The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

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#36 – Big Business Buffoonery

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No guests this week, but lots of rants and items! Suggest future guests you’d like to hear either in the comments section or on the Suggestions Page.

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  1. Finaly!! I was waiting for the new amphour biting my nails about the site going down! Fortunately Dave worked his database magic and everything worked out nicely.
    I’m downloading it now! kudos to both, and I’ll be back with my thoughts after hearing it.

  2. Yea I’m glad you called Hack-a-day out on that. They of all people should be supporting “hackers” – not talking advantage of them.

    BTW – Hack-a-day is owned by the multi-millionaire Jason Calacanis. Him and Hack-a-day have plenty of money.

    They really should be ashamed of themselves.

  4. Hi Dave and Chris I have been listening to your show since episode one, i’m definitely hooked. I have added a link to my blog (not that i get many visitors ;))

    I have a couple of suggestions for solving your issues with doing episodes with more than two people so please e-mail me at the address provided.

    I did notice that your pages carry the “Valid XHTML” link but clicking it shows you that the page is /not/ valid according to w3.

    http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theamphour.com%2F2011%2F03%2F28%2Fthe-amp-hour-36-big-business-buffoonery%2F

    Cant wait till next week!

  5. Thanks for the LCR meter mention guys! The lily remains ungilded. At the end of the article I said I was going to go back to the original AD5933 design with just a couple of additions to allow it to measure low impedances and to broaden the frequency range to measure at audio frequencies. Then I will see what the real-world limitations are and if I really need a different design – my gut feeling is that the simple design will be absolutely fine.

    I will be publishing the circuit schematic and PCB, but as it is very much work in progress it will be a matter of builder beware. No guarantee that version 1 will work!

    The vector network analyser is still an on-going project and not yet at PCB stage.There is a huge amount to write up about that, just not enough hours in the day to do it!

  6. I don’t see why TAH(TheAmpHour) should exclude “bad names”, I personally don’t really care if Dave yells “Bloody wanker” or whatever its a part of the show! Keep it up and keep ranting! 😀

    • I think I’ve heard Chris state his intention that the show content be appropriate for most electronics students, including the younger ones.

  7. Hey Guys!! I’ve been listening to the podcast and it was excellent as allways! I’m also pissed off with the Hack a Day thing, because I regularly follow the site and is quite good, and this thing kinda goes against the hackey aspect of it.
    Jason Calacanis also owns ThisWeekIn wich has a fair amount of good shows, among them “This Week in Comedy” and “The Kevin Pollack’s Chat Show”, for the lastone they tried to make the people pay a fair ammount to watch and it backfired badly.
    Anyways I would take Dave’s phrase and ask Jason Calacanis his pay pal address to send him a dollar, but he’s quite wealthy so I’ll just tell the mad greek to buy himself a clue with his own money!.

  9. Hey guys thanks for the mention! I’m in it for the money and fame!! HA HA! I’m doing it as a kind of protest yes, AND to draw some attention to my talents. My goal is to get hired as a prototyper some time in the next year. I reckon showing off my stuff on Hack A Week can’t hurt, and maybe a few folks will get some education out of it.

    Keep up the good – work- work – work… 🙂
    Dino

    • > My goal is to get hired

      Then I have a suggestion for you.

      Drop that black underground/ghetto style of your website. I don’t see the point in copying hack-a-day in that regard.

      Be nice to your readers and potential employers, make the page easy to read and forget about hack-a-day’s fake underground, fake misfits, fake amateurish, fake script kiddies, fake pirate website.

  10. I have at least 4 or 5 EE-major friends who will be working at big banks this summer. Granted, they’re doing statistical analysis stuff, but still not EE. Makes me sad 🙁

  13. Calacanis is pushing the “quality contextual videos” concept recently as a guard against Googles moves against aggregated content sites. He has certain philosophies about the sort of opportunity he’s presenting here. He would say you aren’t anyone but this channel might make you someone. He would say the position is the gift and the salary is the ribbon.
    $30,000 – $40,000 for a greybeard retiree hacker sounds like good money for a retirement pastime. It also sounds reasonable for a dropout who didnt like school/uni but had skills and ideas. It’s crap money for a tech/engineer who’s used to better money and has kids in school, bills to pay etc.
    Hmm is there an analog for “greybeard” that’s applicable to women?

    JD

  15. An Engineering Mind was my favorite YouTube channel for a long time. Todd losing that to NI who basically let it die is just sad and totally changes my opinion of NI. What a waste. Todd did do one really cool video since his move to Edmund Optics…some kind of Rube Goldberg snow maker IIRC.

    • Yep, I thought he was hilarious too. I was highly doubtful that he was really an engineer though. I mean, the way he spoke to Dr. Kaku really made me think he was putting on a show and pretending to be an engineer.

      Well, I looked him up in our database and the truth is, he works for marketing! *GASP* Nonetheless, I find his videos totally hilarious. I should have got an autograph before he left.

      • Actually, NI never really let “An Engineering Mind” die. Todd left the company, and a bunch of us have been working on where to go from there. It’s been several months, but we’re preparing to roll out new episodes. We’ve got a new season planned out — the videos are going to look very different, and of course we don’t have Todd, who was really, really funny.
        The new season starts Monday, April 11. Hope you can check us out!

  16. I almost forgot…Dave! I feel your pain! Savage Circuits TV has been very difficult to shoot for awhile bcause I have two dogs on each side of my house (rental). They bark all day long at nothing…the owners won’t do anything about it and just leave them out there all day every day. It’s hard when you’re trying to talk and there’s 1-4 dogs barking over your voice. =(

    • I Caught that one but didn’t comment in the hope he’d got away with it…. it would appear not! Just as well he lives in Ozz Lol

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