CRAZY UNCLE SCOTT'S GRAVITY WELL
(it is hard to escape)
kd5njr@sdf.org
QUOTE OF THE ??DAY
"Somewhere near the
End they said you
Can't do this.
I said 'I can too.'
-- REM
ABOUT ME
I am interested in:
Computers
TEXT Ancient FORTRAN Programming Tutorial
Digital Electronics
REM(the band)
TEXT Radios
Rockets
Space Exploration
Soviet Space Stations
TEXT Mir
TEXT Salyut 6
TEXT Salyut 7
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REM SONGS AND LYRICS
There are a lot of good ones.
I'll start a little list.
Song(s) of the Day
1/12/2025
Album: Around the Sun
Songs: Around the Sun
Aftermath
Leaving New York
FEATURE: "ONE PAGE BOOK REPORT"
TITLE: Analogia
AUTHOR: George Dyson
CHAPTER: Four; Voice of the Dolphins
MAIN CHARACTER(S):
Leo Szilard, Hungarian Physicist
Freddy De Hoffmann, founder General Atomics
Freeman Dyson, physicist, IAS
Ted Taylor
Stan Ulam
George Dyson
MINOR CHARACTERS:
Albert Einsein
Brian Dunne
Tom Wolfe
The Martians:
John von Neumann, IAS
Eugene Wigner,
Theodore von Karman, JPL
Edward Teller
J Robert Oppenheimer, IAS
Enrico Fermi, U of Chicago
Hans Bethe
Brian Dunne
PLACES
Hungary
Germany
London
Los Alamos
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
General Atomic / General Dynamics
Torrey Pines, California
La Jolla, California
Alburquerue, NM
THINGS
Einstein's Refridgerator
nuclear weapons
TRIGA reactor
Sputnik
Orion
book: Voice of the Dolphins
kayaks
IDEAS
thermodynamics
nuclear fission
pacifism
Mutually Ensured Destruction
smaller, better bombs
external combustion engines
Ulam-Teller device
"Saturn by 70"
NEWS
24 January 2025: Salyut 6 Visiting Crew 2
01 January 2025
I am the worst about diaries or taking
notes!
How many times have I started a website
(or even myspace :) or blog since 1994?
Several. I've cobbled stuff together in
Notepad several times over the last 30
years for school groups, ham clubs, etc.
This is no different. But it's done with
Gopher Protocol.
The server is SDF.org ... A very cool
not-for-profit. Please check it out.
When was the last time you had a shell
account.
In fact, speaking of Gopher, One of the
first gopherspaces I ever saw was Kipp
Teague's stash of R.E.M. lyrics ! I could
browse Gopherspace from my dorm at Texas
A&M University at 2400 baud dial up to the
Terminal Server and then on to the student
use Unix machine, which I think was a Sun
server at the time. This was mostly text
in a menu driven interface. The rest was,
as they say, history.
Kipp still has the website below.
He's kinda retired now, but still on
Facebook I believe he said.
HTML The Complete R.E.M. Lyrics Archive
URL:https://retroweb.com/rem/lyrics/index.html
JOURNAL
2025
February
08: Hit a local coffee shop and the local
model railroad shop today.
07: Talked to a good friend of mine about
his model railroad ; it's exclusively Swiss
narrow gauge ( 'meter gauge') electric
mountain trains.
06: Worked on my web page.
Specifially collecting some data on the
European visitors to the Mir station.
01: Got a emulated (SIMH) CP/M machine
going on my Windows laptop. MS-BASIC
here I come.
Also, got DOSBOX going again. Wrote
some warm-up programs in C and ASM.
Of course, I can't forget GW-BASIC.
Located some emulators for the ET-3400
and assorted 8080 systems.
What I really wanted was an easy
to use Heathkit H8 emulator. But
MAME and I just didn't get along.
2025
January
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January 20th 2025
From time to time, I like to fire OpenSCAD.
Back in December before the holidays kicked
into high gear, I was working on a little
"art project" where I marked waypoints
along Route 66 and displayed their
elevations. I'll have to print it out
and bring it to work. It'll remind me
to try and escape to the Mountains. Maybe
for good food, good coffee and ham radio ?
January 20th 2025
Today I looked at Complier Explorer.
Really an interesting website. You can put
source code (I'm doing FORTRAN) in one pane
and get color coded assembly language in the
other pane. The color coding lets you match
things up almost line for line. And that is
what surprised me today. A simple loop in
F66 (What I would do routinely in BASIC)
like count up to 10 maps over just about
1:1 in assembler.
But, FORTRAN, after all, is the OG compiled
language. Before FORTRAN, you HAD to write
in assembly, or more likely and much worse,
machine code itself.
January 19th 2025
More Fortran adventures. I think I am a
model rocket guy. I haven't seriously
built them since high school, but I think
them a lot. How I'd make them from house-
hold trash or 3D printed parts. Interesting
stuff. Not the typical paper towel tube
and card stock fin models. But different stuff.
Of course the same core program where I passed
different waypoints with the train could be
cobbled into a program where a new engine
could be ignited for some more vertical
distance.
Or so I think. I could tinker with the timing
on the engines to maintain a certain speed
or get max height.
Like any of this code, if you'd like to see
some of it, lemme know.
January 17th 2025
More Fortran adventures. I wanted to work
more with Loops, an array and some more
complicated IF structures. I ended up with
a program where our train runs linearly from
Station A to Station Z like last time.
However, this time, it passes a series of
waypoints. The observer (us) knows the
distance to the previous waypoint and the
number of the next waypoint and the distance
to it.
I didn't bring over the throttle subroutines
yet.
Jan 12th 2025
Something I've always followed is the Space
Program.
When I was a kid, the Space Shuttle was
big news. Either on the NBC Nightly News
at home in the evenings or on CNN in the
school library, I was there.
I'll never forget listening to my dad's
Bearcat scanner when Owen Garriot flew
by. Or when I would listen on my handheld
scanner or call the ISS on ARRL Field Day.
Right now I'm "into" the Soviet
Salyut 6 Space Station. Many "permament crews"
and "visiting" crews ( some from other countries
even ) came up to the station over it's lifetime.
While the Salyut 6/7 generation space stations
were not expandable, they were flexible in that
the stations were packed with experiments,
instruments and facilities for the crew.
Telescopes, furnaces, cameras, kitchen, restroom
and gym equipment to name just a few things on-
board the station.
The current crew's arrival Soyuz, an visting
crew's Soyuz and a Soyuz-derived Progress
freighter could be docked at once.
It's the Interkosmos missions with the
Soviet-bloc "guest cosmonaut" that interests
me the most. My hope is that these missions
with the "more European" cosmonauts maybe
better documented than those with all Soviet
crews.
Perhaps, the experiments were a little more
important. But perhaps these were just
"tourists" on sight-seeing propaganda missions.
I'll have to give a update.
Jan 11th 2025
But something I've been tinkering on is
FORTRAN code. Just for fun. The gist is
you've got a train moving from Station A to
Station Z. There are reports each deltaT to
inform the passenger of elapsed time, distance
to station, distance from station, you know, the
vitals. There are functions to accelerate and
decellerate the train. Just models a linear
layout.
What I need to do soon is add "time to station"
information. And determine a scheduled time
of arrival. That would inform of the speed
the train needs to run.
Guess I was still thinking about a Z scale
desktop train layout. I think I just to want to
hear the soothing sound of the electric motors.
Do the power packs still buzz ? Do you still get
the smells of dust and sparks and
the smells of "something burning?"
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Jan 2nd 2025
Howdy from vacation.
Actually, we're back now from a trip with
extended family to Branson. Some of the family
have babies. So in the wee hours between bedtime
and feeding time, I was, one night at least,
watching YouTube videos of different stuff as
the 'year end' videos drop.
Why do I think I need a Z scale train ?
Small enough to run around a monitor stand or a
small Christmas Tree on my desk, they might be.
Then again, the z scale is super small, to the
point that the train is hard to get on the
track and couple together. But not so small
they don't make DCC Decoders for them.
We'll have to see if I can get a deal on one.