“The Vast of Night is a movie that takes its time, and thus serves as a wonderful reminder that every generation has its cutting edge telecom landscape, run by people who in their minds and hearts live in the future.”
Archive | Op-Ed
Opinions, editorials and fun stuff.
My Sonos Is Now an Even Better Internet Radio
I got my first Sonos speaker more than five years ago, and since then I’ve installed a speaker in nearly every room of my small house (except the bathrooms). Just a few weeks ago I treated myself to the rechargeable and portable Sonos Move so I can better enjoy music in my back yard. Though […]
Confirmations of 1700 (AM)
Thanks to our intrepid and loyal readers I’ve learned a bit more about the mystery signal I reported on last week. To recap, I DX’d a station at 1700 AM – a frequency with very few stations assigned across the continent – that simply played 80s pop music, with station IDs that were difficult for […]
DX Adventures at 1700
Before going to bed I often enjoying scanning the radio dials, listening for signals that don’t come through while the sun is out. A couple of weeks ago the AM band was particularly fertile, especially at the upper end of the dial. These frequencies north of 1600 kHz are known as the “expanded band” because […]
The case for a Spotify wild card widget
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could plug a little widget into your playlist that allowed Spotify to pick just one tune based on its AI take on your choices? Maybe. Or maybe not.
Turning Zoom into a radio channel
You too can turn your Zoom discussion into a music party! Here are two ways . . .
What did Walter Benjamin think radio was for?
“Every child recognizes that it is in the interest of radio to bring anyone before the microphone at any opportunity,” Walter Benjamin wrote in 1930 or 1931. Yet when he visited the microphone he mostly brought only himself. Why?
Podcast #237 – How Community & College Radio Can Deal with COVID-19
Community and college radio stations are unique in broadcasting because in addition to being important community services, many are also a community crossroads, hosting dozens or hundreds of people in their studios and spaces in any given week. That means the novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic poses a specific challenge for these broadcasters. KPFA’s “UpFront” co-host […]
Happy International Minidisc Day – A Post-Modern Revival
As we enter our second decade of everything-digital-on-demand, the desire for tactile media only seems to grow new buds. By now the vinyl resurgence is old news, and while mainstream publications still gasp or tsk-tsk at the cassette revival, I think we can safely say the tape medium has retaken a beachhead, too. Today is […]
The Greatest Flowering of Community Radio in History Happened in the 2010s
Mid-way through the last decade I declared that, “[w]ith regard to new stations going on the air, 2015 represented the biggest single-year leap forward for non-commercial and community radio in U.S. history.” That’s because 524 new low-power FM stations signed on that year. That was an increase of 56% over the number of existing LPFMs […]