Category: Technology

I have long been fascinated by fire towers. Like lighthouses, they appeal to introverts because of their isolation and because they are found in appealing places — beside a coast, or in a forest. They have all the magic of promontories. Plus, fire towers have a certain nerdy appeal, because of the observation and communications apparatus that they contain.

It happens that, in Fugue in Ursa Major, I use a fire tower as a setting. When writing the descriptions of the fire tower, I had to rely on research. But on a recent trip to the North Carolina coast, I had a chance to examine this fire tower up close and verify that my descriptions of the fire tower were accurate.

Wikipedia has a pretty good article on fire towers, also called lookout towers. They vary in height, but the tallest one in the United States is 175 feet.

The cabin

The landing

One of the eight landings on the way up

A small area of the interior of my 1954 Collins 75A-4 receiver, which has 22 tubes and lots of rotating shafts attached to its inductors and condensers

It is universally understood that human beings — at least the better sort of human beings — have empathy for other human beings, and for animals. But empathy goes way beyond that. It took me a while to figure out the difference between people with green thumbs and people with black thumbs. I concluded that people with green thumbs have a highly developed empathy for plants. They have learned what plants want. If plants are happy, they feel their happiness. If plants are unhappy, they feel their pain and can’t rest until they figure out what the plant needs to be happy again.

It’s the same with mechanical things, and with electronic things. I have an almost debilitating empathy for mechanical things. Partly, I think, it’s because I’ve been a tinkerer ever since I was a little boy. I grew up in a culture in which boys learned how to use tools and learned how to fix things, things like cars. I did not wreck my toys. Some of my favorite toys, such as a train transformer that I used as a power supply for electrical experiments, lasted for years and years. I would even take it apart periodically and oil its rheostat.

I have a painful awareness of when something mechanical is stressed and is in danger of breaking. Anyone who has been around the abbey for very long knows that I have a seemingly neurotic complex about not slamming doors. Now partly this is because the sound of a door slamming is one of the rudest, most irritating sounds I know. But partly it’s because the abbey’s doors are excessively expensive and complicated, and from the day I moved into the abbey I’ve had premonitions of a door’s latch mechanism breaking, knowing how difficult and expensive it would be to get it fixed. Sure enough, one of the door’s latch mechanisms broke. I described the problem on the phone to a master locksmith, and he empathized with my empathy, warning me how difficult it is to repair one of those fancy German locking mechanisms in a door which has not one bolt but three (tighter weather seal and harder to knock down), not to mention a deadbolt and a special anti-slam finger that tells the mechanism whether the door is open or not, to guard against the bolts shearing if some idiot slams the door while the bolts are extended. Now, I know that not one in a hundred readers understood the mechanics in the previous sentence, but I wrote it anyway as an empathy-raising exercise.

Months before the windshield in my Jeep developed a creeping crack, I had a premonition of it. I swear I felt its stress developing. Two weeks ago, my dishwasher started leaking. I’d had a premonition of that too and had started thinking about what sort of replacement would be best.

When you give a machine a home, it’s like adopting an animal. You take on a commitment to feel that machine’s happiness or pain, and to take care of it. My Jeep needs washing, but it’s impeccably maintained. My god-awful complicated Rodgers 730 organ, now 21 years old, also is impeccably maintained. There’s not so much as a burned-out piston lamp. My IBM Self-Correcting Selectric III typewriter is in excellent working condition.

I don’t have a perfect record. A few weeks ago, I forgot to cover the lawn mower, and rain water got into the fuel tank. Horrible! Some of the garden tools are outdoors instead of in the basement where they belong. My Yaesu FT-897 transceiver could use some work. Boxing it up and sending it back to Yaesu’s excellent repair department is not a priority at the moment, but I feel its pain. And I am absolutely terrible with house plants, which is why I don’t have any and have stopped letting people give them to me.

To be surrounded by things that are broken ought to be a source of misery, similar to the misery of hungry chickens that are late to be fed, or lettuce that is wilting from lack of water.

The local garage that maintains my Jeep has a classic Fifties-vintage Rolls-Royce in storage. Every time I take the Jeep in, I sneak out to the Rolls-Royce, open the driver’s door, then gently close it again, just to hear the sound of its beautifully machined latching mechanism. But every latch, and every machine, especially the lame and the humble and the elderly, deserve our empathy, our respect, and our repairs in their time of need.

I like to play with electronics, so I order a lot of electronic parts. For a long time, new items have been for sale on eBay for amazing prices, but the seller is in China. I avoided those deals, afraid that neither the seller nor the shipping could be trusted. But when I needed a hard-to-find circuit board and saw what I needed in China for $2.43 plus $1.00 shipping, I figured it was worth a try.

They shipped the board immediately, and it arrived in the mail 13 days later, nicely packaged, and in perfect working order.

As always on eBay, sellers vary, so check their feedback. But if you’re looking for things like smartphone accessories, you might find some good bargains from Chinese sellers.

I’m always looking to improve my photography, including my food photography. A new (actually used off eBay) camera a while back — a Nikon D1X — was a big step. I recently got a lighting kit for interior photography and food photography.

If you ever watched a professional photo shoot for food photos that are to be published, you know that food photography isn’t easy. I’ve been slouchy in the past for the sake of expediency. For example, holding the camera rather than using a tripod is a good way to reduce the quality of the photo. To prevent jiggling and blurring, a wide aperture must be used to shorten the exposure. A wide aperture means that the depth of field is very low. That is, the broiled tomato may be in focus, but the bacon an inch or two behind it on the plate will be out of focus. The way to correct this is to use a narrow aperture (f stop). A narrow aperture means that the exposure must be longer, hence a tripod. Even with good lighting, the exposure may need to be a full second or longer. So the tripod is essential.

Another important factor with food photography is color management. The color of light varies greatly according to its source. To get true colors, the camera must accurately know (or be able to estimate) the color of the light. Sometimes the color can be corrected by fiddling with the “white point” in Photoshop. But the easiest way to have foods be the right color in a photograph is to use artificial light that is daylight colored — special bulbs. Yippee. I now have such lighting apparatus, plus the white umbrellas that are used to diffuse the light.

Here’s an aside for all who’d like to improve their photography. You’d think, given the way that today’s point-and-shoot digital cameras are marketed, than the number of megapixels is all that matters — the more megapixels, the better the photo. That is completely wrong. Megapixels only matter if you want to print a photo really large — say, the size of a billboard. People who sell digital cameras would like for you to believe that when 8 megapixel cameras are available, 4 megapixel cameras are obsolete. And when 16 megapixel cameras are available, 8 megapixel cameras are obsolete. Totally wrong. All those extra megapixels do is waste storage space on your computer. In some cases, the extra megapixels may help you crop in on a small object in a photo, but chances are that that small object will be blurry, for a number of reasons including the quality of the lens, or focus that is not exact.

My Nikon D1X is 10 years old, and professional photographers have moved on and no longer use them much. But if you’re looking for a camera, you’ll be far better off with a high-quality used camera than with a new camera of lesser quality. The most important factor to the quality of your photos is technique. The second factor, I would say, is the quality of the lens. Another important factor is the internal attributes of the light-sensing and processing parts inside the camera. That gets too technical to go into here, nor do I claim to understand it all. But forget about megapixels.

At this point I’ll plug a book by a neighbor and friend, Jess Moore. The book is Great Pictures Made Simple: How to Make First-Rate Pictures With a Low-Cost Digital Camera or Cell Phone. The book is available on Amazon. Then, when you get good with a low-cost point-and-shoot camera, start shopping for a good camera with a set of good lenses.

One of my bad habits is scouring eBay for older technology that has become cheap but remains useful (or interesting). This Alphasmart 3000 word processor cost me $7.85 on eBay, plus $8.05 shipping.

It’s a simple device. You type, and it stores the text. To retrieve the text, you plug the Alphasmart 3000 into your computer’s USB port. The computer thinks it’s just a keyboard. Press the “SEND” key on the Alphasmart, and the computer thinks that a fast typist is keying text into your word processing program or whatever program is open and receiving keyboard input at the time.

The Alphasmart can hold eight separate files and up to 120 pages of text (though I’m not sure what their definition of a page is). It has rudimentary editing capability, and a spell-checker. There are later versions of the Alphasmart, also available on eBay for somewhat more money. They have bigger text buffers and a somewhat larger LCD screen. And of course you can still buy them new.

Need to type something in bed, or sitting at the picnic table? It works, and the keyboard is much nicer than any confounded laptop I’ve ever seen. Not to mention that it’s much cheaper and less fragile. I think the biggest market for these devices is in schools, so they’re made to take the sort of beating that fifth-graders can give. Its design clearly was inspired by Apple’s clamshell Newton from the 1990s.

This week, a Sony Reader app for iPad was released. That’s now four major readers available on the iPad that I know of — Apple’s iBooks, Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader, and Barnes & Noble’s Nook.

Sony did it right and makes it possible to download all the books you’ve previously bought to the new iPad app. I was an early adopter of the Sony Reader (more than five years ago), so I had bought quite a few books. All those books now reside on my iPad.

I’ve not yet tried the Nook app, because I don’t yet have an account at Barnes & Noble. I’ll probably open an account, though, because it’s nice to have as many options as possible when buying books.

Books take up a relatively small amount of storage space, so it’s great to be able to carry so many books around with you. It’s also nice that the books are searchable. If you remember something from a book you’ve previously read that you want to look up, it’s easy.

The process of getting older classics into digital format is continuing. I’m finding that many science fiction classics from the 1980s and older are now showing up in Kindle editions. There are often lots of typos, however. It’s clear that the books were scanned and run through an OCR system with very little proofing. Some classics still haven’t made it to digital, though. A few weeks ago I was unable to find anything at all by Daphne du Maurier.