Satellite fun, part two

Motor mount


After I had my satellite pole properly set, it was time to aim the dish. While I had little trouble finding a satellite earlier when I simply stuck the dish on the pole and fiddled a bit, I found it much more difficult to make things work when I added the mount motor. That’s because the motor adds its own angle to the mix, so you have two dials to set, not just one. When you couple that with an instruction manual often written with poor English it becomes an even greater challenge.

I mounted the motor to the pole, attached the dish to it, and began fiddling. And fiddling. And fiddling some more. I just couldn’t get the receiver to work. The motor needed to be pointed directly south and I worked a long time to get it correct. It didn’t help that I had my TV and receiver all the way inside while I worked. Though I had a “satellite beeper” device which makes a tone when it detects a satellite, I couldn’t get the receiver to do what I wanted.
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Scammer of the year?

This guy deserves a real medal of some sort. I’m stunned that he ever pulled this off.

A Chinese national who said he was the “supreme commander” of a made-up Army unit orchestrated an elaborate scheme that attracted recruits and their money with the promise that it was a path to U.S. citizenship, authorities allege.

Yupeng Deng, who is accused of raking in hundreds of dollars from his recruits, is set to be arraigned Wednesday on more than a dozen charges.

Los Angeles County prosecutors said Deng, also known as David Deng, recruited 100 other Chinese nationals, primarily in Asian enclaves in the San Gabriel Valley, to join the “U.S. Army/Military Special Forces Reserve unit,” then gave them phony U.S. Army uniforms and military ID cards.

Read more.

Update 10:09 AM: Read the press release from the LA County DA’s office.

Satellite fun

Satellite dish


Longtime MT.Net readers will know that I’m a satellite geek. I bought a DVB-S card for my computer five years ago and enjoyed tuning in the few channels I could pull in on a tiny 18″ dish. That didn’t hold my interest, though, because … well, there wasn’t much to see.

For my latest birthday, I decided to get a little more serious into this hobby. I found a Craigslist ad from a local guy who was selling his satellite gear. For about $75, I bought three DVB receivers, a dish, and an LNB. I took the parts home, scratched my head, and wondered if I had the knowledge to put it all together into something that worked. It turns out I did!
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UNC hate crime

I oppose discrimination in any form, but the story of gay UNC student Quinn Matney getting branded by an unknown assailant sounds mighty fishy to me. There are just too many holes in it. I’m reminded of the 2008 Ashley Todd case, where the victim admitted making it all up.

Quinn Matney was having trouble sleeping.

As the freshman took a walk on South Campus at about 3 a.m. on April 4, he said he ran into an acquaintance on the Craige Residence Hall footbridge. As the two spoke, a man sitting at a nearby picnic table stood up and grabbed him by the wrist, he said.

“Here’s a taste of hell you f—-ing fag,” Matney remembered the man saying.

The man branded Matney, who is gay, on the left wrist with an unidentified object, causing third- and fourth-degree burns that damaged three nerves and a tendon, leaving the freshman with no feeling in his thumb and limited mobility in his index finger, he said.

Matney said he tried to pull away — but the man didn’t let go until he received a hard punch to the face.

Update 3:30 PM: Matney was interviewed by the Durham Herald-Sun 7 months ago on his first day at UNC-CH, when Chancellor Thorp visited him and other students moving in.

Update 9:19 PM: Officials now say Matney made the whole thing up.

Woz TV

Why is it whenever I think up something cool to create, Steve Wozniak’s already beaten me to it?

This is from his open letter to the FCC defending Net Neutrality. Like me, Woz knows the value of open networks.

In the earliest days of satellite TV to homes, you would buy a receiver and pay a fee to get all the common cable channels. I had a large family (two adults, six kids) and felt like making every room a lot easier to wire for TV. Rather than place a satellite receiver in each room, I’d provide all the common channels on a normal cable, like cable companies do. In my garage, I set up three racks of satellite receivers. I paid for one receiver to access CNN. I paid for another to access TNT. I paid for others to access HBO and other such networks. I had about 30 or 40 channels done this way. I had modulators to put each of these channels onto standard cable TV channels on one cable, which was distributed throughout my home. I could buy any TV I liked and plug it in anywhere in the home and it immediately watch everything without having to install another satellite receiver in that room. I literally had my own cable TV ‘company’ in the garage, which I called Woz TV, except that I even kept signals in stereo, a quality step that virtually every cable company skipped.
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Another terrorist walks

Our political leaders like to brag about protecting us from terrorists, yet yesterday an actual terrorist walked away a free man yet again. Luis Posada Carriles, who carried out multiple bombings through his past work as a CIA agent, was acquitted of immigration fraud in court yesterday.

The feds have no trouble locking up people who pose no threat to anyone, like Bradley Manning, but can’t seem to keep the cuffs on actual terrorists like Carriles, a man who boasts about the blood on his hands.

Fallout from Epsilon email breach?

Like many folks, I’ve gotten emails from many companies I do business with online letting me know that their email databases have been compromised by hackers. The breach took place at an email marketing company called Epsilon. Here’s one notification I received from Marriott:

April 4, 2011

Dear Marriott Customer,

We were recently notified by Epsilon, a marketing vendor used by Marriott International, Inc. to manage customer emails, that an unauthorized third party gained access to a number of Epsilon’s accounts including Marriott’s email list.

In all likelihood, this will not impact you. However, we recommend that you continue to be on the alert for spam emails requesting personal or sensitive information. Please understand and be assured that Marriott does not send emails requesting customers to verify personal information.

We take your privacy very seriously. Marriott has a long-standing commitment to protecting the privacy of the personal information that our guests entrust to us. We regret this has taken place and apologize for any inconvenience.

Please visit our FAQ to learn more.

Sincerely,

Marriott International, Inc.

I also received one from Hilton and saw an online notice on the Chase website. Most of these notices state that there has been no direct leak of account information, only email addresses. That may be true, but early this morning someone tried to close a Paypal account linked with my email address and then open a new one ten minutes later:
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GOP wants drug testing for unemployment benefits

The Republican party motto: We want government out
of our lives … and into everyone else’s!

A bill being discussed in the House could require applicants for unemployment benefits to submit to periodic drug testing.

HB 735 requires “periodic drug testing” for unemployment benefit applicants “to ensure that recipients are able and available to work.”

If the applicant’s former employer agrees to pay for the drug testing, the bill says, “Upon the initial filing of a claim for unemployment benefits, the individual must submit to and pass a drug test to establish that the individual is able and available for work.”

via Bill would require unemployment benefit applicants to submit to drug testing | NBC17.com.

Raleigh considers hiking parking fees

I was not a fan of the City of Raleigh’s move to remove free on-street parking from downtown streets. The move was designed to boost revenue for the parking decks downtown, but now a city report says that parking revenue is down and officials are looking again for ways to boost revenue.

One way being considered is to make the parking decks into paid spaces 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This has drawn the ire of some downtown businesses which depend on convenient parking for their customers.

I’ve considered affordable parking to be a key to Raleigh’s downtown renaissance. Should the city press too hard in its money collection, it risks putting the brakes on downtown redevelopment. I hope officials will instead wait until the economic fortunes improve before making any move to squeeze our more parking revenue.