2025-10-24 22:00:54
Why do some radio towers blink?
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?
Joe: Well, blinking I would call like the way you described it, "flashing", "white light", or "strobe". All these lights are to aid pilots and air traffic. helicopters, fighter planes, regular jets. So that's the purpose of it.
Jeff: Well that one tower that I saw had red lights that faded in and out, but I even think there's a freestanding tower just north of here that has red and white on top.
2025-10-24 01:30:41
Recovering videos from my Sony camera that I stupidly deleted

My normal process for transferring video footage from my Sony cameras to my computer is as follows:
2025-10-16 22:03:39
VCF Midwest was even better than I expected

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.
2025-10-09 22:12:44
Resizeable BAR support on the Raspberry Pi
While not an absolute requirement for modern graphics card support on Linux, Resizeable BAR support makes GPUs go faster, by allowing GPUs to throw data back and forth on the PCIe bus in chunks larger than 256 MB.
In January, I opened an issue in the Raspberry Pi Linux repo, Resizable BAR support on Pi 5.

2025-10-08 23:32:50
How much radiation can a Pi handle in space?
Late in the cycle while researching CubeSats using Pis in space, I got in touch with Ian Charnas1, the chief engineer for the Mark Rober YouTube channel.
Earlier this year, Crunchlabs launched SatGus, which is currently orbiting Earth taking 'space selfies'.

2025-10-07 21:01:08
Qualcomm's buying Arduino – what it means for makers

Qualcomm just announced they're acquiring Arduino, the company that introduced a whole generation of tinkerers to microcontrollers and embedded electronics.
The Uno R3 was the first microcontroller board I owned. Over a decade ago, I blinked my first LED with an Uno; the code for that is actually still up on my GitHub.