[GTALUG] I’m obviously way behind in my reading: IBM owns Redhat

[Russell Reiter]

On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 12:56 PM El Fontanero via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

> On 2020-05-27 12:39 p.m., Russell Reiter via talk wrote:
>
>
> I also had a weird experience when I used a line adapter to plug a guitar
> into the line in and play out the speakers. After I defined the loopback
> device for pulse audio I'm not sure what it was but, when I adjusted the
> potentiometers on the guitar for base, treble and volume, I seemed to be
> able to tune in an audio broadcast channel and got that signal out the
> speakers. I know it was a broadcast, I heard it clearly, it was a one sided
> conversation, but in a language I don't know.
>
> The guitar has big coils: the circuit has high impedances, and in the case
> of a connection to a regular audio line input, it's not optimally
> terminated.  And bingo, an impromptu radio receiver.  We used to hear a HAM
> radio operator key up transmission through our subwoofer. You could see his
> antenna rising up over the houses a block over.
>
>
> Thanks for that explanation. You read about weird edge case RF stuff like
that but unless you actually experience it for yourself, it can be hard to
sort out the source of the issue.


> So my thought was to get an audio breakout to usb via the Thunderspy port,
> but that would defeat the purpose of using the Realtek codec features of
> the board. What I really need is a good quality junction between the guitar
> phono I/O and the computers stereo line-in.
>
> Guitar in to a mic preamp is not as exciting but is fairly clean.  From
> there you can go to line level with impunity.
>
I had a look around for non usb direct input hw. The ones with the 3.5mm
output are a couple of hundred bucks. The direct phono jack adapter and
cable I used with 3.5mm connections at both ends cost about ten all total.
The sound is clean enough, but the mechanical connection causes a lot of
static. The fittings don't match to high enough tolerances and the cord
jiggles the connection too much when I play it.

Reminds me of when I was ten and built a crystal radio. I was disappointed
that I could only tune in one station, 1050 CHUM AM, the closest one to my
house.

Looks like I accidentally anachronistically recreated CFRB (Canada's First
Rogers Battery) using a two thousand dollar Linux solid state home computer
system, a forty dollar electric guitar and cheap ebay audio fittings and
cables, although I'm pretty sure that wasn't CFRB I was tuning in.

https://torontoist.com/2012/12/toronto-invents-the-batteryless-radio/

>
> Linux, Linux, Linux. There. :-)
>
>
> Cheers,
> Mike
>
>
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-- 
Russell
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