Category Archives: infrastructure

All home now

From 2007 until about a month ago, I wrote on three blogs that lived at blogs.harvard.edu. There was my personal blog (this one here, which I started after retiring my original blog), ProjectVRM‘s blog (also its home page), and Trunkline, … Continue reading

Posted in Berkman, Blogging, Harvard, infrastructure, Journalism, VRM, WordPress | 3 Comments

A look at broadcast history happening

When I was a kid in the 1950s and early 1960s, AM was the ruling form of radio, and its transmitters were beyond obvious, taking the form of towers hundreds of feet high, sometimes in clusters formed to produce directional … Continue reading

Posted in Broadcasting, Business, history, infrastructure, radio | Leave a comment

Moving on

I started this blog in August 2007 after the host for my original blog went away. (That blog has been preserved, however. Find it at http://weblog.searls.com.) At the time I was told something like “Hey, Harvard has been around since … Continue reading

Posted in Berkman, Blogging, Harvard, infrastructure | Leave a comment

FM Stations Down on Gibraltar Peak

[Update: 11:20 AM Wednesday 18 January] Well, I woke this morning to hear all the signals from Gibraltar Peak back on the air. I don’t know if the site is on generator power, or if electric power has been restored. … Continue reading

Posted in Broadcasting, california, data, infrastructure, Journalism, Santa Barbara | 1 Comment

From Hollywood Park Racetrack to SoFi Stadium

Hollywood Park Racetrack is gone. In its place is SoFi Stadium, the 77,000-seat home of Los Angeles’ two pro football teams and much else, including the 6,000-seat YouTube Theater. There’s also more to come in the surrounding vastness of Hollywood Park, … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Art, Aviation, Awesome, Business, california, data, infrastructure, Photography, Places, Technology, Travel | 4 Comments

Clearing things up

Back in 2009 I shot the picture above from a plane flight on approach to SFO. On Flickr (at that link) the photo has had 16,524 views and has been faved 420 times as of now. Here’s the caption: These … Continue reading

Posted in Friends, infrastructure, Photography, Science | Tagged , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Is there a way out of password hell?

Passwords are hell. Worse, to make your hundreds of passwords safe as possible, they should be nearly impossible for others to discover—and for you to remember. Unless you’re a wizard, this all but requires using a password manager.† Think about … Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, infrastructure, Internet, privacy, problems, security, Technology | 5 Comments

How anywhere is everywhere

On Quora, somebody asked, Which is your choice, radio, television, or the Internet?. I replied with the following. If you say to your smart speaker “Play KSKO,” it will play that small-town Alaska station, which has the wattage of a … Continue reading

Posted in infrastructure, Internet, language | Leave a comment

Social shell games

If you listen to Episode 49: Parler, Ownership, and Open Source of the latest Reality 2.0 podcast, you’ll learn that I was blindsided at first by the topic of Parler, which has lately become a thing. But I caught up fast, even getting … Continue reading

Posted in Ideas, infrastructure, Internet, problems, Research | Leave a comment

The smell of boiling frog

I just got this email today: Which tells me, from a sample of one (after another, after another) that Zoom is to video conferencing in 2020 what Microsoft Windows was to personal computing in 1999. Back then one business after … Continue reading

Posted in Business, infrastructure, Internet | Leave a comment