(via DIGG.COM) Congressman Pete Stark represents California, but where is he paying taxes?

Congress loves to tax us but when it comes to paying taxes themselves, well that’s another matter…

See also this information at Bloomberg.com.

(Ed Note: This is usually a tech blog but since I used to live in California and now live in Maryland this egregious silliness really yanked my chain. Thanks to The 912 Project website for alerting us to this. Maryland tax authorities are looking into Stark’s “primary residence” and I hope they consider criminal charges.

Californians, your esteemed Congressman claims he lives in Maryland full time? What is this politician doing representing you eh? If you really want Stark take him home please!)

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The modern day pirate doesn’t sport a patch or walk with a limp. His weapon of choice is an unassuming pizza-sized satellite dish that can literally harpoon signals from space – and provide lucrative and illicit profit.

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Researchers at the University of Cincinnati have successfully developed a nano-antenna which transmits both AM and FM radio signals. Carbon nanotubes have already proven their special “abilities” and now the Cincinnati researchers have discovered new applications for this revolutionary material.

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Marian Merritt writes, “Teens believe taking and sharing the sexy photo of themselves is a natural progression point in a romantic relationship. It’s not just step 1, hold hands; step 2, kiss. Now it’s step 1, friend on social network; step 2, chat on IM or text; 3, send sexy photos. Crazy!” Chuck talks about what can be done to stop this practice.

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AT&T announced plans on Tuesday to add approximately 3,000 jobs in 2009 in order to support customer demand in its wireless, broadband and video businesses.

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It
’s a good news for blind and visually impaired, a new service for the blind and visually impaired is annouced by Verizon Wireless today, which is called Talks. Talks is a new assistive technology that converts displayed text into highly intelligible speechconverts on-screen text into speech so the visually impaired will know what is on the

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The new Wacom nextbeat is a music controller which lets both professional and casual digital dee-jays finesse their tunes in about any way imaginable – even from the middle of the dance floor. That
’s because the nextbeat features a unique docking wireless control pod which lets you roam and control sounds loaded onto the nextbeat base station.

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With much of the mobile world yet to migrate to 3G mobile communications, let alone 4G, European researchers are already working on a new technology able to deliver data wirelessly up to 12.5Gb/s.

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I think this is very interesting listening. Boring for some exciting for others. Listen to lightning and other electromagnetic Earth related stuff on Nasa’s INSPIRE VLF radio receiver located in Huntsville, AL. You will need RealPlayer or WinAmp. Quicktime link too. This is what the Nasa page says you will hear:

“You can hear sferics, tweeks, whistlers and other VLF radio sounds at any time of the day, but the hours around dawn and dusk are generally best. Nighttime is also better than daytime. In Huntsville, AL, where our online receiver is located, dawn happens at about 1200 UT and dusk is ten hours later at 2200 UT.”

The frequency in use out of the range of even some of the best low-frequency receivers. Thanks to the SpaceWeather.com website fro bringing this unique radio feed to the geeks among us.

(via Drudge & International Herald Tribune 031109) – The millions of people who use their cellphones daily to play games, download applications and browse the Web may not realize that they have an unseen companion: advertisers that can track their interests, their habits and even their location.

Ed note: A very interesting article about personal privacy for those who use smartphones.)

Read the whole story here.

It is possible to use the power of Twitter and a Twitter third party applications to enhance the radio listening hobbies. Twitter users can share listening reports more or less in real time with other radio listening enthusiasts.

There are a couple of ways this can be done. The easiest way uses keyword searches and a third party Twitter application called TweetDeck. The second is by giving a specific radio listening hobby a Twitter Hash Tag and searching for the hash tag.

When you initiate a keyword Twitter search in TweetDeck a new search results column is created. The search is saved and checked each time the application connects to Twitter. The results of a keyword search find current tweets with your keyword. Let’s say you used DX as the search term. Any Twitterer using the letters DX would appear in the search. What we do to make the search more unique is to make a search acronym unique enough that only persons interested in our hobby will use it:

FMDX FM radio station long distance listening
AMDX AM radio station long distance listening
TVDX Television long distance reception
SWLDX Short wave listening

Scanner buffs could also create unique acronyms to use in tweets that referenced their geographic area. I’m thinking that using the GPS grid square in the name would help narrow down where the listening took place. I could be MDFM18 Maryland FM18.

The hash tag method is very similar except that a has tag is preceded with this: #. Converting the above to has tags we would have:

#FMDX
#AMDX
#TVDX
#SWLDX

A complete list of hash tags in current use appears at HashTags.org

Every once in a while you find that someone has used your favorite abbreviation. GMRS is an example. I created #POPWIRE so I could add hashtags to GMRS related tweets.

A tweet has room for 140 characters. Using the #AMDX hashtag you have 135 left. A tweet might look like:

WNAV 1430 1600EST heavy fading #AMDX

So join me on Twitter using TweetDeck and tweet your broadcast band DX!

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