SWHarden.com

The personal website of Scott W Harden

Transmitting Around the World

One of my recent fascinations is QRSS, a super-low power mode of transmission over the airwaves. Picture this: get a ham radio setup which outputs dozens of watts of power, use a microcontroller to transmit data (frequency-shifting Morse code), use FFT on the receive end to view it on the computer, now increase the time between the “beeps” to tens of seconds and decrease the power to milliwatts and receive the signal thousands of miles away - that’s QRSS! How cool! I want to try this badly… but I have to get back to lab - I have a thesis to write!


Hacking Into Pandora's Box

Summary: The files are in M4A format, which is essentially videoless MP4, but they have garbage filenames (random letters). If you can obtain the artist and song title for each file, you'll be able to write a script to associate them with their corresponding audio tracks.
This summary was generated in 51.87 seconds from an original post containing 447 words.

Mystic Mechanism

Summary: The author is hesitant to share their experimental data on the internet before it has been formally published due to concerns that it could be flawed logic and they don't want to feel like an idiot later on.
This summary was generated in 48.07 seconds from an original post containing 272 words.

Integrated Writing

Summary: The author of the blog is trying to determine the height of their geekdom by analyzing the size of their blog over time, with a particular spike in 2003 that they speculate may be due to their increased geekiness at that time.
This summary was generated in 86.87 seconds from an original post containing 189 words.

Averatec's Last Breath

Summary: The user purchased a laptop from Circuit City's going out of business sale, which has a 10.2'' LCD, 1.6ghz processor, 1gb ram, 180 gb hard drive, webcam, wifi, and 3 USB ports, but lacks a CD-ROM drive.
This summary was generated in 79.54 seconds from an original post containing 305 words.

My Mental Dustpan

Summary: The writer has been saving words for several days and is excited to finally share them on their blog after preparing a piece of heart tissue that they will view with a confocal microscope.
This summary was generated in 58.01 seconds from an original post containing 974 words.

InkScape to the Rescue!

After a few weeks of using InkScape, slowly working through documentation, tutorials, and practicing drawing random objects, I think I’m finally getting the feel of designing images in InkScape, and am growing to appreciate the depth of its usefulness. I’d love to have some great diagrams to include in potential publications. For example, I want a diagram to show how the autonomic nervous system innervates the mouse heart, but no such diagram exists! Here’s one for humans but it’s major overkill, shows every organ (I only want the heart), and doesn’t go into detail as to what the nerves do when they reach the heart (something I’m researching). Also, mouse brains are very different in shape from human brains, and there aren’t any good pictures of the ventral side of a mouse brain. So, I found the best one I could and re-created it with InkScape.

I used an existing image as a reference, made half a brain, and can mirror it when I’m done. It looks pretty good, right?