Notes from the Electronic Cottage 10/19/06

Producer/host: Jim Campbell

We walk around all day with electromagnetic waves surrounding us, and actually passing right through our bodies. Our eyes and ears can see and hear only a tiny part of that spectrum, both in the physical world and through the media of radio and TV. So it might be worth wondering justwhat the electronic spectrum is, how it is divided up, and where our radio and television channels live in it. Let’s.

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 08/31/06

Producer/host: Jim Campbell
Topic: Do you rely on the news from established news organizations like Reuters? Maybe you go to U.S. Government sites to seek objective information that your tax dollars have paid for. Alas, these days it’s difficult to really trust either source of information. Reuters just discovered photos it had put on the web from the battlefront in Lebanon had been doctored in Photoshop, and the U.S. Government has been classifying an increasing amount of information as secret, and doctoring or removing from its web sites information that isn’t classified. What’s a citizen to do?

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 08/24/06

Producer/host: Jim Campbell
Topic: It’s tough to lose a part of your community under any circumstances. When that loss is of a 24 karat gold crap detector, radio maestro, and ace reporter who is only 54 years old, the loss stings all the more. But Dave Piszcz lives on, and his life challenges us to take up the tasks he accomplished so well but has now left behind for others to continue.

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Notes from the Electronic Cottage 08/17/06

Host/Producer: Jim Campbell
Topic: The U.S. is now issuing spanking new passports – with RFID chips in them. The State Department swears these new passports are full of all sorts of security measures which makes it impossible to copy them, skim information from them, or do anything else that might shake our confidence in the usefulness of devices that may one day store not only our pictures and personal information, but also our fingerprints, iris scans and DNA profiles. But guess what? On almost the same day that the U.S. posted all those reassuring (as long as you don’t mind being chipped like cattle) words, there was a demonstration of how to clone an RFID passport. Feel more secure?

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