My QSL from The Mighty KBC

Here’s something I haven’t received for many years: a QSL card. Technically, it’s an electronic QSL card (sometimes called an eQSL) from The Mighty KBC, a shortwave station located in Germany.

The Mighty KBC broadcasts music programs up to two hours weekdays and seven hours weekends on 6095 kHz to Europe. But every weekend, The Mighty KBC also airs a two-hour broadcast aimed at Canada, the United States, and South America on 7375 kHz. “The Giant Jukebox” show, presented by Eric van Willegen, starts at 0000 UTC on Sunday, which is equivalent to 8:00PM EDT on Saturday.

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Decoding VOA Radiogram Program 100

Last week, I wrote about my experiences decoding the VOA Radiogram program on shortwave. Once again this week, I decoded three different VOA Radiogram broadcasts.

The February 28-March 1 show was an anniversary of sorts, marking two years of VOA Radiogram and the 100th program. It featured these stories:

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Decoding VOA Radiogram

For the past few months, I have been experimenting with decoding VOA Radiogram. VOA Radiogram is a weekly half-hour show broadcast over shortwave on the Voice of America. Conceived by Kim Andrew Elliott in 2013, VOA Radiogram transmits text and images digitally for reception using only ordinary shortwave radios and computers.

Each VOA Radiogram program is broadcast four times every weekend. All four broadcasts originate at the Edward R. Murrow transmitter site in North Carolina.

A typical VOA Radiogram program consists of four text news items from the Voice of America and four images. For example, the February 21–22 show (program 99) contained these four stories:

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Mavericks, Apple Mail, and Gmail

I’ve been running OS X 10.9 Mavericks for a few days now. Overall, I’m impressed by the speed improvements and how trouble-free the upgrade was. There aren’t any major new features (other than a few programs added from iOS), but it’s a solid update and probably representative of the yearly update cycle Apple is planning to use from now on.

(I don’t understand why so many people insist that 10.9 isn’t a new version but an upgrade. Although it’s true that many people like me will install it as an upgrade, that is a meaningless distinction. Almost every operating system has offered upgrades for existing users. By that reasoning, only Mac OS X 10.0 back in 2001 was a true version and everything since has been an upgrade.)

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How I Logged Back into WordPress After Locking Myself Out

One problem with doing any task over and over is that your attention tends to wander a bit after the process becomes too familiar.

I noticed this the other day when I was setting up a new WordPress installation. This is something I have done many times before. But this time I somehow got turned around when setting up the options. I managed to change the WordPress URL to point to an invalid URL. (I had intended to change the “Front page displays” option, but got confused. One problem with the WordPress administration screens is that its options do all tend to look similar.)

This was a big problem because WordPress was now convinced that it was actually installed at that invalid URL. Not only did the site no longer display, but WordPress kept trying to route me to that invalid URL whenever I tried to log in. If I couldn’t log in, how could I change the URL back to the correct value?

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Will Televisions of the Future Be Smart or Dumb?

Here’s an unexpected news item: LG Electronics has purchased webOS from Hewlett Packard. webOS was a potentially revolutionary operating system originally developed by Palm but largely ignored by Hewlett Packard even after spending $1.2 billion to acquire it. As part of the deal, LG is also taking over Open webOS, the open-source version of webOS that Hewlett Packard released but also mostly ignored.

The other surprise is that LG is not planning to use webOS on smartphones (of which it has several), but on its televisions that use “next generation Smart TV technology.” Skott Ahn, the LG president, stated in a press release:

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