I have some strange fascination with statistics. I have as long as I can remember, and I doubt I’ll ever not be intrigued by them. So it’s perhaps no surprise that I’d really like the ability to compel millions of Americans to complete questionnaires. Unfortunately, I don’t have that power, so we’ll go with an unmeasurable trend.

Well here’s an unrelated one: I’ve noticed lots of pickup trucks with McCain-Palin stickers, some with “NObama” stickers, but not a single one for Obama. I suspect confirmation bias plays a role, but I’m also pretty confident that people who drive trucks are significantly more likely to have supported McCain than Obama. I’m fascinated by this, and would really like to explore the demographics of it.

But now to the titular observation: on September 12, 2001, I think an overwhelming majority of Americans thought that The Taliban was “the enemy,” and that they were a lunatic fringe group of Muslims. I was younger and less politically-astute then, so perhaps this isn’t the case. But these days, I see a frightening amount of people who think that “the enemy” is Islam, and that all Muslims are bad people: most are terrorists (in their mind), and the rest are just backwards people who hate freedom and Jesus.

I’m really curious if there have been opinion polls of the perception of Muslims. Has it, in fact, gotten progressively worse in the past years? I’ve read a surprising number of rants by far-right authors who truly believe that Obama is a Muslim, by the way, and that he’s deliberately trying to destroy America. I thought Bush was among the worst Presidents*, but never thought that he was on a deliberate quest to sabotage America, nor did anyone else I know.

I suppose it’s true that many of the parties we’re warring, or just enemies of, happen to be Muslim. But I don’t understand where the perception that Islam as a whole is our enemy comes from.

• But given that Clinton is the only other one I can actually remember, my experience is pretty limited

MaximumPC posted 21 Essential Steps to Make Your PC Better/Stronger/Faster, and it seems really good. It doesn’t have the “Run this random registry optimizer program and delete all your Prefetch files” type of pseudo-advice that other sites give. Some is of no use to the normal user (please don’t overclock anything unless you already know what it is!), but a lot of it is stuff anyone can do to help keep things in good shape.

Another link: PhotoRec. A friend of a friend deleted a bunch of photos from her camera. I’ve used PhotoRec a few times, and it’s amazing at retreiving deleted files, but the terminal interface isn’t at all beginner-friendly. I may try posting a quick tutorial on how to use it at some point.

I just saw Postbox, an apparently-free (at least in beta) mail client that really took the time to rethink e-mail. Check out the features. It currently runs on Mac and Windows.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…

The Constitution only prevents the government from censoring you. If you call Mexicans “leeches” and “primitives” on your radio program, and complain about Mexico exporting “women with mustaches and VD,” you can be fired. It has nothing to do with the First Amendment. And if the radio station decides that being appalingly racist is okay and brings you back, and you give an apology, it doesn’t mean, as one commenter puts it, that “Freedom of speech is a thing of the past!”

Please familiarize yourself with the Constitution before attempting to apply it to private actors.

I just found the BlueOnyx (Blue Onyx) project today. It looks like it’s meant to be a more up-to-date version of the BlueQuartz project, which is the ongoing development of the old Cobalt RaQ software. The project seems to be hardly-known right now.

There’s also Aventurin{e}, a Linux OS with a web GUI for virtualization, apparently based on the RaQ style interface, and intended to host BlueOnyx/BlueQuartz VMs. It turns out that my novel idea, hosting BlueQuartz virtual machines, is something that a lot of people have been doing for quite a while now.

There’s an oft-neglected ham band up on 900 MHz. A few Boston area groups have been making a big push to try to revive ham radio activity in our allocation up there, especially GEMOTO. They’re a club of GE and Motorola commercial radio aficionados, so it’s no surprise that the new machine is looking really impressive.

They say they’ve got a 130 Watt repeater, with split antennas: 9dB gain on receive, 12db on transmit. I’m not normally excited by coaxial cable, but at high frequencies like 900 MHz, attenuation through cables can be magnified; they’re using 1-5/8″ Heliax on receive, and transmitting into 3-1/8″ solid copper “plumbing.”

It’s going up on One Financial Center in Boston. It’s a 46-story skyscraper in Boston; Wikipedia puts it at the 7th-tallest building in Boston, but, if you include the towers on top, the third-tallest. They posted some photos of the ‘radio room’ on the top, which looks more like a high-end colocation facility than a room filled with radios. The towers seem meticulously planned, with a designated receive-only zone.

130 Watts into an extremely high-gain antenna on top of one of the tallest buildings in Boston? Something tells me this repeater’s going to have some range! Now I just need to pick up a 900 MHz rig.

I feel like I’ve done this before, but here’s my review of the RadioShack Pro-96 digital scanner: it would be alright if it were $150. At $400, it’s not worth the price. And it was once $500, if it’s not still.

Much of New Hampshire has gone to an APCO Project 25 digital voice (P25 / Motorola ASTRO) digital voice radio system. Only a handful of police scanners can decode the digital format, and those radios are super-expensive, like the Pro-96.

So first, the good. It can decode P25 more often than not. It does several trunking formats, including several Motorola formats, APCO digital trunking, and EDACS. Trunk-tracking seems to work well. It has pretty wide frequency coverage, and a backlit keypad. It supports assigning text to channel names.

So now, the bad. For one, it’s ungodly expensive.

For another, digital decode is really bad. I once owned a really old Motorola ASTRO Saber, which was something like 5 firmware versions behind the latest. Every firmware version brought significantly improved audio quality to digital voice decode. That radio left the Pro96 in the dust. My local police department has 300 Watts ERP from the highest point in town. I receive them DFQ, S9+. Periodically, the Pro96 just fails to decode them, playing the awful noises of IMBE through the speakers. Other times, it seems like it’s missing a lot of frames, causing awful high-pitched blips to come out the speaker in between words. Other times audio decode is spot-on. I see no rhyme or reason, but it drives me bonkers. (State Police run data, believed to be mobile data terminals, on the same frequency as their digital voice. The Pro96 really struggles with this, but I can’t really fault it for that so much.) Volume is really erratic, too. Turning the knob maybe a quarter of the way is way too loud much of the time. Turning it down just a hair makes it almost inaudible. Turning it up more makes it nominally louder than the “too loud” setting. I’ve read others complaining about this, too. Even though they claim there is, it seems that there’s no AGC on digital, either: some people come across much louder than others.

There’s a constant hiss coming out of the speaker. Not too loud, but I can hear it, so it’s annoying.

The volume control is notoriously bad. I’ve read a lot of people complaining about this, and now mine does it. Even cranked all the way, the volume is barely audible. People have disassembled their radios and found that it’s just a crappily-soldered connection. Pulling the antenna towards you often fixes the problem for a few minutes. The fix I’ve read is to take the radio apart and resolder it. Thanks, RadioShack, for making such a quality product.

As seems typical of most any radio, the interface is anything but easy-to-use. You get used to it, but it’s never something I’d consider intuitive. And as with most every scanner ever made, it feels hollow and cheaply-made, whereas a good ham radio or commercial two-way rig feels quite solid. It’s weird that the Pro96 manages to feel heavy and yet also feel hollow: one would expect a radio feeling that way to be light, but it’s not the case.

All in all, it works most of the time, but for the price they’re charging, it’s not worth the aggravation. While I’m delighted to be able to listen to local police once more, I really regret buying the Pro-96.

Whoever did this clearly missed the point of the very Commandment they were so concerned with enforcing. (Though I’d argue they have a little reading of John to do, too.)

There seems to be a lot of hype around chipotle, but I think a lot of it is just using it as a catchphrase. But chipotle is a very specific thing: a smoked jalapeño. They typically wait until the peppers are dark red, at which point they’re already somewhat dry inside. They’re then smoked until they’re completely dry, imparting a smoky flavor. Jalapenos can lose up to 90% of their weight while being smoked. The Wikipedia page has more information, and photos, but first, a warning: the photos of chipotles on Wikipedia are repulsive-looking.

There’s now a Chipotle Tabasco Sauce. I just made some nachos and sprinkled a bit of it on top with the salsa, for a great effect. (I’m still a big fan of their Green Pepper Sauce, too.)

Speaking of Tabasco, did you know that there’s a type of pepper known as the Tabasco pepper. It seems that they’re sold in a handful of places; here’s one.

All the time, I want to know my IP, but find myself Googling “what is my IP” and trying to choose from a bunch of ad-infested sites.

I’ve had ttwagner.com/p0f.php for a while. It shows your IP, hostname (reverse DNS), your browser’s user agent, the headers your browser sent, and, if one was recorded, the most recent OS fingerprint my server saw. (Thanks to p0f.) I should add geolocation data from Maxmind.

But I just whipped up something handy to scripters: ttwagner.com/myip.php. It returns nothing but your IP address, with no formatting. Use it for whatever floats your boat (within reason), but I set it up so I could create a little bash one-liner on my laptop: curl http://ttwagner.com/myip.php && echo "".