54 years after Sputnik, the UK is getting into the “tiny orbiting satellite” game.

At 10x10x10cm, the “FUNCube” will launch later this year.

There’s a product being developed in concert with the satellite, the FUNCube Dongle, which is a USB device designed to listen to and broadcast through FUNCube’s transceiver. It’s aimed at schools and it’s pretty inexpensive (~$120).

The dongle was originally designed to tune to the specific frequencies used by the satellite, but the guy behind it figured that if he opened up the listening range to go all the way from 64MHz to 1,700MHz he’d have a pretty wonderful tool on his hands. And so he has.

The FunCube Dongle Pro is a full-fledged USB receiver – a Software Defined Radio as the kids say – and it’s dirt cheap. About $160 at the current exchange rate.

You’d need to use one of any number of SDR application suites to actually use it but in the end you’ve got the equivalent of a WinRadio G313e for about a thousand dollars less.

And because SDRs are really just dumb receivers, processing filters and other features normally found on high-end dedicated hardware in the $5,000 to $10,000 range can now be passed off to the host PC’s CPU in software.

That enormous price discrepancy is why these things have been selling out in five minutes or less, and why they’re going for upwards of $500 on eBay.

I don’t know a lot about what makes for “good” SDR software…SDR-Radio seems like a pretty mature product and it’s easy on the eyes. There’s a whole slew of others out there, too. So far the only downside is that they’re all designed to be used by ham radio geniuses and definitely not simple scanner folk like me.

Anything that breaks up the Uniden/GRE duopoly and gets prices down seems like a step in the right direction, though!

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Alex Chadwick was laid off from NPR two years ago in the midst of a budget shortfall bloodbath that left more than 60 talented long-time employees in its wake.

In the meantime he’s been setting up card tables in public places and paying passers-by 50 cents to sit down for quick interviews. Some are quirky, some are funny, and some are pointless. But they’re all fun to watch.

I’m not sure how giving away money could possibly help with his employment situation, though.

Visit: Interviews 50 Cents

Here’s a good one: Almost Kidnapped

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In the world of eBook file formats, you’ve basically got epub, mobi, lit, and fb2. There are many others, but those seem to be the most widely distributed.

If you’re not buying books from a store tied to your device (Amazon for the Kindle, for example) you generally need to use a third-party tool like Calibre to convert your books to a format best-suited for your device.

However, about 10% of the books you’ll come across are PDFs. PDFs are the absolute worst format to use for ebooks because text is basically inserted in a rigid matrix and isn’t designed to reflow itself based on the device on which it’s being viewed. They’re great for printing, but not so much for reading, particularly on a small screen.

Calibre can convert PDFs to other formats, but it’s a painful process to get it to remove repeating elements like page numbers and headers (which typically appear in opposite locations on alternating pages) and unless you’re a regex whiz, it’s just not worth it.

The appropriately-named Briss solves all that. It’ll let you easily select the text you’d like to keep and discard the rest. It’ll output to a simplified PDF which you can THEN convert with Calibre into something that should work for whatever your ereader-of-choice may be.

It seems like a lot of work to go to, but in the end you’ll have a book that you can take anywhere, instead of one that only looks good on a computer or ipad screen!

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The orchestra hits turn this video into something very special.

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The Carnegie Hero Fund was established in 1904 “to recognize persons who perform acts of heroism in civilian life in the United States and Canada, and to provide financial assistance for those disabled and the dependents of those killed helping others.” Firefighters/police/soliders are in the business of saving lives and hence are not eligible.

Awardees get $5000, a medal, and a bronze grave insignia to embed in their tombstone/grave marker/urn. And maybe some ongoing financial assistance if they qualify.

You can read some of the stories of recent awardees. This is inspiring stuff.

I love hearing about good people doing good things. I’m glad this fund exists. It’s heartening to know that there are people out there who have the courage to get up and put their own lives at risk to help others.

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Ted Williams was a homeless man living in Columbus, Ohio.

Hearing his voice is like having melted butter dripped into your ears.

He was discovered by a passer-by who tipped off The Columbus Dispatch. They then did a quick interview with him and threw it up on YouTube.

5 million views later and Ted now has job offers coming in left and right. This pleases me.

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If you haven’t yet hooked an antenna up to your HDTV you’re missing out on the purest uncompressed signal that broadcast ATSC has to offer. And of course, it’s all free, recordable, fast-forwardable, DRM-free (for now) content.

Some changes happened after New Year’s in the Southern California market that may not interest you…but they interest me!

28.x, KCET, is now an independent station and is no longer affiliated with PBS. The real loss here is WorldCompass (formerly PBS World), a documentary-rich PBS substation that was multicast on 28.4 for a long time. WorldCompass has been replaced on 28.4 by MhzWorldView, a station with diverse international content that targets a completely different audience. Their programming schedule is less than exciting.

Read more about KCET’s new channel lineup.

Classic movie showcase ThisTV has moved from KTLA 5.2 to 5.3. 5.2 is now AntennaTV, a brand new nationally syndicated subchannel that focuses on classic TV and movies.

If the concept of AntennaTV sounds familiar it is… It’s more or less the same type of programming that can be found on RetroTV, another national subchannel with basically the same idea.

In LA RetroTV is broadcast on KFLA 8.2, but their Mount Wilson broadcast tower has a curiously small footprint, so AntennaTV should fill a void for anyone not directly situated in the LA basin.

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