Civil War Re-enactors
http://www.millermobley.com

Colourised photographs by Sanna Dullaway
http://www.retronaut.co

A Global Portrait of Red Tape
http://www.brainpickings.org

Scouting An Abandoned Cold War Missile Base
http://www.scoutingny.com

Driving Inside the Soviets’ Secret Submarine Lair
http://www.wired.com

China Turns Soviet Aircraft Carrier Into Hotel
http://www.wired.com

Audio Inputs: Two XLR inputs, which is great, but no phantom power. To me it seems pointless to offer XLRs without phantom power. And those inputs should also offer channel switching so either channel 1 or 2 can be routed to both channels. My DVX100 use to do this and it was a great feature I used all the time. Maybe the Digital Bolex will do this via software?
HDMI Outputs: Needed for an external LCD monitor. I think there is an adaptor that allows you to do this, but there should be a dedicated jack for a standard HDMI or HDMI mini cable.
Ergonomics: To be perfectly honest, I never really liked the way my old 16mm Bolex felt in my hands. The only saving grace was the brick-like weight. Some of the old super 8 camera makers made cameras that felt wonderful in the hand, like Eumig and Nizo. Not a big deal though, since I shot using a stabilizer rig a lot these days.

Of course the cost of the Digital Bolex won’t be cheap when they finally start building them. Sounds like they will be in the $3k neighborhood, which isn’t all that bad considering a Canon D5 Mark II DSLR runs about the same. I still have a bunch of great c-mount lens, so this camera is totally something I would love to have. But I’m not sure I’m ready to make that kind of investment for my minimal documentary work. If the audio options are improved and if an HDMI jack is added, I might consider a stretch for the camera though.

Minimax: As mentioned above, this is a Mini Moog emulation. It’s a nice sounding clone, although nobody would likely mistake this for the real thing since it sounds pretty sterile. As with all the plugins, there are two digital effects that can be applied to a plugin and those are limited to delay and chorus. Unfortunately, nearly all of the presets have effects applied to them. I went through and turned the effects off for all of the sounds and resaved, since I felt they really detracted from the overall punch of the Plugiator. Here’s what a I really like about the Minimax plugin though: polyphony! The real Mini Moog is single voice, meaning; only one key can be played at a time. The Minimax doesn’t have this limitation, so you can play chords, so it’s more like a Poly Moog or Memory Moog.

B4000: This is a pretty weak imitation of the Hammond B-3, but it also doesn’t sound terrible in its own right. I typically use it for dirty organ sounds by running it through a distortion preset in one of my effects boxes.

Lightwave: I use to have an Ensoniq SQ-R, which was a hardware synth from the ’80s. This plugin reminds me a lot of this old synth. The Lightwave is not really a wavetable synth like my Korg Wavestation, which is a disappointment, but like the SQ-R, the Lightwave has a bunch of waveforms you can select for the four oscillators with all sorts of modulation options. It’s an extremely fun plugin to play around with, but I haven’t programmed any fantastic sounds with it yet, which was also true of my old SQ-R. I think I just need to spend some more time with this plugin.

Pro-12: Being someone who has never used a Prophet 5, I can’t say the Pro-12 is a good emulation. This plugin sounds great though — once the annoying effects are disabled. I really like some of the bass presets the plugin came with. Haven’t had a chance to try my hand at programming completely new sounds, but I think this will be a pretty useful plugin. This one did cost extra money and was not included in the module I purchased. How could this plugin be better? An arpeggiator would be nice. And a spring reverb option would be nice for this, and any of the other plugins.

One of the great things about the Plugiator is there are no latency issues — something that can be a complete nightmare with VSTs running on a laptop or on the Muse Receptor. Latency is related to the time someone hits a key to when the sound plays. In some VST plugins, you have to reduce the number of notes you can play to get acceptable latency. No worries of that with the Plugiator, which is great. One of the things that really sucks about the Plugiator is the unclear process required to purchase additional plugins, like the Pro-12 I downloaded. The software that comes with the Plugiator also includes a connection to the Use Audio online store where plugins can be purchased. My expectation is once you complete the transaction via PayPal, the needed activation codes would show-up in the interface. Not so in my case. It took multiple emails to Use Audio support before I was able to install the plugin in the module. This should be seamless and simple, but was anything but. Because of this, I would caution anyone considering buying a Plugiator since Use Audio seems a bit scattered and possibly not long for this world (the Creamware curse). Unlike some other small companies I’ve dealt with, Elektron back when I had my Sid Station comes to mind, Use Audio is not very responsive. And they don’t seem to offer any user forums. Hell, it doesn’t even look like they’ve updated their website in the past couple of years. Even the modest Meeblip synth is better supported. On the plus side, the physical construction of the Plugiator is quite nice. The rotary knobs are solid and don’t feel cheap and the all the audio connections are heavy duty. I’ve lugged my Plugiator back-and-forth between work and home and it’s held up well.

Celebrity Yearbook
http://www.retronaut.co

10 Super-Nerdy Snow Sculptures
http://digitallife.today.msnbc.msn.com

China’s Deserted Fake Disneyland
http://finance.yahoo.com

Jaffa Apartment
http://www.thecoolist.com

A City on Rails
http://gizmodo.com

Sofia and Varna Air Traffic Control
http://www.airliners.net

The only other time I experienced a significant earthquake was in 2001, when the office building I was working in shook pretty hard from a quake in Washington. That quake was probably more like the one folks experienced out on the East Coast.

On a recent trip to central Oregon I made a detour to Christmas Valley to visit the former Over-the-Horizon Backscatter (OTH-B) radar site — one of the last Cold War installations in Oregon. This first required permission from the US Bureau of Land Management and the Oregon Military Department, who were kind enough to allow me to explore the site. Most Oregonians have probably never heard about the AN/FPS-118 (the official Air Force designation) radar installation in Christmas Valley. The system actually had three components: the transmitter site here in Oregon, a receiver site in Tule Lake California, and an operations center at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. All three sites were connected by satellite. A similar OTH-B radar existed in Maine to serve the East Coast. At the Oregon site, there are really three separate radar installations arranged in a sort of half-moon pattern facing west. Each has wood fencing surrounding the massive 460 acre perimeter and cyclone fencing around a power station, water tank, and the lone pole-barn style building. The operation center in Mountain Home processed all the data from the three West Coast radars. If something looked suspicious, interceptor aircraft would be dispatched to in investigate.

Funding for the West Coast site was authorized by Congress between 1986 and 1988. Construction was completed in December of 1990 at a cost of over $300 million. In 1991, plans were on track to turn the West Coast site over to the Air Force’s Tactical Air Command for official operation. However, with the ending of the Cold War, the Air Force decided to end activities at both the East and West Coast OTH-B radar sites and both were placed into caretaker status. In the mid ‘90s, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began using data from the Navy’s smaller and portable OTH-B radar system (AN/TPS-71). The Air Force operated the West Coast site system briefly around this time for scientific and counter narcotics purposes, but this activity stopped in 1997 due to high operating costs. Again, the system was mothballed.

So how is OTH-B radar different from conventional radar? Well, conventional radar has always been limited in range due to the curvature of the earth. OTH-B radar gets around this problem by bouncing radio signals off the ionosphere. A small part of the signal is then reflects back to the receiver, which is called “backscatter”. The range of the OTH-B radar is anywhere from 500 to 1,800 nautical miles, much further than the conventional 250 mile maximum range of a rotating radar. The one major disadvantage of both the West and East Coast sites was the fixed 60 degree coverage. In contrast, a conventional rotating radar provides a 360 degree coverage. The Soviets also had their own OTH-B radar about a decade earlier than ours and was nicknamed the “Russian Woodpecker” by shortwave radio operators. It was shut-down around 1989, possibly because it interfered with civilian radio transmissions. Currently, the only large-scale fixed OTH-B radar site is in Australia.

The Oregon site sat unused from 1997 to 2007. Metal thieves took their toll as the price for metals soared during the economic boom years. In 2007 an Oregon State Trooper pulled over Peter and Andry Sharipoff of Mount Angel who were carrying 1,500 of copper wire stolen from the site. Both, not surprisingly, were also charged with meth possession. The Air Force dismantled the massive radar arrays shortly thereafter. In 2008, Lake County began exploring ways to use the site for alternative energy production. Since power transmission lines still exist at the site, the thinking was it would be easy to install solar arrays and push power out from the three sites. As of 2011, there has been no alternative energy development at the site. The Oregon Air National Guard now uses the installation for training purposes, but there doesn’t seem to be any long term game plan for the 2,500 acres of land.

I didn’t see any activity when I visited this summer — although there were a few exterior lights on. The power station was buzzing, so juice is still flowing to the site. Overall, the buildings and fencing look to be in good shape. Of course the radar arrays are long gone, but you can still see the cement footings. I should be clear though; this is still a military site and should not be entered without permission from the Oregon Military Office and the Bureau of Land Management. I suspect there are still security systems in place around the remaining buildings, so trespassing would be a bad idea. If you would like to see the site, my suggestion is to view it from the well maintained gravel roads that ring the three installations. But there really isn’t that much to see, so I’m not sure it’s worth making a trek out to Christmas Valley unless you’re a hard-core fan of Cold War infrastructure.

So how’s the decor? It’s pretty awesome as one might expect. Lots of tikis of various sizes. Glass floats hanging from the ceiling. Just about every flat surface covered in bamboo. Tables all have tiki candle holders and tiki salt and pepper shakers. Even the menus are in the old Vic’s style. Of course the drinks are fantastic and numerous. The food is pretty spendy if you’re in the dining room, but the lounge offers cheaper, and smaller, dishes. The big advantage to being the dining room is the service, which awesome. It’s refreshing experiencing efficient and unobtrusive service in a Portland restaurant. This aspect will especially be appreciated by the older crowd, who undoubtedly are nostalgic for a time when service was more of a priority here in Portland. The food was, not surprisingly, good. Nothing shockingly adventurous and memorable, but it was exactly what one would expect from Trader Vic’s. I enjoyed the spareribs from the famous Vic’s Chinese Oven, but our Caesar salad was also really great. Entrees are crazy expensive, but that’s what you get for sitting in the dining room. Really, I imagine you’re paying a premium for the top-notch service. Overall, I’m super-excited Vic’s is back in Portland. I’ll probably be spending the next couple of years working my way through the cocktail menu.

A couple of months ago I took a trip up to North Bend, WA to explore a former AUTOVON site from the Cold War era. AUTOVON, an abbreviation of Automatic Voice Network, was a military phone system built to operate under extreme conditions, like an atomic attack. AUTOVON was world wide and during its height of operation there were sites in the UK, Asia, Central America, and the Middle East. By the early 1990s, advances in digital technology and the end of the Cold War lead to the abandonment of AUTOVON and its replacement, the Defense Commercial Telecommunications Network (DCTN). The site I visited was a switching center — possibly the only one in the Pacific Northwest — and opened in November of 1970. Some AUTOVON switching centers were underground and hardened for nuclear attack. In the case of the North Bend AUTOVON site, everything is above ground, but it looks like it was designed to ride out a nuclear exchange between the superpowers. Why do I say that? Because when I went inside the building, there is a decontamination shower just past the steel blast doors. Also, there is still a massive fresh water tank in the mechanical room. I didn’t see any sleeping quarters, but those could have been removed when the site was sold decades ago. A kitchen and bathroom facilities are still intact though. All the switching equipment was removed years ago, so there wasn’t really much to see in the operations room.

During normal Cold War operations, 17 technicians would have worked around the clock to keep the switching equipment running. This particular site would have handled all military communications for Washington, Alaska, and Idaho (and probably Oregon as well). The site was built by the Cascade Autovon Company at a cost of four million dollars and was managed by a one Larmar Gaines, the white-shirted civilian featured in the photos below. Century Link was kind enough to allow me to tour the facility and they also provide scans of the photos below. I have no idea what the future of the building will be — I think Century Link is trying to sell it though.