. I want to be able to drop content onto it by USB mass storage – something that every other bloody smartphone in the known universe can do. Or – here’s a shocker, folks – load it up with a damn memory card! I want to hook it to my PC without having to install a bunch of pointless bloatware. I want to invest in a piece of hardware, and not have to worry about finding my hands tied later on – by the company that sold it to me!

To be sure, the iPhone world (you know, that impenetrable bubble that forms around iPhone users when their noses are to their phones) is a magical, utopian place where none suffer and all the users are equal. But remember: some users are more equal than others. There’s no better proof of that than the news that broke from Apple today…

If you’ve ever seen the movies Contact or Frequency, or the Simpsons episode entitled Homer’s Paternity Coot, then you’ve had a very small – though rather fictional and in the later case mocking – look at the world of amateur radio. I was 13 years old when I passed the entry-level exam and received my first ham license in the mail. I saved every penny of a summer’s lawn-mowing money to buy a new handheld radio, and by 1996 I had upgraded my license to afford greater priveliges and explore the parts of the radio spectrum that can traverse the world over. A week before my 16th birthday, I begged the local bank manager to let me open a checking account in order to buy a “fox tango” that was older than me, and convinced my parents to let me plant a 25-foot-high aluminum antenna behind our house.

Needless to say, I did not have a girlfriend, but we’ll save that round of soul-searching for another blog entry. Now, as I was saying…

More…

Remember when we talked about the importance of privacy waaaaaay back in August? An article over at Wired Blogs reminded me of that little chat tonight:

NSA Whistleblower: Wiretaps Were Combined with Credit Card Records of U.S. Citizens

I think it’s reasonable to say we all conduct our lives with a certain expectation of privacy… When we’re on the phone, we expect we’re only on the phone with the person on the other end of the line. When we surf the web, we expect our travels are nobody’s business but ours. When we shop at Amazon, or swipe our credit card at the local Blockbuster, we expect the only place those transactions are going are to our bank. As it turns out, those expectations might be a little misplaced:

“This [information] could sit there for ten years and then potentially it marries up with something else and ten years from now they get put on a no-fly list and they, of course, won’t have a clue why,” Tice said.

In most cases, the person would have no discernible link to terrorist organizations that would justify the initial data mining or their inclusion in the database.

“This is garnered from algorithms that have been put together to try to just dream-up scenarios that might be information that is associated with how a terrorist could operate,” Tice said. “And once that information gets to the NSA, and they start to put it through the filters there . . . and they start looking for word-recognition, if someone just talked about the daily news and mentioned something about the Middle East they could easily be brought to the forefront of having that little flag put by their name that says ‘potential terrorist’.”

I’m not about to go cut up my credit cards, smash my cell phone or throw my Thruway E-Z Pass into the briny depths of the Genesee anytime soon. But news like this should make us all think a bit about the kind of digital signature we leave behind, and explore ways we can enhance our privacy without compromising the connected lives we so often take for granted.