The device was not an ordinary smart watch made by Apple or Samsung, but a special type that US Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) had mandated the woman wear at all times, allowing the agency to track her. The device was beeping when she entered the hospital, indicating she needed to charge it, and she worried that if the battery died, ICE agents would think she was trying to disappear, the hospital workers recalled. She told them that, just days earlier, she had been put on a deportation flight to Mexico, but the pilot refused to let her fly because she was so close to giving birth.

This situation is still fucked up.

Uh, I don’t know that

Or to Stranger in a Strange Land, at least the very beginning.

However you go about it, keep it simple. If it’s complicated or a chore to do, compliance will likely fall off and you might not maintain it.

I do the YMD thing with folders, but fail to do the text file; it’s not a deal killer for me, but there are times we have to figure out what on earth we were doing. We can get a lot of contextual clues from the photos themselves. Depending on what you’re shooting, establishing shots can be really helpful.

Folders get YYYY-MM-DD, files get whatever they get. A simple text.txt file get placed in each folder describing the photos of that day.

When you borrow $1M from the bank, it’s your problem. When you borrow $100M, it’s the bank’s problem.

Relevant XKCD, as always:

XKCD//2347

Hey everyone, that guy doesn’t know how to use the three seashells lol

I bet it’s just off-gassing the spine glue or cover coating or ink. Set them someplace outside but shaded and out of the elements for a few days.

ADHD crew skips days all the time.

There is certainly a lot to learn, and you would benefit greatly from joining the hobby officially. If you are US-based, you can take the amateur radio exam after memorizing the answers for the exam (a legal and encouraged practice), the exam itself can be administered remotely via Zoom.

I am beyond my technical knowledge if I tried to explain why we use transformers to get an impedance match; I only know what we do.

Great questions, one which highlights my own knowledge gap beyond knowing that for a given feedline and antenna combination, you’ll have some measure of impedance. At the most basic level, your radio will “see” some impedance value. In the amateur radio world this is generally 50Ω. If our antenna system (feedline + radiator) presents 450Ω (quite common), we use a 9:1 transformer to get it to match. This allows us to use our radio on that system without (1) stray current returning to the radio and damage our transmission circuits, and (2) at full power but with inherent loss of signal owing to antenna inefficiency.

Case in point, I have a commercially-purchased multi-band EFHW antenna which presents varying amounts of impedance to the radio. This system includes a transformer (I think it’s 9:1) so that on the bands of interest, there’s a resistance match and as a result an SWR that’s suitable to make decent transmissions on.

As a tangential example, J-pole antennas have a built-in matching system which uses no special parts. It’s composed of a matching section and radiator. The combination of matching section, radiator length, and physical feedpoint allow this type of antenna to sort of self-manage impedance.

The difference here is that a j-pole is a monoband antenna, and a long wire with transformer can often be functional on many bands, depending on length, where the lowest useable frequency is the inverse of its length.

What challenges are you facing? It’s a small mercy that antenna fundamentals are basically the same across all frequencies. The resonant element must be sufficiently long as to present an impedance match (or be brought down through via a transformer; 9:1, 49:1, or whichever flavor you need).

On 40m (~7Mhz) a dipole would need to be ~67’ long. You can get away with shorter, bearing in mind the compromises which come with that.

Nice try. I’m not falling for yet another hidden Saddam.

I read all of that in Peter Capaldi’s voice. You made my day

Infinite Improbably Drive in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Space cocaine is the best take on spice I’ve ever seen.

My first thought was Lupus.

It’s what plants crave.

To be real, the worst part isn’t that we’re joking about it; it’s that it’s already happened:

One of the best no-noise locations I ever did was in a fully powered-down sailboat in the southern lagoon at Fort Jefferson, Dry Tortugas. Leaky consumer electronics are the worst.

To contrast, I managed to work Indonesia from Alamogordo NM despite being in a residential neighborhood, HVAC capacitors and foreign over-the-horizon-radar (OTHR) be damned. Taught me a lot about being patient and picking out transmissions in the noise.