A Terahertz Modulator

We’re all used to the changes in the properties of radio frequency systems as the frequency increases and the wavelength becomes shorter. The difference between the way an FM radio and a WiFi adapter behave with respect to their environments, for instance. But these are relatively low frequencies in the scheme of electromagnetic radiation, as you will be aware with ever shorter wavelengths those properties change further until eventually we are not dealing with something we’d describe as radio, but infrared light.

Terahertz waves are the electromagnetic radiation that lies in that area between radio frequencies and infra-red light. You might expect that since science has delivered so many breakthroughs in both radio and IR, we’d have mastered them, but so far very few devices capable of working at these wavelengths have been developed.

A Nature paper from a group at Tufts University holds the promise of harnessing terahertz waves for applications such as data transfer, for they have developed the first terahertz modulator. It takes the form of a section of slot waveguide between two conductors on a substrate, interrupted by what they describe as a two-dimensional electron gas. This is a very thin layer of electron concentration in an InGaAs region of a semiconductor sandwich that can be created or dissipated by electrical stimulus. This creation and removal of the electron layer has the effect of interrupting the flow of terahertz waves in the waveguide, making a functional modulator.

This isn’t something you’ll find on a hacker’s bench in the near future, but it’s no less exciting a development. One day it may deliver wireless data transfers at bandwidths we would now consider unimaginable, and you will wonder how we ever managed without it.

Unsurprisingly stories involving terahertz radiation are rare here. We recently had an SDR for terahertz frequencies, but it’s probably fair to say that it’s more fairly described as for infra-red. We’ll keep an eye out for further developments.

Via Phys.org.

Filed under: radio hacks

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Lucid Dreaming | What should i do?

Iv recently noticed that a certain individual in my life that i rarely see due to them living so far away is in my dreams....maybe once every 2 or 3 dreams....due to this bieng a dream sign and dream signs in general what should i do to purposly induce a dream with them in it so i know im dreaming?
Iv never messed with dream signs aa i can never really find any but this i have figured out.....i also tend to dream alot about bieng on holiday for some reason.I believe as i never see this person much anymore that itd be a good dream sign.Any suggestions? Thanx
P.s i was thinking about using the persons picture with the words i am dreaming on it as a wallpaper for my phone but as it seems a good idea its also quiet weird and if ever they noticed my phone i think id die of embarrisment lol

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Lucid Dreaming | Sharing abit if success =)

Iv been away from lucid dreaming for the past 4months due ti christmas and life in general but now im back and iv been trying something new that so far has gave me good success.
I watched a video where stephen laberge mentioned having the right mindset before sleeping...ofcourse before you do this u need to make sure your recall is good and a decent level of waking awareness.
So last night i said to myself in a mantra type way but not *due to it bieng too long* im going to sleep now...if i find myself with people then i know that i am.dreaming.....if i find myself outside or anywhere that isnt my bed then i will know that its a dream. Then once i woke at 6am i had my first LD in a while.....i then told it myself again during my afternoon nap and yet again i had another.
I used to have a feeling of doubt anytime i would try mantras and maybe thats why it wouldnt work before....maybe instead of short mantras just talk to yourself in a positive way? Eneways just sharing my success and hope all the LDers on this site are all good and happy =)

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Raspberry Pi SDR

[Chris D] noticed that the excellent software defined radio (SDR) software gqrx will run on the Raspberry Pi now. So he married a Raspberry Pi 3, a touchscreen, an RTL-SDR dongle, and an upconverter to make a very nice receiver setup. You can see the receiver in action below.

The video is a little light on build details, but there is a shot of the setup with the pieces labeled, and you should be able to figure it out from there. Of course, gqrx works with lots of different SDR devices so you might have to make adjustments depending on what you use (for example, many of the supported dongles won’t need the upconverter that [Chris] uses).

Experimental Raspberry Pi support for gqrx has only been in place since October of last year, but as you can see in the video, it appears to work quite well. Using a more powerful SDR module would make it even better, but be sure to check the gqrx site for information on what hardware is working with the Pi.

We’ve seen gqrx on a lot of different platforms,  and its features along with the wide range of SDR hardware supported, makes it a very useful tool, indeed. If [Chris] is looking for a neat case, we might suggest this. If you want to build SDR, but don’t want to use canned software like gqrx, we suggest GNU Radio.

Filed under: radio hacks, Raspberry Pi

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Lucid Dreaming | Prospective vs Associative memory in the MILD technique.

In ETWOLD, LeBerge argues the prospective memory is the key to MILD.

Definition:

Quote:

---

Prospective memory is a form of memory that involves remembering to perform a planned action or recall a planned intention at some future point in time

---

So we set the intention before falling asleep to become lucid in the near future, fall asleep and remember we wanted to become lucid.
He then presents prospective memory exercises where you set triggers, and then set an intention to question reality the first time you see them. Many of you are familiar with this exercise.
I would argue that this exercise is strengthening associative memory instead of prospective memory and therefore not useful for MILD.

Definition:

Quote:

---

Associative memory is defined as the ability to learn and remember the relationship between unrelated items.

---

Associative memory is how we link a dream sign with becoming lucid. Since there is no trigger point in the MILD technique I would argue that this exercise is not valid for MILD.
The method focuses on becoming lucid "later" (prospective) and not when we see a dream sign (associative.)

Thoughts?

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Lucid Dreaming | VBIM Lucid Dream (Vision Board Induction Method) by AstronomyDomine

I had an LD this morning which came as the result of a hybrid induction technique I've been experimenting with. The LD itself was brief, but duration was not what I was aiming for -- I was aiming for awareness and instant lucidity. And this I achieved. In fact, the shortness of the LD was due to my sheer surprise and excitement upon realizing that the technique actually worked. I've called it VBIM - Vision Board Induction Method. It is essentially the same method I use to manifest wealth through the laws of attraction via creative visualization. The method consists of only two components: one simple mantra, and one simple visual. The mantra is: "In my dreams, I am aware that I am dreaming," and the visual is two hands, palms up. The mantra was given to me by my subconscious higher-self during a period of hypnogogic activity, word-for-word. When I tried to exclude the word "that" from the mantra, I was instructed not to exclude it via a dream guide who appeared to me as a little girl sitting in a park.

To make the method work, you'll need to construct a vision board. The vision board's purpose is to implant the mantra and its associated image directly into your subconscious. Thus the two items become inseparable in your mind. For this, I use a 20 x 30 x 3/16 inch foam board that you can pick up at any hobby store for less than two bucks. On the board, I centralize the mantra and then surround the text with its associated image: the pair of hands. The vision board I created looks like this (please click to enlarge):

IMG_0784.jpg

I look at this board frequently, several times a day. When I'm not in front of it, I visualize it in my mind. While I am driving, for instance, I can easily conjure the image. When I see the image in my mind, I do it holographically: meaning I attach emotion, sound and feeling to it, simulating the induction as though it were actually happening in a dream. When I see the hands, I automatically recite the affirmation (in my mind); when I recite the affirmation, I automatically see the hands (in my mind). I do this frequently throughout the day, pretending that WL right now is the dream. You can do this as frequently as you do your regular RC's throughout the day. Only this is much more powerful. It is like an RC on steroids when done properly. It also serves as an tremendous autosuggestion, as I explain below.

When I do VBIM, it is all mental. I am not moving my physical hands, nor am I actually speaking. Because while asleep in my bed, I am not physically moving my hands or speaking audibly. All the activity is taking place in my "dream mind" while I'm awake. As I look at my vision board and practice projecting its message through my third eye, it becomes embedded more and more deeply into the subconscious. And when I lay down at night, after doing a WBTB, I can go right back to sleep after journaling whatever recall I have from the first part of the night without having to worry about any additional techniques. For when I close my eyes, I automatically see my vision board -- and this provides an instant autosuggestion.

The first time I tried this method, I went lucid so fast that I didn't have time to stabilize or ground myself. Literally, as soon as the dream started (I was in a car, driving down the road), I began questioning my awareness. I thought the car drove strangely. When I slowed down to park, the brakes seemed bad; that's how keen my observation was. I remembered that my truck's breaks weren't nearly this bad in IWL. Up came the hands (an automatic reflex), and this time I saw that they were fat and misshapen -- BAM I was lucid. The dream had hardly started, yet I picked up on something so insignificant and mundane to which I would have never noticed otherwise (usually it takes me having a conversation with a dead person, or wandering around the halls of my high school naked to even think to do an RC). This method works very effectively for me. Maybe it will work for you?

Good luck, and sweet lucidity!

Attached Images

• IMG_0784.jpg (92.3 KB)

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The Left Says Terrorism Isn’t a big Deal. Pathetic.

by Isabella

For those of us who have attempted to talk some sense into a leftist in regards to Muslims, Islamic terrorists and the threat they pose to our lives and Western civilization, you probably heard that one of two things.  Either that the West deserves to the victim of terrorism, or that terrorism isn’t really a big deal and I shouldn’t be so focused on such an irrelevant issue that poses such an insignificant threat to me, this coming from someone that more than likely thinks traditional gender roles are something worth getting upset about.  But since leftist can’t think for themselves where do they get these ideas from, and is there anything to the assertion that Islamic terrorism is minor threat and not as worthy of our attention as other issues?

Let’s start by taking a look at a quintessential leftist propaganda piece that takes this position.  The Washington Post published an article in November of 2015 by Andrew Shaver entitled You are More Likely to be Fatally Crushed by Furniture than Killed by a Terrorist.  Shaver makes claims like “…while the Paris attacks left some 130 people dead, roughly three times that number of French citizens died on that same day from cancer.”

What Shaver doesn’t mention is that most of the people that died of cancer that day weren’t in same age demographic as those killed in the Paris attack he refers to, and that if it wasn’t cancer some other natural death would soon claim them, while the victims of the Paris attack could have lived on for decades.  Shaver goes on to compare Islamic terrorism favorably to such unnatural killers as auto-accidents, which is ironic because gun advocates are always bringing up the amount of auto related deaths compared to the deaths from firearms that the Washington Post loves to spotlight.

That being said, however, Shaver is right.  More people will die from diabetes, car crashes, and cancer than they will from Islamic terrorism, and I congratulate him on actually using the term “Islamic terrorism”.  But does that mean that we should open our arms and our borders?  Not exactly.

There are two reasons why.  One, Islamic terrorism is often not called Islamic terrorism, and two, Muslims do a lot more than hijack plains or cut people’s heads off.

Let’s quickly address the first reason.  In America, Obama has a history of not being willing to even use the term “Islamic terrorism.”  He has gone as far as to call the Fort Hood massacre “workplace violence” even though the shooter who was in contact with al-Qaeda was shouting “Allahu Akbar!” while shooting U.S. service men.

Obama also referred to the shooting of Jews at a kosher supermarket by Muslims in Paris was a “random” shooting.  But this sort of disconnect between acts of terrorism carried out by Muslims in the name of Allah and the term Islamic terrorism is not confined to the United States.  In Germany, when a Muslim terrorist who had sworn allegiance to ISIS attempted to kill scores of innocent Germans at a music festival with a suicide bomb hidden in a backpack that did end up injuring over a dozen bystanders, Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said “We don’t know if this man planned on suicide or if he had the intention of killing others”.

As if depression often drives people to seek out black market explosives and pledge allegiance to terrorist organizations before killing yourself with a bomb strapped to you in a crowded area without ever wanting to harm anyone else.  But can he be blamed?

Maybe he just gets his news from the BBC, which ran the headline “German Blast Kills Syrian Migrant” when reporting on the incident.  That’s right, “German Blast”.  So, one reason why leftists think that Islamic terrorism is not a legitimate threat to their health and way of life is because when it happens, the media and even national leaders of the countries that are attacked often don’t treat it as if it was in fact Islamic terrorism.

Even if one were to adjust the statistics to accommodate for all the deception Islamic terrorism would still not rank very high when it came to causes of death.  But that brings us to our other point.  What are these upstanding citizens doing when they’re not offering us the benefits of multiculturalism that comes with suicide bombings, shootings, and machete attacks?

In Norway, for instance, they can hardly find the time to carry out an act of terrorism with all the rape they are busy committing.  Rape seems to be the number one import that follows Muslim “refugees” these days, but nowhere is it as evident to those with a rational mind (which does not seem to include the Norwegian authorities), as in Norway’s capital city of Onslow.  Non-white immigrants account for 100% of reported violent rape attackers.  That’s right, literally every single case of rape in Onslow was committed by an immigrant, a non-white immigrant which means that we are not talking about Swedish men coming to Norway for fresh victims, but African and Middle-Eastern Muslims.

What has been the near-universal response from European leaders to the rape epidemic?  They promote Sharia law of course.  Well, I’m sure that they don’t come right out and say it that way, but under Sharia law, a woman is required to dress “modestly” and is not allowed to travel alone.  A school official in Bavaria Germany sent a letter home to parents that told them their daughters need to dress “modestly” because the gym nearby was being used to house Muslim migrants.

Among other things the letter stated that “shorts and skirts” could lead to “misunderstandings.”  Vienna’s chief of police told women not to go out alone; maybe he meant well, maybe he was just taking the lazy approach to his job since covering up rapes wasn’t working for him anymore.  Either way, Muslims are not being rounded up and deported, instead Western women are being told to adhere to Sharia which demands that they dress “modestly” and have an “escort” when outside of the home.

Even the kids get in on the exchange of culture.  In Halifax, Canada, refugee children (because I guess some of them actually are children and not only military aged males) were reported to have choked a third grade girl with a chain while shouting “Muslims rule the world”.  The girl’s mother said that school faculty intervened, but that there was no discipline taken against the assailants.  The mother, who wanted to be referred to only as “Missy,” said that her daughter begs not to go to school now because of constant violent bullying.

In Twin Falls, Idaho, two elementary school aged Muslim boys stripped and sexually assaulted a 5 year old white girl while a 14 year old Muslim recorded the scene, then they urinated on her and her clothing.  Several leftist propaganda outlets “debunked” this incident because it was originally reported that the boys were Syrian refugees and that they used a knife in their attack.

The boys were not Syrian and they didn’t use a knife, they were from Sudan and Iraq, and no weapon was reported to have been used.  But they did sexually assault a 5-year-old before humiliating her further by urinating on her while filing the attack to enjoy watching later.  Local residents that complained about Muslims being forced on their community without their consent were labeled racist and white supremacists by city council members.   At least these incidents were only ignored or denied, instead of the victims being told that they caused their attacks by not following Sharia law carefully enough.

But maybe we are just “getting carried away” as the leftists would say.  After all those rapes all over the European continent were the fault of the women who didn’t dress moderately enough, or they were consenting and made up the rape charges because of racism.  Maybe assaulting a 5-year-old and urinating on her was just the result of a “misunderstanding” because of what she was wearing or maybe it was just kids being kids.

Surely adult Muslim men don’t victimize young girls, and if they did the European authorities would do something to stop it and punish them right?

Of course not.

The Higher Regional Court in Bamberg, Bavaria recently ruled that it was perfectly legal for a 14-year-old girl to be “married” to her 20-year-old cousin.  Why?  Because they were married in Syria and the “marriage” was conducted under Sunni marriage rites.  This ruling has set a precedent that is only going to get worse, 14 is not at all young for a Muslim “bride”, in fact 9 isn’t too young since Muhammad married a 6-year-old and consummated the “marriage” when the girl was 9.  I use quotations for all of this because I refuse to validate the rape of a child that is too young to give consent with terms used for legitimate relationships between adults.  So, once again Sharia law is the answer.

Surprisingly, women and children are not the only targets of Islamic violence and aggression.

Occasionally, when in large enough numbers Muslims might even attack grown men.  This happened a few years ago in Whales when a mob of pro-Palestine Muslims attacked a group made up mainly of men that were seated outside a pub.  Why were they attacked?  Because they were drinking alcohol and eating pork products.  Someone should have told these ignorant Brits that if they wanted to prevent further attacks they shouldn’t have voted for Brexit, they should have just instituted Sharia law to keep the Muslims from getting justifiably violent when offended.

Surely that kind of stuff only happens in Europe, not in America, right?  Well, not exactly.  During the Dearborn, Michigan Arab festival of both 2009 and 2010, Dearborn police stopped the distribution of religious pamphlets by a Christian organization comprised mainly of former Muslims.

This is a direct violation of American’s 1^st amendment rights, since the festival was takin place in public and the Muslims were themselves distributing religious information.  Some of the Christians were even arrested.  I’m not sure what charges were trumped up against them, but I doubt the charges were as honest as to admit that Sharia law was being protected.  It is against Sharia law to attempt to persuade a Muslim to leave his religion, and it is a capital crime for that Muslim to choose to leave Islam.

There is also the famous “clock boy” incident. Ahmed Mohamad, a 14-year-old high school student of Sudanese descent, brought a “clock” he had “made” to school. The supposed clock was simply a reassembled digital clock he’d put into a pencil case, and his teacher, alarmed, sent him to the principal’s office where they called the police, because the “clock” resembled a bomb. He was arrested and questioned by police officers, who determined he had no malicious intent and released him to his parents.

The story went viral, with angry social media pitchfork mobs crying racism and Islamophobia. The boy was invited to several prestigious events relating to young people and science, and even visited the White House where his creativity was hailed by president Obama. His family also sued the city of Irvine, Texas, and received millions in compensation for their “emotional trauma”.

Nevermind that the clock he made did indeed resemble a homemade bomb, and we live in an age of constant paranoia about gruesome acts of violence committed on our schoolchildren. Because he was Muslim, apparently the school officials and police officers had no right to take precaution. When the president himself bends over backwards to accommodate someone suspected of terrorism, what does that say about our nation’s willingness to stand up against Sharia law, rape, and violence at the hands of immigrants? Or authentic terrorism itself?

But maybe I’m just overreacting.  If diabetes is more dangerous than terrorism, then maybe I shouldn’t worry about being attacked for drinking a beer, arrested for telling a Muslim that Mohammad was a false prophet, or my wife and female family members being raped and urinated on either.  I am just prone to overreacting I guess.  Worrying won’t make me any safer, I should instead spend my time concerning myself with my blood sugar and the finer points of Sharia law.  And anyone who says otherwise is a white supremacist, as always.

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A Simple Yagi Antenna For Your Wi-Fi Router

When we take a new Wi-Fi router from its box, the stock antenna is a short plastic stub with a reverse SMA plug on one end. More recent and more fancy routers have more than one such antenna for clever tricks to extend their range or bandwidth, but even if the manufacturer has encased it in mean-looking plastic the antenna inside is the same. It’s a sleeve dipole, think of it as a vertical dipole antenna in which the lower radiator is hollow, and through which the feeder is routed.

These antennas do a reasonable job of covering a typical home, because a vertical sleeve dipole is omnidirectional. It radiates in all horizontal directions, or if you are a pessimist you might say it radiates equally badly in all horizontal directions. [Brian Beezley, K6STI] has an interesting modification which changes that, he’s made a simple Yagi beam antenna from copper wire and part of a plastic yoghurt container, and slotted it over the sleeve dipole to make it directional and improve its gain and throughput in that direction.

Though its construction may look rough and ready it has been carefully simulated, so it’s as good a design as it can be in the circumstances. The simulation predicts 8.6 dB of gain, though as any radio amateur will tell you, always take antenna gain figures with a pinch of salt. It does however provide a significant improvement in range, which for the investment put in you certainly can’t complain at. Give it a try, and bring connectivity back to far-flung corners of your home!

We’ve covered quite a few WiFi Yagis here over the years, such as this rather extreme wardriving tool. But few have been this cheap.

Thanks to London Hackspace Radio Club for the tip.

Filed under: radio hacks

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Lucid Dreaming | Please Help! I have good dream recall, but I'm struggling to become lucid

I've always had pretty vivid dreams and I become lucid on my own about once a month. Even then, my lucid dreams ALWAYS end within several minutes, if not instantly. I can remember about 1 dream per month as though it was reality (with a few gaps) and sometimes 2 or 3.

Despite even receiving nudges here and there within the dream (for example, a dream character pointing out that there was no way in hell that my grandma could play video games that well INSIDE OF MY FIRST PERIOD CLASSROOM. I always have a very faint awareness, but it still isn't lucid enough for me to fully comprehend the implications of that fact. Also, I should note that I don't currently keep a dream journal, as I've never thought of the slight boost in memory as important enough for the effort I would have to put in to maintain it.

So, my question is, how can I make that leap/realization to the sweet lucidity that I so desire?

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Ice, Ice, Radio Uses FPGA

Building a software defined radio (SDR) involves many trades offs. But one of the most fundamental is should you use an FPGA or a CPU to do the processing. Of course, if you are piping data to a PC, the answer is probably a CPU. But if you are doing the whole system, it is a vexing choice. The FPGA can handle lots of data all at one time but is somewhat more difficult to develop and modify. CPUs using software are flexible–especially for coding user interfaces, networking connections, and the like) but don’t always have enough horsepower to cope with signal processing tasks (and, yes, it depends on the CPU).

[Eric Brombaugh] sidestepped that trade off. He used a board with both an ARM processor and an ICE FPGA at the heart of his SDR design. He uses three custom boards: one is the CPU/FPGA board, another is a 10-bit converter that can sample at 40 MSPS (sufficient to decode to 20 MHz), and an I2S DAC to produce audio. Each board has its own page linked from the main project.

You can find the C and Verilog sources for the device on GitHub. [Eric] also has a great block diagram and description of how everything works available. So far, the device can handle AM, synchronous AM, narrow-band FM, as well as upper and lower sideband (or both at once). It can also send raw IQ signals directly out for further processing.

Oddly enough, we haven’t talked about [Eric’s] design before, but a picture of it appeared in a past post about (among other things) the PMOD connector system (since the DAC uses PMOD as its interface). [Eric’s] device handles about 20 kHz of bandwidth at a time. If you want something more (also with an FPGA), check out FreeSRP.

Filed under: ARM, FPGA, radio hacks

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How to Assemble an INCH Bag

by Karen

In the prepper world there seems to be a bag for everything. There is your bugout bag (BOB), your get home bag (GHB), and your everyday carry (EDC) bag. But there is another bag that might just be more important than all of these because it is the bag that you leave home with knowing that whatever is in that bag is what will keep you alive indefinitely. It’s the I’m never coming home (INCH) bag and this is one bag you definitely do not want to get wrong.

Why an INCH Bag?

The name really says it all—the I’m never coming home bag. Many preppers consider their BOB an INCH bag. They have packed it as such. However, a BOB is ideally something with which you can survive for just a few days or even weeks, something that will keep you going as you move from your bug in location to your bugout location or are temporarily on the move for some other reason. People with a BOB intend to go back home or reach another destination at some point.

When you carry an INCH bag, it is because you will be bugging out permanently. You will have to leave and survive on the move. You simply cannot stay at your bug in or bugout location. Reasons you would have to leave your home, and thus carry an INCH bag, include:

• Your home/bugout location is destroyed
• Looters or gangs have taken your home
• There is a lot of civil unrest
• There is no food or water left where you are
• There is so much disease that you need to get away
• All communication is down
• Stores and gas stations are closed

These are just a few of the reasons why you might need to get out of Dodge. There are plenty of others, as well as warning signs of when to bug out permanently.

Selecting the Right Bag

Before you can pack the contents in the bag, you need the bag. Since your INCH bag will contain everything you need for survival, it needs to be big and it needs to be sturdy. When choosing the bag you will use, consider the following:

• How well it fits your body shape and size: Make sure it fits the length of your torso.
• How much support it offers in terms of frame and support straps: Packs with an external frame tend to offer better support and you want to make sure there are adjustable straps that will allow you to distribute the weight between your shoulders and your hips.
• Whether it is waterproof: You just don’t want your stuff getting wet.
• The number of extra/external pockets and compartments: Make sure the pack has enough room for everything and that there are compartments in which you can store things so they are within easy reach.

You absolutely need to invest in a high-quality bag. It might cost some extra dollars, but it is worth it. You also want to get a bag that is neutral in color, something that will blend in with the natural surroundings. This will help you go unnoticed, whereas a brightly colored pack will make you a moving target, one that has a lot of useful items others will want to steal.

What’s Inside?

The key to packing an INCH bag is to take a minimalist approach. This is a bag in which you will pack more than you would in your BOB, yet you want to do your best to ensure that it does not weigh more than 25% of your body weight. Thus, if you are a small woman who weighs 120 pounds, your pack should weigh no more than 30 pounds. If you are a 200-pound man, then you can carry up to 50 pounds.

So, your INCH bag will be heavier than your BOB, which has its drawbacks, including moving more slowly and traveling less distance each day. However, you will have everything you will need for survival in any environment. Now, let’s get back to that minimalist approach.

When packing your INCH bag, you need to think over the long-term. Instead of packing a lot of food, you need to pack tools and equipment that will allow you to get food while you are on the move. Instead of packing water, you need to pack a means of purifying the water you find as you go. You need to carry tools that will help you build a fire and build shelter, rather than the matches and tarp you might otherwise carry in a BOB. With that in mind here are the most essential categories of items you should include in your INCH bag.

Water

• Stainless steel water bottle

The go-to water solution for a BOB is water purification tablets and a LifeStraw, and while you should still pack these, you will want to include a simple stainless steel water bottle. Why? Because you will run out of tablets and your LifeStraw filter will get used up and you’ll still be out there. So instead of using those tablets and the LifeStraw, save them as backup and just boil your water. If you have a stainless steel water bottle you can boil your water in your water bottle and keep on moving.

Food and Protection

• Snares
• Slingshot
• Fishing line/compact fishing pole and hooks
• Crossbow

As with water, you can only carry so much food with you, and after a few days it will be gone. While you could take some MREs or other lightweight and easy to carry food (e.g. freeze-dried), you should ensure you have with you the means to catch your own food. There are calories all around you if you know how to hunt and fish. Foraging will also supplement your diet with much needed plant nutrition.

By having a compact fishing rod or fishing line, you can catch fish that are highly nutritious. With snare wire and a slingshot, you can catch small game. With a crossbow, you can catch bigger game. Just make sure you get these things ahead of time and practice so you become skilled in how to use them.

Why not a gun? Well, you can and should certainly have one, but the bullets will eventually run out and then it will be useless. The fishing line and snares are reusable. Ammo for a slingshot can be found anywhere there are rocks (which is pretty much everywhere!). Arrows for a crossbow can be reclaimed and reused most of the time, and if you build your skills ahead of time, you can make arrows out of what is around you.

Medical

Have a serious first aid kit. Fortunately, first aid kits are already small, compact, and lightweight, so you don’t have to alter this much. Just be sure to pack what you can in as compact a package as possible.

But as with your other food and supplies, eventually the items in your first aid kit will run out, so you need to be familiar with how to identify medicinal plants and learn how to use what you find in nature to help you with medical care and procedures when necessary.

Tools

When you are surviving on the move, there are certain tools you will need in certain situations. The key is to take with you the fewest number of tools that will effectively get any job done that needs doing. You essentially need bushcraft tools that are easy to carry and effective for the many tasks you will need to perform, such as clearing brush, cutting firewood, and skinning and cleaning animals. Here are the basic tools you need:

• Large knife
• Small knife
• Hatchet/small axe
• Saw
• Multi-tool
• Carving tool
• Whetstone
• Firestarter
• Navigation
• Compass
• Gas mask
• Shovel (compact and foldable)
• Small sewing kit

Clothing

When it comes to clothing, you need to have clothing for all weather situations. This means warm- and cold-weather clothing and waterproof clothing. However, you should pack one extra of each thing, not multiples. There simply is no room and you’ll have to get used to having less and washing what you do have in the nearest creek once a week or so. Just be sure the clothing you do have is high quality, moisture-wicking, and include some wool in there.

Shelter

Tents, tarps, sleeping bags, and pillows are all added weight that you don’t need, even if you might want these luxury items. If you have a high-quality bivvy bag, one that is like a tiny tent, you can survive quite nicely. Add your survival shovel for when you need to dig a trench to tuck down in and you are all set.

This is the basic must-have gear for an INCH bag, but you may want to include other supplies and equipment to ensure your survival. This is fine, provided you choose carefully and they will fit in your pack.

Assembling Your INCH Bag

When you assemble you INCH bag, be sure to pack the heaviest, least used items at the back and bottom of the pack and the lightest, most frequently used items near the front and top. You can use the exterior compartments for the smaller items you need to access frequently and quickly, such as your water, compass, and weapon. Packing a bag well will mean the difference between awkward discomfort and relative comfort and ease of movement.

Ultimately, you need to be sure you have everything in your INCH bag that you can use to survive the rest of your life on the move if need be. However, you might have noticed as you read through what you need to pack that there was something else you need to go with these items—skills!

Your survival when on the move will depend on the skills you master even more than the items you pack in your INCH bag. It is critical that you practice using everything you have, that you learn how to hunt, fish, and forage, and that you become skilled at bushcraft. The contents of your INCH bag and the skills you build will keep you alive and well.

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Voice at 700 Bits Per Second

All other things being equal, signals with wider bandwidth can carry more information. Sometimes that information is data, but sometimes it is frequency. AM radio stations (traditionally) used about 30 kHz of bandwidth, while FM stations consume nearly 200 kHz. Analog video signals used to take up even more space. However, your brain is a great signal processor. To understand speech, you don’t need very high fidelity reproduction.

Radio operators have made use of that fact for years. Traditional shortwave broadcasts eat up about 10kHz of bandwidth, but by stripping off the carrier and one sideband, you can squeeze the voice into about 3 kHz and it still is intelligible. Typical voice codecs (that is, something that converts speech to digital data and back) use anywhere from about 6 kbps to 64 kbps.

[David Rowe] wants to change that. He’s working on a codec for ham radio use that can compress voice to 700 bits per second. He is trying to keep the sound quality similar to his existing 1,300 bit per second codec and you can hear sound samples from both in his post. You’ll notice the voices sound almost like old-fashioned speech synthesis, but it is intelligible.

Your ears are not linear with respect to frequency response, and the codec takes advantage of this, sampling more low frequencies than high frequencies. There are other specialized signal processing and filtering steps taken to improve the audio quality. Here’s the block diagram (you can find out more at the original post):

Tight bandwidth has lots of advantages: more channels per given frequency band, less interference, and improved resistance to noise. A 700 Hz audio signal able to carry speech would have major implications for radio communications by voice.

The codec is destined for integration with FreeDV. We’ve talked before about the wealth of technology ham radio produces. Perhaps others will find use for this codec in other situations that are not ham radio-related.

Thanks to [Rob] for pointing this out.

Filed under: radio hacks

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Recapture Radio’s Roots with an Updated Regenerative Receiver

Crystal radios used to be the “gateway drug” into hobby electronics. Trouble was, there’s only so much one can hope to accomplish with a wire-wrapped oatmeal carton, a safety-pin, and a razor blade. Adding a few components and exploring the regenerative circuit can prove to be a little more engaging, and that’s where this simple breadboard regen radio comes in.

Sometimes it’s the simple concepts that can capture the imagination, and revisiting the classics is a great way to do it. Basically a reiteration of [Armstrong]’s original 1912 regenerative design, [VonAcht] uses silicon where glass was used, but the principle is the same. A little of the amplified RF signal is fed back into the tuned circuit through an additional coil on the ferrite rod that acts as the receiver’s antenna. Positive feedback amplifies the RF even more, a germanium diode envelope detector demodulates the signal, and the audio is passed to a simple op amp stage for driving a headphone.

Amenable to solderless breadboarding, or even literal breadboard construction using dead bug or Manhattan wiring, the circuit invites experimentation and looks like fun to fiddle with. And getting a handle on analog and RF concepts is always a treat.

[via r/electronics]

Filed under: classic hacks, radio hacks

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Lucid Dreaming | WBTB not working

So my bladder is tiny and loves to wake me up about 3-4 hours into my 6-7 hour sleep every night. I figured that I may as well lose some sleep to try and WBTB but to no avail. I get up, empty the bladder and have stayed up on different occasions from 5 all the way up to 60 minutes. Anything past 60 minutes and I just cannot fall back alseep (or just don't have to time to). My dreams are very vivid when I wake up, but not lucid. Does anyone else have this problem? Also I have lucid dreamed a handful of times already but they have all been randomly from MILD.

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Shmoocon 2017: Dig Out Your Old Brick Phone

The 90s were a wonderful time for portable communications devices. Cell phones had mass, real buttons, and thick batteries – everything you want in next year’s flagship phone. Unfortunately, Zach Morris’ phone hasn’t been able to find a tower for the last decade, but that doesn’t mean these phones are dead. This weekend at Shmoocon, [Brandon Creighton] brought these phones back to life. The Motorola DynaTAC lives again.

[Brandon] has a history of building ad-hoc cell phone networks. A few years ago, he was part of Ninja Tel, the group that set up their own cell phone network at DEF CON. That was a GSM network, and brickphones are so much cooler, so for the last few months he’s set his sights on building out a 1G network. All the code is up on GitHub, and the hardware requirements for building a 1G tower are pretty light; you can roll your own 1G network for about $400.

The first step in building a 1G network, properly referred to as an AMPS network, is simply reading the documentation. The entire spec is only 136 pages, it’s simple enough for a single person to wrap their head around, and the concept of a ‘call’ really doesn’t exist. AMPS looks more like a trunking system, and the voice channels are just FM. All of this info was translated into GNU Radio blocks, and [Brandon] could place a call to an old Motorola flip phone.

As far as hardware is concerned, AMPS is pretty lightweight when compared to the capabilities of modern SDR hardware. The live demo setup used an Ettus Research USRP N210, but this is overkill. These phones operate around 824-849 MHz with minimal bandwidth, so a base station could easily be assembled from a single HackRF and an RTL-SDR dongle.

Yes, the phones are old, but there is one great bonus concerning AMPS. Nobody is really using these frequencies anymore in the US. That’s not to say building your own unlicensed 1G tower in the US is legally permissible, but if nobody reports you, you can probably get away with it.

Filed under: cons, radio hacks

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The ARRL Raises A Stink About Illegal FPV Transmitters

We have all been beneficiaries of the boom in availability of cheap imported electronics over the last decade. It is difficult to convey to someone under a certain age the step change in availability of parts and modules that has come about as a result of both the growth of Chinese manufacturing and Internet sales that allow us direct access to sellers we would once only have found through a lengthy flight and an intractable language barrier.

So being able to buy an ESP8266 module or an OLED display for relative pennies is good news, but there is a downside to this free-for-all. Not all the products on offer are manufactured to legal standards wherever in the world we as customers might be, and not all of them are safe to use. We’ve all seen teardowns of lethal iPhone charger knock-offs, but this week the ARRL has highlighted an illegal import that could take being dangerous to a whole new level as well as bring an already beleaguered section of our community to a new low.

The products the radio amateurs are concerned about are video transmitters that work in the 1.2GHz band. These are sold for use with FPV cameras on multirotors, popularly referred to as drones, and are also being described as amateur radio products though their amateur radio application is minimal. The ARRL go into detail in their official complaint (PDF) about how these devices’ channels sit squarely over the frequencies used by GLONASS positioning systems, and most seriously, the frequencies used by the aircraft transponders on which the safety of our air traffic control system relies.

The multirotor community is the unfortunate recipient of a lot of bad press, most of which is arguably undeserved and the result of ignorant mass media reporting. We’ve written on this subject in the past, and reported on some of the proposals from governments which do not sound good for the enthusiast. It is thus a huge concern that products like those the ARRL is highlighting could result in interference with air traffic, this is exactly not the association that multirotor fliers need in a hostile environment.

The ARRL complaint highlights a particular model with a 5W output, which is easily high enough to cause significant interference. It is however just one of many similar products, which a very straightforward search on the likes of AliExpress or eBay will find on sale for prices well under $100. So if you are concerned with multirotors we’d urge you to ensure that the FPV transmitters you or your friends use are within the legal frequencies and power levels. We’re sure none of you would want an incident involving a manned aircraft on your conscience, nor would you relish the prospect of the encounter with law enforcement that would inevitably follow.

In the past we’ve taken a look at some of the fuss surrounding reported drone incidents, and brought you news of an Australian sausage lover in hot water for drone-based filming. It’s a hostile world out there, fly safe!

Filed under: news, radio hacks

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Top 5 Brands of 1911 to Own

by Nicholas

Easily one of the most iconic and beloved semi-automatic pistols of all time, the 1911 is a timeless design that has been around for over a hundred years and will likely be around for a hundred more.

But what makes the 1911 so adored by shooters? Just as importantly, what specific brands of 1911 stand out above the rest and should be the top ones for you to consider should you decide to buy a 1911?  We’ll answer these questions in this article.

WHAT MAKES THE 1911 SO GREAT?

The reality is that there is a great multitude of things that make the 1911 a great pistol. The 1911 is not for everyone. There are pistols out there that are lighter, simpler, and carry more bullets, but no one can deny that there are specific attributes about the 1911 that have made it such an enduring pistol.

These attributes include:

• Accuracy. The 1911 is a highly accurate pistol thanks to its fixed barrel design, light trigger, soft recoil, and longer sight radius. Is it the most accurate production pistol made? That’s debatable, but its accuracy is a major plus.

• Light Trigger. The trigger of the 1911 alone makes it a dream to shoot. It’s very light and crisp, with a relatively short reset. The light trigger pull makes it unsafe to carry the 1911 chambered and cocked without the safety on, so you must train yourself to manually switch off the safety when drawing the weapon to fire. Nonetheless, the trigger on the 1911 is one of the biggest appeals. It makes it an excellent handgun to shoot for target practice, competition, or for tactical training.

• Slim Design. The 1911 is a naturally slim possible, which means shooters with smaller hands can comfortably grip the weapon and it’s easy to conceal carry. The obvious trade-off is fewer bullets in the magazine (the standard 1911 magazine holds either 7 or 8 rounds).

• Customization. The 1911 is one of the most customizable firearms on the planet. The AR-15, Glock, and Ruger 10/22 are the only other guns that can match it for the number of spare accessories and add-ons that you can buy. This means you can customize your 1911 to be exactly the way you want it to be. For SHTF purposes, this means that spare magazines and parts will be relatively easy to find in comparison to other pistols.

• Power. Most 1911s are chambered for the .45 ACP caliber, which is a very powerful bullet that will put a big hole in its target. While 1911s are also available in other calibers such as .22 LR or 9mm, if you’re going to buy a 1911, most would agree that it should be in .45.

None of this is to say that the 1911 is not without faults. It has a more complicated takedown procedure than more modern pistols. It is heavy, only holds 7-8 rounds in the magazine. And most 1911 guns require a break-in period of around 200-300 rounds before they can become reliable.

Still, the 1911 reigns supreme as one of the most popular pistol designs of all time. It’s a perfectly valid option as a range gun, for professional competition shooting, as a home defense gun, or for an SHTF sidearm.

Since the 1911 is so popular, there are naturally many different brands and models available. Narrowing down our selection to just five brand recommendations above the others is difficult, but here are five of the best 1911 brands available:

COLT

Colt was the original manufacturer of the 1911 (using John Browning’s design), and the phrases “Colt 1911” and “Colt 45” have now become iconic. Colt 1911s today are known for their reliability right out of the box.

Go to Colt’s website, and you will find a wide variety of different models available. Colt produces classic models such as the Mark IV Series 70 based on the original M1911A1. It was issued to troops in World War II, but they also make modern options such as the Rail Gun that are made for duty use, the Gold Cup built for competition shooting, the Commander model with a shorter barrel, and the Defender with an even shorter barrel and grip.

Colt 1911s are not cheap by any means, but you will get what you pay for due to their exceptional quality. Besides, there’s something cool about saying that you own a true ‘Colt 1911.’

KIMBER

Another high-quality option for a 1911 is Kimber, with their custom model available in a wide variety of calibers and configurations. Not only can you buy the Kimber Custom in .45 ACP, but it’s also available in .38 Super, 9mm Luger, 10mm AUTO, and even .40 S&W.

The Custom model uses a full-length guide rod (in contrast to most 1911s that use a shorter length guide rod), and modern upgrades such as forward serrations, a beavertail grip safety, extended thumb safety, and a beveled magazine well for faster and smoother reloading.

The Custom TLE II and Warrior models are also available, which are designed for military and law enforcement use. These are an excellent choice for a duty weapon or as a durable SHTF sidearm. As with Colt, Kimber 1911s are highly expensive, but as the old saying goes, you have to pay for quality.

RUGER

Ruger began producing 1911s only a few years ago, but they have quickly proven themselves to be one of the best 1911 manufacturers on the market. The Ruger SR1911 is their standard line, which is available in both the full 5-inch and the shorter 4.25-inch Commander sized barrel versions.

Whereas most 1911s use a Series 80-style firing system, the SR1911 uses the more traditional Series 70-style firing system just like the Colt Mark IV Series 70. Many 1911 aficionados prefer a Series 70-type model. It’s regarded as being the original firing system of the 1911, and 70 models also tend to have a lighter trigger system than 80 models.

‘Series 70’ and ‘Series 80’ are currently trademarks owned by Colt, but the terms are still used to denote the specific firing systems. The Series 80 simply has an internal safety system that prevents the possibility of discharge should the gun be dropped and the hammer falls on its own.

The Ruger SR1911 also comes equipped with modern parts such as an extended thumb safety and beavertail grip safety, and forward cocking serrations. In essence, it represents the traditional 1911 firing system integrated with modern upgrades. The SR1911 is also very reasonably priced in the $700 to $800 range and sometimes can be found for even less than that.

SPRINGFIELD

Many consider Springfield to offer the best quality for the money. Their 1911s are routinely priced less than $1,000 (other than the premium models), and they make an extremely wide variety of model options.

Springfield makes practically any kind of 1911 you can think of, from the standard G.I models, like what the troops carried in World War II, to competition ready guns or duty 1911s with modern upgrades and concealed carry variations with shorter grips and barrels. They are also available in different calibers as well.

The neat thing about Springfield is how they will ship many of their 1911s with three magazines (instead of the standard two), with a holster and double mag holder. This essentially gives you a complete kit right out of the box and can save you on money for accessories that you would have to buy anyway.

WILSON COMBAT

If you want the best 1911 possible and are willing to pay for it, many would say that you should go with Wilson Combat. Not only does Wilson manufacture high-quality parts and accessories for 1911s that can be added to other brands, but they also manufacture actual 1911’s themselves.

Wilson originally got started manufacturing spare parts and customization options for the 1911, Smith & Wesson Model 10, and Remington 870. Since then, however, they have become the most well-known for the aftermarket parts they produce for the 1911. Some other 1911 manufacturers will even install Wilson Combat parts on their production guns, and many people also will customize their 1911s with Wilson Combat parts to enhance performance.

Wilson Combat 1911s are not only popular with civilians. They also have been utilized extensively by military and police forces. They have seen action all around the world, and are guaranteed to deliver one-inch groups at twenty-five yards.

For a premium 1911, Wilson Combat should be a top option. Even if you can’t afford a Wilson Combat 1911, you can always buy from another manufacturer and then customize it with Wilson parts.

CONCLUSION

If the 1911 is your dream gun, these five manufacturers should be your top choices. Even though the 1911 has become a little outdated in some ways when compared to the more modern, polymer framed guns, it’s not a gun that’s going to be going away anytime soon either. They truly are a joy to shoot, and if you spend the time learning how to use one, the 1911 can save your life in a life-or-death situation as well.

 

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Lucid Dreaming | How to Effectively Use Techniques

This is probably the closest I will get to writing "What I do to get lucid", so for those asking... um... here.

This is how to make DILD techs more effective, and what I believe, is what DILD techs are for. This will help with WILD as well, but it I shall make a thread for WILD soon, maybe. :P
So! You have read all the tutorials and they don't seem to work. Right? Like, I do something that others have done over and over and even if it works at the start, it doesn't seem to work consistently. I may have weeks without a lucid dream, how do I combat this? Where do I go from here.

Another little note before we start. When first LDing, you don't even know the feeling, so it can be muddled and hard to follow. This may not help people at the beginning. When you have 50-100 LDs, you will generally start doing a "technique shuffle" where you keep changing the tech over and over because they keep falling apart and not working. Even if you stay consistently lucid, the tech shuffle keeps happening, you just get better at the tech shuffle. After about 100, people will start to get that tech down that gets them the feeling, but dry spells and things "leaving the feeling" are going to hurt them and make it harder on them than it needs to be. This is actually mainly for people with some LDs under their belt, but I am guessing that reading it when you don't know the feeling will help you to look for it. :)

Daytime Techniques
Have you ever had the feeling that you were definitely going to lucid dream tonight? Like... "Man... I just need to fall asleep, and I will definitely have a lucid dream!" I doubt the feeling is the exact same for everyone, but this is what I call "Peak performance" and is the best you can get at LDing for your experience level for day work. The problem here is that people are stuck to their techniques, so they end up breaking out of this feeling by working "too hard" and leaving the prime area. Imagine someone playing basketball that cannot yet shoot the ball, but still walks right next to the basket, waiting to shoot. Instead of just waiting until it is time to shoot, he keeps moving, walking around in a circle, trying to get a good vantage point for shooting. Just stand still! The techniques are trying to get you to this point, where you can just easily shoot and score, but you keep moving! Thinking that by some force of will, you will be able to get a better shot than right next to the basket! What the sheol? Just stop and trust in that feeling. I am not saying that if you have that feeling that you will LD, but it is more likely than anything else that you could do at this time. The techniques are there to get you to the feeling, if you have the feeling, the techniques are arbitrary.

Nighttime Prep
Before you go to bed. Instead of "spending 30 minutes visualizing getting lucid over and over" or something like that. visualize what you will do when you get lucid. Because you are already "taking a good shot", don't worry about getting lucid. Just enjoy some time thinking about lucidity without trying to grasp it. This is a time that I think a lot of people lose the feeling and walk further away from the goal. BUT! Before you go to sleep, just double check the feeling, make sure it is there. If it isn't, no big deal, it may have just faded a bit and will come back through the night.

Nighttime techniques
WBTB, Micro-WBTB, DEILD tries, and all the things like this all have one thing in common. Waking up! Why is this important? Because the feeling is not there during your black out stages. On days that I LD many times, I usually have pretty much no time blacked out. A black out phase would be the time before your dream starts or time before you remember what was happening in a dream. Think about the last dream you had. How did it begin? See, black out phase right there. The more you wake up, the less time the black out phase will be. This can put a strain on your sleep, so the amount you wake up should correspond to how much you are sleeping and how well you are sleeping. Every time you wake through the night, you are closer to REM than you would have been otherwise and you are going to have an easier time making the shot. Every time you wake up, you take another shot. This might take some energy, but it gives you another shot, and the more shots you take, the more warmed up you are. The most important thing to do during the night is to bring the feeling back You will lose the feeling, unless you have all lucid dreams all night. The feeling will have faded. But if you just, reach out, it should be close if it was there yesterday. If you wake up from a lucid dream, you still have the feeling, maybe right down a dream or two, but GO BACK TO SLEEP! Think of it like being on fire in basketball, or doing the Micah drill. Just grab, put it back, grab, put it back. If you wake up from a LD for more than a minute, then make sure to grasp the feeling, but not the feeling from before, but the feeling of the previous dream.

A Good Sleep Schedule
You know what a good sleep schedule is, and the better you are at LDing, the more you can stress the idea of a "good sleep schedule" I used to have to sleep before 11 for 3 nights in a row, now it is... different. Even if I stay up till 1 or 2 or more, I can still usually LD, It just won't be as much as it had in the past, it still adversely effects me, but it doesn't cripple me. I can also tell that if I go to bed on time every night, I will have way more lucid dreams, dreams, and recall of all them if I just go to sleep on time. This is one I struggle with greatly and LDing has been the only thing to make me go to bed on time. :P

Meditation
Meditation is amazing, plain and simple, everything that we do for LDing is a form of meditation even LDing itself. This doesn't mean, however that any meditation at any time is a good thing. Some meditation is always good. Like, clearing your mind, or stress relief, or fun visualization. Intense meditation for the sole purpose of LDing can be you walking away from the goal though. I have this ritual I do, it takes a while, but if I don't have the feeling at all (usually when I haven't been lucid in a bit), I will sit on a couch in a position that I cannot fall asleep, I will then visualize all my LDs that I can remember until I get the feeling back, then I stop immediately. I didn't used to know why I stopped, but I knew it was time to stop. I have tried before to do this every day, because I thought "I always get a lucid when I do this" and I didn't get a lucid for weeks while trying this. IT IS MY BEST TECHNIQUE?! WHAT THE HECK!? Because I wasn't staying near the goal. The feeling, not the tech.

Stress
Why does stress effect us so much? Because it is literally the waking feeling being overwhelming. Your life is pressing in on your mind in a bad way. You can't think about anything but your problems. This is why LDing is hard during stressful times, lucid nightmares happen more often as well, if you experience "great waking stress" and this can be an extremely distressing experience. Try not to stress, even if life is hard and pressing on you. I feel like a very unqualified person to say this because I am a very carefree person. When I first started LDing, I was FT work and college, wife, and a child on the way and I didn't have a care in the world. This is not what holds me back, but it holds a lot of people back.

Insomnia
The old fiend. If there was one thing that held me back in my LDing, it was my insomnia. I would have the feeling for days and be lucid almost every night and then BAM! I don't sleep even a wink at night! :/ It used to take me three days of sleeping well and doing techniques to find the feeling, now it takes... less time. :P After a good night of insomnia and then sleeping well the next day because of, well, being completely and utterly tired, I would draw an accidental (or maybe not so accidental) line between the insomnia and the feeling. This has haunted me and held me back for years. So much so, that now that I am over it, or feel like I am over it, I don't see anything stopping me from having LDs every single night until eternity. :P How did I get past it? The same way I lucid dream. I realized that I have a feeling every time I think I am not going to get to sleep, and then I worry about it, and then I don't sleep. So I started some techniques for keeping the feeling away, and that "anti-feeling" I treat like a feeling. If I feel like I will sleep tonight, I don't worry at all. If I start feeling like I am not going to sleep tonight, I do my techs to bring the other feeling back. This has worked for a month and will really be tested with the Dreamviews competition. It is something that has caused much insomnia in the past, and I am excited to see my progress. Ways to fix this have included, self affirmations, visualization, meditation, etc.

Forgotten
This is something that I have forgotten time and again and have either had it as a "sure sure, I know this" or "I can't believe I forgot!" type thing. If I had kept with it all the time, I imagine I would be farther than I am now at LDing, but I am where I am, and it isn't a bad place to be. :D

Technique is not a bad thing
Techs are needed, especially at first, but they are not the goal. They are the bow, they get you to the goal. Most people see techniques as things that they need to do every day, but they aren't, they are like drills and may be something that you need every day at first, but when you have the fundamentals down, you may just need to brush up on them every week. However to score every night and to keep getting better and better, you need to try almost every night.

One last note on DJing
Dream Journaling is not needed to LD, but it will probably benefit you more than anything else, especially if you are wanting to get better at dream control, persistent worlds, etc. Dream Journaling doesn't have to be a tedious crazy thing either. You can just write a quick summary. I might even just use keywords and phrases, but if you want to remember a dream, write it down. One of my favorite lucid dreams, I have read time and again, is the first one in my DJ, I reread it for the first time in a year the other day and I had completely forgotten a big part of how I got lucid! It changes the whole context of the dream! If you are serious about LDing, then at least write down the LDs that you want to keep, you won't just remember all of them.

To some, this may seem overly complicated, to others, it may seem like it isn't complicated enough. When you read through this, you may realize that if I have the feeling, I don't need to do anything to get lucid. I just go to sleep and wake up with the lucid dream. Note, this is a technique on how to utilize the dream feeling! I doubt that it is the best possible thing to do with it, it is just what I do with it. Explore, figure out what you want to do with it. :D

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Shmoocon 2017: A Simple Tool For Reverse Engineering RF

Anyone can hack a radio, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy: there’s a lot of mechanics that go into formatting a signal before you can decode the ones and zeros.

At his Shmoocon talk, [Paul Clark] introduced a great new tool for RF Reverse Engineering. It’s called WaveConverter, and it is possibly the single most interesting tool we’ve seen in radio in a long time.

If you wanted to hack an RF system — read the data from a tire pressure monitor, a car’s key fob, a garage door opener, or a signal from a home security system’s sensor — you’ll be doing the same thing for each attack. The first is to capture the signal, probably with a software defined radio. Take this data into GNU Radio, and you’ll have to figure out the modulation, the framing, the encoding, extract the data, and finally figure out what the ones and zeros mean. Only that last part, figuring out what the ones and zeros actually do, is the real hack. Everything before that is just a highly advanced form of data entry and manipulation.

[Paul]’s WaveConverter is the tool built for this data manipulation. Take WaveConverter, input an IQ file of the relevant radio sample you’d like to reverse engineer, and you have all the tools to turn a radio signal into ones and zeros at your disposal. Everything from determining the preamble of a signal, figuring out the encoding, to determining CRC checksums is right there.

All of this is great for reverse engineering a single radio protocol, but it gets even better. Once you’re able to decode a signal in WaveConverter, it’s set up to decode every other signal from that device. You can save your settings, too, which means this might be the beginnings of an open source library of protocol analyzers. If someone on the Internet has already decoded the signals from the keyfob of a 1995 Ford Taurus, they could share those settings to allow you to decode the same keyfob. This is the very beginnings of something very, very cool.

The Github repo for WaveConverter includes a few sample IQ files, and you can try it out for yourself right now. [Paul] admits there are a few problems with the app, but most of those are UI changes he has in mind. If you know your way around programming GUIs, [Paul] would appreciate your input.

Filed under: cons, radio hacks

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Everyday Carry Kids for Kids

Have you ever thought about what your kid carries with him every day? While you can expect him or her to be able to survive any disaster, making sure he has these survival items with him in his backpack could make a huge difference.

This article written on Everyday Carry Experts shows exactly which edc items to get for your kids depending on their age. Read more

(Just keep in mind part of the reason why you’re doing this is to plant the seed in your child’s mind, so that, when he grows up, he’ll become a real prepper and protector of his family.)

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Shmoocon 2017: So You Want To Hack RF

Far too much stuff is wireless these days. Home security systems have dozens of radios for door and window sensors, thermostats aren’t just a wire to the furnace anymore, and we are annoyed when we can’t start our cars from across a parking lot. This is a golden era for anyone who wants to hack RF. This year at Shmoocon, [Marc Newlin] and [Matt Knight] of Bastille Networks gave an overview of how to get into hacking RF. These are guys who know a few things about hacking RF; [Marc] is responsible for MouseJack and KeySniffer, and [Matt] reverse engineered the LoRa PHY.

In their talk, [Marc] and [Matt] outlined five steps to reverse engineering any RF signal. First, characterize the channel. Determine the modulation. Determine the symbol rate. Synchronize a receiver against the data. Finally, extract the symbols, or get the ones and zeros out of the analog soup.

From [Marc] and [Matt]’s experience, most of this process doesn’t require a radio, software or otherwise. Open source intelligence or information from regulatory databases can be a treasure trove of information regarding the operating frequency of the device, the modulation, and even the bit rate. The pertinent example from the talk was the FCC ID for a Z-wave module. A simple search revealed the frequency of the device. Since the stated symbol rate was twice the stated data rate, the device obviously used Manchester encoding. These sorts of insights become obvious once you know what you’re looking for.

In their demo, [Marc] and [Matt] went through the entire process of firing up GNU Radio, running a Z-wave decoder and receiving Z-wave frames. All of this was done with a minimum of hardware and required zero understanding of what radio actually is, imaginary numbers, or anything else a ham license will hopefully teach you. It’s a great introduction to RF hacking, and shows anyone how to do it.

Filed under: cons, radio hacks

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Is the US a Socialist State?

by Aaron

A 2012 Pew Research Center poll regarding positive versus negative reactions to the terms “capitalism” and “socialism” revealed that 40% of respondents had a negative reaction to capitalism while 31% had a positive reaction to socialism. If we shift our view only to millennials, a Harvard University poll of millennials (ages 18 to 29) showed that a whopping 51% do not support capitalism, while only 33% claim to support socialism.

In the interest of fair journalism, I should point out that worded differently the polls would suggest that most millennials dislike socialism more than they dislike capitalism. So I’m not here to convince you that all, or even most, millennials are socialists – only that we have a very interesting view of the terms in this country.

I fear that a major problem here is that so few people in general understand the theories behind the terms they hear from sound bites from the media that public outcry has become lost in zealous ignorance. To further complicate things, I would argue that many of the problems inherent in American businesses are a result of quazi-socialist agendas. That is, our youth is blaming capitalism for the failures of socialism.

I think it’s pretty clear that we don’t have anything close to a free market in this country, and here’s why:

The “Trickle-Up” Economy

You’ve probably all heard of trickle-down economics, where the idea is that the more money the wealthy have (for instance, by having tax cuts and other incentives), the more money they have to invest in their businesses, and hence the more jobs they can afford to create.

Conversely, in trickle-up economics, wealth is believed to flow from the bottom up. This is because notice that the consumer is the one who drives the economy, and that a striking portion of the consumer base is under or barely over the poverty line. This includes our poor as well as our lower middle class.

It should take no convincing to recognize that the more money the lower classes have, the more money they have to spend. The more money they spend, the more money goes to the business owners, and thus the more people they can hire. The more people they can hire, the more money more people are able to make, thus generating the economy.

While this is a valid premise to build on, the “how” question is just as important as the “what” question. The liberals tend to see the solution to this as being: jumpstart the economy by throwing money at the problem.

Great. Here we go. Here’s where the problem lies. Not in the “what,” but in the “how.” So we take a portion of tax revenue and give it to the poor and lower middle class. Then what? Hopefully they’ll spend wisely? Certainly the sale of alcohol, cigarettes, and diapers may go up. But then what? We’re still taxing these businesses to oblivion anyway! And with all the roadblocks (i.e., taxes, regulations, etc.) businesses must drive over to make their businesses profitable, job growth gets stifled, meaning we have to keep throwing money at the wrong part of the problem while doing little – if anything – to solve the actual problem.

But hey, at least it’s easier for the politicians to look like they’re doing something useful with our money. And further, keeping the problem existing keeps them employed, which brings us to our next problem.

The Broken Window Fallacy

The Broken Window problem refers to a parable by 19^th century French economist Frédéric Bastiat as an example of the problem with society’s view of employment. In the parable, Bastiat tells of a shop owner who’s window is broken accidentally by a little boy. In attempts to console the shop owner, townspeople tell him that they’re sorry it happened, but then again if windows didn’t get broken, then window glaziers couldn’t stay employed.

In other words, disaster creates jobs! The problem that Bastiat points out though is that with that line of thinking, what’s to stop the glaziers from paying kids to go around breaking windows so they could remain in business? Well, this is actually sort of happening by our government.

• Cash for Clunkers

A recent example would be the government’s 2009 Cash for Clunkers program, where the government has paid people money for their old cars so that those people will spend the money on a new car. The idea was that because people were tending to keep their cars longer, their cars had to be junked in order for them to buy new ones to stimulate economic growth in the automobile industry that we had just spent billions bailing out.

The old models turned in were then junked (to be fair, some were sold for parts, but the value was negligible). So the government literally broke a bunch of windows (along with the rest of the cars) to artificially stimulate job growth.

The liberals hail this, and plans like it, as a fantastic way to stimulate job growth. Except that

• GM and Chrysler failed on their own accords. Giving handouts to failing businesses just teaches businesses that they can be as irresponsible as they want since they’ll just be bailed out every time. It’s basically corporate welfare.
• The old cars still had value. They got their owners from point A to B and were still reasonably reliable. So the government destroyed items that had value to create… value.
• The money spent on new cars people didn’t need yet was money that could have been invested elsewhere. Maybe people were saving to buy a new car in the future. Maybe they were saving for something else. Just because someone else was employed by the destruction of someone else’s car doesn’t mean that there was necessarily any real net gain.

Manipulating wealth by destroying value to create value is not sound. The liberals seem to equate savings to money lost. Sure, money in savings isn’t stimulating the economy at that moment, but suppose the shop owner in the parable had been putting money into savings to invest back into his company in the future to create jobs – even to build additions to his building, requiring the work of glaziers for more windows – but now that he has to spend savings on a new window, he has less to invest into the business.

And as long as we’re destroying things to create wealth, why stop at just the window? Why not destroy entire homes!? Why not go nuts and bomb entire cities!? Which leads me to my next point:

• War

It’s no surprise that war creates jobs. This is why our politicians have decided to funnel so much money into the military. And it’s not even just the liberals in the White House. Some of our very own are buying into the scheme under the guise of “national security.” Please, our nation is plenty secure. We spend more on our military than the next 8 super powers combined. National security my ass. Something else is at play.

For one, part of why we spend so much more than other nations is because according to NATO, all allied nations have to contribute 2% of their GDP into their respective militaries. Well, since much of Europe doesn’t believe in that rule apparently, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to spend more on a bigger military to compensate for those poor nations. How nice of us.

But then we also create conflicts overseas by funding rebels of various countries. This practice is great for our economy though! American firearms manufacturers see more work; military supplies contractors stay gainfully employed. We’re creating so many jobs… by funding terrorists.

Hell, we even go above and beyond the call of duty by funding military supplies we don’t even need! In 2014, we spent $120 million on Abrams tanks for the army that army generals repeatedly said they had no use for (and it’s in particularly been pushed by two Ohio senators. The tanks are manufactured in Ohio. Go figure).

We’ve added $1.33 billion in our recent budget on 11 F-35’s – a stealth plane that’s already years past its due date and riddled with systematic problems. $1.33 billion on planes we can’t even use yet. Proponents of the expenditure claim that we’ve already spent too much on the project over the past several years to quit now. A gambler’s fallacy if I’ve ever heard one.

I could go on and on with examples. Just last year we spent $640 million on a ship in Mississippi for the Coast Guard that the Coast Guard assured us we don’t need (Mississippi senator Thad Cochran was the main advocate of this bill). The same year, $1 billion was allocated to build a Naval ship in Maine that the Navy never did ask for (Maine senator Susan Collins pushed this bill). We’re keeping numerous bases open that serve no real purpose.

And of course with all the destruction of cities in the Middle East, our great nation is able to hire so many American contractors to deploy and rebuild those cities.

With our treating of excessive military spending and funding rebels to destroy places so we can build them back up, I’d hate to see what would happen if peace were to ever break out.

Bastiat used the term “Sisyphism” to describe such systematic destroying value to create value, named after the Greek titan Sisyphus who was punished by being forced to roll a boulder up a hill, only for it to fall back down, causing him to have to start back over rolling the boulder back up (only for it to fall again) for all of eternity. But hey, according to the liberals, at least Sisyphus will always be employed!

The “Free Market”

The free market isn’t a thing that’s ever truly existed in America, and the market has only shifted further and further away from the notion of being free. We make start-up costs for businesses super high, and this mainly affects small businesses.

Up until recently, Louisiana required florists to pay thousands of dollars for classes and state licensing before they could legally sell flowers (it physically pains me to write this). Beautician licenses are required just for braiding hair for profit in some states. It’s illegal to sell lemonade on your own property without having a vender’s license, business license, filing business taxes, etc.

You need licenses and registrations for just about everything. If you want to hire employees, that’s yet another license. Want to open up a bar? Not with the price of liquor licenses you don’t. It’s a wonder anyone starts up small businesses anymore. If we got rid of these licenses and regulations and people were allowed to engage in free exchange among consenting individuals, more people could sell items and services, open up small businesses, and hire more employees. Talk about stimulating the economy.

But the government doesn’t believe in the people’s ability to control the economy themselves without falling to disaster, so the government has taken over control of industries by artificially driving economies by a host of means – to include, ironically, disaster.

They claim all these regulations are to protect the consumer and employees. But the best regulator of businesses is the consumer. The government requires so much red tape to get anything done. Meanwhile, if the consumer finds that your product isn’t safe or friendly or whatever, then they stop doing business with you immediately.

In the words of L.N. Smith, “Every dollar you spend . . . or don’t spend . . . is a vote you cast for the world you want.” Except that even if you don’t spend your money in certain ways, the government will just bail out those failures and find ways to force – or “incentivize” – you to spend money at those businesses. And if too many votes – or dollars – are cast to businesses who are doing too well, the government will punish them.

The government tries to make everything about equality. But equality can’t be artificially created. It won’t be respected then. The economy is an organic living and breathing thing. The success and failure of businesses is evolution at play. The things that work stick around, while the things that don’t go away. It’s survival of the fittest. But not when the government intervenes. We’re not livestock. We can’t just be herded a certain way. But then if that is what’s happening, I suppose we can be after all.

So… Are We Already Socialist?

Is the US a socialist state? This is a tricky question. In socialism, every business is owned by the state and everyone is employed, since the state can open as many jobs in public businesses to accommodate everyone, whether their job is particularly useful or not.

One could argue that when the US bails out businesses that they have a stake in that company. After all, the Obama administration used the automobile bail out as leverage to get the companies on board with certain emissions practices, and the government had the businesses as collateral until they paid it off.

The US government also owns some other public industries, as well as funds industries that are run by private entities so as not to give the impression of being socialist. The government artificially manipulates the economy, seeking to even out the playing field, even if it means stifling business. The government spreads wealth amongst individuals so that everyone has what they need, regardless of whether they provide anything useful back to the system or not.

Socialism might look great on paper; everyone is employed and everyone is more-or-less classless and equal. But in practice, certain executives running certain enterprises (private or public even) might have ties to certain public officials. Connections such as these may allow their enterprise to grow at the expense of others, all while being funded by we, the tax payers. At the same time though, their profits are all theirs to keep.

So we, the people, get to fund their businesses while seeing nothing in return, and they get to keep whatever profit they make. This is the worst kind of socialism, and it leads the public to have negative views of businesses and of business people. They don’t realize that this sort of crony capitalism only exists because of socialism.

While this is going on, the working class becomes more and more complacent. Why try when the nanny state is going to take care of you? Even if you are so inherently inclined, why try to succeed when the state is just going to shut down your every attempt? After all, in socialist America, one person’s destruction is another person’s value.

References

Pew Research Center. “Little Change in Public’s Response to ‘Capitalism,’ ‘Socialism’”. http://ift.tt/20aGGOF

The Washington Post. “A majority of millennials now reject capitalism, poll shows”. http://ift.tt/1SxzEht

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). “Trends in world military expenditure, 2014”. http://ift.tt/1IeZz9G

Military.com. “Pentagon Tells Congress to Stop Buying Equipment it Doesn’t Need”. http://ift.tt/15WKUC8

Institute for Justice. “Louisiana Florists (new challenge)”. http://ift.tt/2ioQyZ1

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Shmoocon 2017: On Not Reverse Engineering Through Emulation

Right now, I’m at Shmoocon, and it’s living up to all expectations. That’s a tall order — last year, the breakout talk was from [Travis Goodspeed] on his efforts to reverse engineer the firmware for a cheap Chinese radio. Four people in the room for that talk last year bought the radio on Amazon, and now there’s a legitimate open source project dedicated to building firmware and tools to support this radio.

Now that [Travis] has a few compatriots working on firmware for this radio, he has the same challenges as any other team. The project needs unit tests, and this isn’t easy to do when all the code is locked up inside a radio. Instead of setting up an entire development platform based around a cheap radio, [Travis] came up with a toolchain that’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Instead of reverse engineering the firmware for this radio, he’s simply emulating the ARM firmware on the desktop. Development is quick and easy, and he has the live demos to prove it.

The heart of the Tytera radio in question is an STM32F405. This is a pretty common part, and thanks to [Travis]’ work last year, he has all the firmware that ships on this radio. This doesn’t mean he has access to all the radio’s capabilities, though; there’s a black box in the code somewhere that translates .wav files to radio packets and back again. Open sourcing this would usually mean reverse engineering, but [Travis] had a better idea.

Instead of reverse engineering the entire radio, [Travis] is using QEMU to emulate an ARM microcontroller on his desktop, run the relevant code, and completely ignore any actual reverse engineering. Since this radio is already jailbroken and the community has a pretty good idea of where all the functions and subroutines are in the firmware, the most difficult part of pulling this trick off is setting up QEMU.

As a proof of concept, [Travis] downloaded raw AMBE packets from the radio to his laptop. These were then sent through the emulated radio, producing raw audio that was then converted into a .wav file. Effectively, a black box in this radio was emulated, which means [Travis] doesn’t need to know how the black box works.

All the code for this weird emulation / unit test, as well as everything the community has released for this radio is available on the GitHub. A lot of work has gone into the jailbreaking, reverse engineering, and emulation efforts here, making this radio somewhat ironically one of the most open radios you can buy.

Filed under: cons, radio hacks

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