still space geek.

in keeping with my unusual 60's spaceflight fascination, i've been playing with the virtual reproduction of the APOLLO 11 guidance computer. it runs well on os x, not surprising considering my powerbook is about 5000x more powerful than the computers we used to land a man on the moon, and much more adept at locating and showing pictures of naked girls.

i enjoyed playing with the virtual AGC for 10 or 15 minutes or so, but for the life of me i can't imagine the kind of dedication it takes, to spend 4 years of your life on something like this.

i won't even give you a hint. just go check it out. at my absolute nerdiest i could never reach such heights. i tip my hat to that gentleman.

space geek today.

i always wondered the exact technical reason for the 'beep' you always hear in space communications. i first nocited it on the Apollo missions but i believe nasa still uses it to this day. you know the sound, it sounds like this. call me an audio geek, but that sounds like .5 seconds or so of a 2.5Khz sine wave. swell. i know what it is, but what is it for? this sure answered my question:

Subject: Apollo era space communications

Question
While growing up watching the Apollo missions, I noticed that there was always this beep that could be heard as the astronauts communicated with the ground. I was periodic but I don't recall if it occurred at regular intervals or not. You could hear them talking and then hear this "beep". Do you know what this classic "beep" was all about? I've always wondered but never heard the answer. Thanks.


Answer
Hi Jeff.

Thanks for the question. What a great question!

An HF or High Frequency Radio draws quite a bit of power, to give you an idea, I intercepted a radio transmission from Houston to the ISS just the other day on an Airplane equipped with this HF radio. This radio draws about 5.5 amps just to "power it up" if the signal draws even throughout the transmission the reciever on the other end recieves it at 5.5 amps, this is where you get the term, " I have you five by five".
Now to answer your question, when drawing this amperage the HF has a tendency to just draw a lot of power in the first second, The signal at this point is weak, and when the power is full this would indicate it would be okay to talk. However, if you just pressed the button and started talking it would be hard to reach you, even in space.
So, To indicate full power in the HF, ALL spacecraft have this beep installed, just to indicate when the radio has reached its full potential, and in your question, when the radios reached their full potential, on the moon, the beep would sound off just about 2-3 seconds delayed due to the small power that the landing module could provide.

I hope that this explains your question.

let us know if you need any other questions asked, and once again thanks for the question, and dont forget to rate us!!!


Joel Osborne

(thanks to joel osbourne and about.com)

classic arcade sounds!

i stumbled across this when i was looking for a sample from the old 'defender' video game to scare the bejeezus out of someone with. (you know the one, the one at the very beginning of the game? i love that sound.) well, this guy apparently used to bring his sony TCS-310 Stereo Cassette Recorder with him to the video arcade as a youth. this was back in the heyday of Galaxian, Missile Command, Asteroids etc. i was there, man. i remember those days all too well.

lucky for us, his mom never threw away his old cassettes, and now he's digitized them and put them ALL online. it's amazing stuff. field recordings of real early 80's suburban mall video arcades, complete with nerdy kid voices and jingling change. you may be saying 'wow, what kind of geek would do that?' i just can't believe i didn't think of doing this myself. basically in that odd period of 1980-84 i only did two things, play video games at the mall and record stuff. it's mind-boggling that i never thought to put the two together.

bless you Daniel P. Hower. hearing these recordings actually gave me more of a rush of nostalgia than when i stumbled across macMAME a few years ago and started playing the games themselves again, after two decades. if only more of us were as careful about documenting our misspent youths.

...and yes, if you listen to the entire 'defender' recording you can hear an attendant ask if they are recording the game and in true 80's computer nerd fashion our man replies 'not for reproductive purposes.' you can say that again.

John K!

John Kricfalusi, the guy known to most of us in the civilised world as the creator of "Ren and Stimpy" actually has himself a blog. i only stumbled across it today but so far it looks like it's full of all kinds of entertaining, interesting stuff. and lots lots lots of drawings. whether you are a cartoonist, illustrator, fan or just a run-of the-mill geek, it's defintely worth adding to yr list of 'things to look at at least once a day.'

you may catch a glimpse of the shaven yak, in his enchanted canoe.

Commodore!

i'm not sure what causes these things, but today i started thinking about the Commodore 64. it may have come from watching old episodes of the 'Computer Chronicles' show on archive.org, especially the one about the c64. it didn't take me more than 3 minutes of searching to find Power64, a really good C64 emulator for osx and a great site for old C64 music software.

i've just started playing with it, but as most C64 geeks know, the SID chip that commodore used to make sound is pretty damn cool. entire hardware synths have been built around the SID6581 chip, as well as a pretty decent vst plugin, the QuadraSID. i've used the QuadraSID a bunch of times on recordings and you definitely can't fake that SID sound with any other synth.

but i really did want to spend some time away from my usual point n' click music apps, Live, Cubase SX2, Reason, etc etc. and write some music the old fashioned 80s way. so far i've only gotten to ProDrum2.0, which is a pretty neat sort-of-808-style drum programmer. (and i love how they spell it 'basedrum') it didnt take more than a minute to start cranking out pretty raw sounding 80's videogame drum sounds. fantastic! with names like 'music construction set' and 'cybertracker' it has to be cool. any actual hardware C64 geeks out there with any advice? i've pretty much been a mac user for music since my late-80s Mac SE days, and before that it was the Atari 1040, so i missed all this C64 fun the first time around.

snow day.

well, i just got through dragging the snow blower up and down my driveway. i'm not complaining much though. that's the first time all winter we've had to really do that in new england. i won't get into any sort of ill-informed global warming rant, but 60 degrees for most of january? that's highly suspect.

what to do with the rest of the day. luckily the guys at analogue industries aren't taking the day off. they just released a test version of their FUZZ+ plugin for OSX AU. time to make the tb-303 sound all fuzzy. or maybe plug in the guitar and give "I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night" a good going over; you can do it too, go and see for yourself:

from analogindustries.com:

Here is the number-one generator of traffic on the AD Info mailbox, FuzzPlus2 for AudioUnits. If you'd like to give it a spin, grab yourself a copy and try it out. Post here if it works for you. This is also a Universal Binary, and works fine in everything I have that is an AU host. Again, I'm especially curious about 10.3.9 users. This definitely won't work in 10.3.8 or lower, but 10.3.9 should be okay.

if you're all stoked over the fuzz box and the Electric Prunes aren't yr thing, there's always Double Dare by Bauhaus. ahh, Dan'l Ash. Ok, i couldnt find a clip of double dare, but this one of them doing Ziggy is pretty damn good, too. youtube comes to the rescue once again.

yes indeed. here's that first post. where you don't actually have anything to say, but you want to at least get started. i'm going to use this thing to babble about the usual music geek stuff. analog synths, odd and unusual music, and what-have-you. we'll see what happens. i'll put links to interesting (to me) stuff on here. it'll sort of look like this:

like most people these days i'm having way too much fun with youtube.com. you get the feeling that some of these people have been waiting years for the chance to share their collections of oddball music videos. some of this stuff i'd seen as a kid but never thought i would run into again. like this unbelievable footage of Peter Gabriel-era Genesis on belgian tv performing 'the musical box.' probably ca. 1972. amazing. there's a lot of talk these days about a 'prog rock resurgence,' but for my $ it didn't get any better than this. worth watching just for the shots of Tony Banks' MKII Mellotron and Steve Hackett's really swell nerdy eyeglasses.

BONUS! there's also a clip from the same tv show of the band playing the hell out of "return of the giant hogweed" from the same album, Nursery Cryme. this time you get to actually hear the mellotron. very nice.

now i'm off to look for some old King Crimson footage.