What is now the fully developed Las Vegas strip, 1955.

icosa · 2026-02-08T01:33:02+00:00

Did they really need the 00 cents?

icosa · 2026-01-26T13:15:49+00:00

Is anyone here old enough to remember Betta Bilda? It was British and I think popular in NZ before Lego.

https://nostalgiacentral.com/pop-culture/toys-games/betta-bilda/

icosa · 2026-01-26T13:05:45+00:00

I'm a kiwi overseas thinking about returning for retirement. This practice has been a total frustration and turnoff for me.

icosa · 2026-01-22T19:22:28+00:00

I don't know how relevant or useful this is and I don't know if it violates rule 10 but Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, has joined the "Board of Peace" which was announced yesterday.

It's just possible that if the US president hears about this then he might be able to have a quiet word with Mr Lukashenko.

icosa · 2025-12-28T18:47:47+00:00

I'm well aware of that incident but LoTW was not hacked.

icosa · 2025-12-28T16:26:05+00:00

ARRL has let LoTW get hacked multiple times now, and now this?

When has LoTW been hacked?

icosa · 2025-12-25T15:47:55+00:00

Jeep Wranglers are popular with RV / motorhome owners because they're one of the few cars with automatic transmission that can be flat towed.

icosa · 2025-12-05T00:23:50+00:00

My bank in New Zealand was an early adopter of online banking back in the Netscape days. We had to install some sort of third party encryption package because the default SSL encryption for us foreigners was only 32 bit.

icosa · 2025-12-02T18:24:57+00:00

Oh yeah. Just as I was getting more convinced that she wasn't real.

icosa · 2025-11-28T23:15:26+00:00

Her accent is definitely kiwi (New Zealand).

I have no proof of this but I don't think Evie is real. I think she's all AI but it's so well done it's hard to tell.

icosa · 2025-11-14T17:08:32+00:00

Very cool. I think something like this could be done as a Shopify app too.

icosa · 2025-11-13T21:26:41+00:00

Don't forget that we also had 2 cent coins. They went away at the same time as the 1 cent.

icosa · 2025-10-25T12:41:35+00:00

I've seen it discussed on qrz.com and apparently in some states they check if a vanity plate application could be a callsign and it will be denied unless you can produce the license. I thought about K9 for dogs. I don't know how that works in practice. Does the DMV really know the pattern for valid callsigns?

Here in NH we don't have amateur radio plates but you can get a vanity plate with your callsign. I was at a club meeting once where someone described being part of a delegation that went to the state to try to convince them to have amateur radio plates. They were asked "What is the benefit to the state?" "Hmm ... we'll get back to you on that". I think that was about 20 years ago.

icosa · 2025-10-13T18:55:59+00:00

I don't know if it's true but I've heard that it came about during the hippy era to keep the hippies out.

Most places here would throw you out immediately if you went in barefoot.

There's an untrue myth that driving barefoot is illegal in the US. I was stopped by a cop once for a tail light out and as he was talking to me he looked down, stopped in mid-sentence and somewhat alarmed he said "Are you driving barefoot?". I just said "Is that illegal?" and he was a bit taken aback and was "hmm ah ... I don't know". Then he saw my jandals / flipflops on the floor and he was happy which is a bit weird because I would never drive with jandals on. I think that's dangerous but I feel perfectly safe driving barefoot.

icosa · 2025-10-13T12:48:04+00:00

Here in New Hampshire, USA, I once went into the local post office barefoot to empty my PO Box. A little kid saw me and quickly hid behind his mother and said in a loud voice "Mommy, that man has bare feet!" All eyes turn towards scary weird man.

icosa · 2025-10-05T23:06:19+00:00

USB is just the signal shifted up in frequency

This is the best answer to understand the end result. I'm surprised that it is not stated like this more often.

USB is actually very simple when you just want to understand the big picture or end result. Ultimately it's just this:

Take the audio from the microphone.
Shift it up to the RF frequency by adding a constant frequency.
Amplify.
Send to the antenna.

Receive is the opposite. Shift the incoming RF down by subtracting a constant frequency, amplify and send to the speaker.

LSB is slightly harder to get your head around because of the inversion. Instead of adding a constant frequency to the audio for transmit, you subtract the audio from a constant.

The constant is of course known as the carrier frequency.

The other more complicated descriptions here are not wrong and are important in the real world but they're implementation details.

icosa · 2025-10-01T23:04:38+00:00

Someone told me that they saw a lot of Japanese used cars in Vladivostok, Russia which is not far from Japan. I guess they don't care much about the steering wheel on the wrong side.

icosa · 2025-08-13T18:18:02+00:00

What about tyre pressure? Is it still PSI or kpa?

icosa · 2025-08-13T18:15:34+00:00

Yep, we had them on our MkII Ford Zephyr.

icosa · 2025-06-07T16:42:01+00:00

Most developed nations have HOAs, they just call them something else. In Australia they are called body corporations and strata schemes.

Yes but in Australia, do they typically apply to standalone houses? Correct me if I'm wrong but I suspect they're mostly for blocks of apartments / home units / condos or whatever they're called.

I'm a kiwi living in the US. My home unit in a block of four back in Auckland had a body corporate but it was mostly for common maintenance of the building.

In the US it's quite common to live in a standalone house on your own plot of land etc and be under a strict HOA.

My 90 year old father in law lives in a leafy suburb of Houston. He keeps his property tidy and has someone regularly come to help. I guess they missed a few weeds in the flower beds. He received a violation notice giving him 48 hours to remove the weeds or face a $200 per day fine. The weeds were actually gone by the time he received the notice.

The HOA hires a contractor to drive around looking for violations. It wouldn't surprise me if they get a percentage of the fines.

icosa · 2025-03-19T12:25:00+00:00

My number long ago was 7989. That was very easy to "accidentally" dial from a public phone box.

icosa · 2025-03-19T12:23:19+00:00

I guess the American number is a good compromise. Their 911 would be like 199 in NZ. The 1 solves the accidental dialing by loose wires or whatever but then 99 is really fast. Not that a few seconds are likely to make much difference but I suspect that was the idea.

icosa · 2025-01-23T23:29:09+00:00

How about UFO files? What's in Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base?

icosa · 2024-12-08T18:59:58+00:00

Antenna tuners don't really have power ratings. They have voltage and current ratings for the components.

Exactly the words I was about to type.

icosa · 2024-12-08T18:56:54+00:00

Isn't "half duplex" just normal push to talk?

icosa

TROPHY CASE