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low tech fun with high technology
Wednesday, August 14 2002
I try to watch news, but more often than not, it's not really news. "Another [white] child has been abducted!" shouts MSNBC/CNN/FOX. Oh the horror! I'm expected to feel something, but for some reason I couldn't care less. Lots of grandmothers died today too, and it sucks, but none of these normal tragedies of life contribute to the push and pull of society. What matters more is that anyone in America can now be declared an enemy combatant and locked away without any recourse. It doesn't matter if it's all been a terrible mistake; no one gets a chance to argue with anyone about it. At least when you're a white kid and someone steals you from mommy, people raise a ruckus and act as if what's happening to you is news.
I went to the hardware store again for supplies again this afternoon. I was nervous that my rooftop antenna installation had become so heavy that bad things would happen during a strong gale, so I bought a piece of metal shaped like a large belt loop so I could attach it to a rooftop object that I mistook for a chimney. More about that in a bit. While I was at the hardware store I also bought some of the makings for a bolt and washer Yagi antenna.
Today's rooftop installation work was made considerably easier due to the presence of 120 volt power. Using a powerdrill, I made four holes into that tall chimney-shaped structure near my antenna. I expected that beneath its black tar shrouding, the structure was composed of brick. But no; when I pressed into it with my mortar bit, the thing proved to consist of particle board. More troubling than this, the moment I'd broken through, I could see daylight streaming out of the holes I'd just drilled. Whatever the structure was, it wasn't a chimney, because most of the top of it was some sort of skylight capped with an air vent. I fretted for awhile that perhaps I'd just drilled holes into the sides of somebody's skylight and now they had telltale sawdust on their carpet and they'd look up to see four green plastic bolt anchors protruding into their light shaft. But then I considered it for a bit and my fears seemed unfounded; what sort of contractor would build a skylight at the top of an eight foot shaft sticking up from a roof? I looked around at the other brownstones, and they all had similar skylight-vent-chimneyesque things. If anyone knows what purpose these structures serve, please write to me.
Once I'd bolted the steel belt loop to the chimney-like structure, I clamped it to the protruding tip of my antenna installation's equilateral triangle. The structure ceased bobbing in the wind and assumed even greater rigidity than I'd expected. So often structures I build in my thought experiments seem so firm and reliable, only to prove flimsy once translated into real world objects. For once one of my structures was exceeding the standards of my mental blueprints. Of course, it's important to note that the final ligature between the antenna assembly and the steel belt loop was made with a plumber's screw-tightened pipe clamp. It's one of the most strong and versatile connective devices ever invented. I loved those things back in the days when I fastened odd things to my bicycles.
I spent most of the rest of the day toying with materials in what I must admit was an unusually juvenile manner. I wanted to build some sort of do-it-yourself Yagi antenna for 2.4 GHz WiFi signals, and I thought I had all the right materials. But it turned out that the holes in my washers (used as elements) were too big - they were just big enough to be penetrated by the brass sleaving which I intended to use as element spacers.
So then I had this harebrained notion that if I electroplated the washers with copper, the holes would shrink sufficiently to use the sleaving. This was a stupid idea; I've never been successful at electroplating objects with anything but black smut. But I tried nonetheless, using a 12 volt power supply and a jar filled with an electrolyte of vinegar and salt water. As a source of copper, I attached older copper-cored pennies to the anode while attaching my steel washers to the cathode. For the hell of it, at some point I also attached a newer zinc-cored penny to the anode and was amazed to see that it dissolved away to almost nothing in the course of an hour - hundreds of times faster than an older copper-cored penny. The whole process was more alchemy, experiment, voodoo, and child's play than it was a serious attempt to electroplate, but it was fun nonetheless. To give you a sense of how juvenile my experimentation was, at one point I held a lit match to some of the green Hydrogen and Oxygen froth on top of the electrolyte chamber and POP! There was an explosion like a microscopic Hindenburg.
There was a time a decade and a half ago when it was possible for guys like me with soldering irons and discrete TTL logic chips to customize the hardware of computers for less money than it cost to buy official hardware upgrades. Sure, the stuff I used to build wasn't too reliable and never was supported by my machines' software, but building it was such an adventure. One of the consummate pleasures of life is experiencing a successful boot after an afternoon spent sweating over a soldering iron making tiny, precise connections.
Now, of course, computer technology is far too miniaturized to permit customization. All the buses and logic that were once exposed on the computers of old are now locked away, small neighborhoods of microscopic cities sealed beneath epoxy in multifunction chips. When something goes wrong with any of this, you don't replace the chips. You throw the whole board away. The hobbyist has been effective banished from the logic of his machine by layers upon layers of encapsulation and miniaturization. This probably explains the explosion of interest in aspects of computer modification that have more in common with magic than they do with high technology. Now that we've been effectively barred from altering the digital logic, our interest has been redirected towards low-tech computer modifications. One of these is overclocking, usually coupled with novel methods of heat dissipation, and another is the culture of homebrew antennas for WiFi networks. Both of these allow geeks to break out the old dremel bit and pipe cutter for the purpose of improving their computational experience. Maybe they can't strap a 74LS374 to their computer's data bus like in the days of old, but there's a chance that they can throw their data ten miles if they can make the proper interface between the RF circuits of their 802.11b cards and a Pringles can. Analog signals (such as 2.4 GHz microwave transmissions) can be a lot more fun than digital signals. They're more spiritual, less scientific. There's lots more room for voodoo and cargo cult wishful thinking. With digital signals, on the other hand, it either works or it doesn't.
Antenna installation, looking eastward.
Gretchen tells me that New York Senator Charles Schumer lives somewhere
in 9 Prospect Park West, that large brick building in the near background.
I saw Schumer interviewed once on the Daily Show and he was unexpectedly entertaining.
The rooftop patio area is in the far foreground.
You can see the laptop I use to test my signals on the little table.
In the left foreground is one of those mysterious skylight-vent-chimneyesque structures.
I have no idea what purpose they serve,
but I do know that ours is made of particle board.
Click for a bigger, wider version.
Antenna installation, looking westward.
The Whilliamsburgh Bank Tower, the largest clock tower in the World
until surpassed by a building in Milwaukee,
is visible between the two tall buildings in the near background.
Click for a bigger version.
Tonight when I took Sally for her midnight walk in Prospect Park's Long Meadow, I noticed that there were a couple of people lying down atop a grassy knoll just to my west in the center of the meadow. As I drew a bit closer, I saw that one of the people was actually overtop the other and that the rump of the person on top was going up and down about three times per second (a frequency of 3 Hz) with an amplitude of about a half inch. Obviously, somebody was getting fucked, but in the darkness it was kind of difficult to see, so it didn't strike me that the two had picked a terribly inappropriate place to be conducting their business. Later, though, I was walking back home on the west side of the fucking couple and this time they weren't hard to make out at all. There they were, a black silhouette of one person mounting another from behind, right there at the crest of the knoll against the diffuse light of distant illumination. I'm sure they had no idea they could be seen so easily from this very public vantage point.
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