Kevin Reid's blog

A couple weekends ago, I was musing that among my electronic devices there was no radio — as in AM/FM, not WiFi and Bluetooth and NFC and etc. Of course, radio is not exactly the most generally useful of information or entertainment sources, but it still has some things to be said for it, such as being independent of Internet connections.

Another thing that came to mind was my idle curiosity about software-defined radio. So, having read that Wikipedia article, it led me to an article with a neat list of radio hardware, including frequency range, sampling rate (≈ bandwidth) and price. Sort by price, and — $20, eh? Maybe I’ll play around with this.

What that price was for was RTL-SDR — not a specific product, but any of several USB digital TV receivers built around the Realtek RTL2832U chip, which happens to have a mode where it sends raw downshifted samples to the host computer — intended to be used to provide FM radio receiving without requiring additional hardware for the task. But there's plenty of room to do other things with it.

I specifically bought the “ezTV”/“ezcap” device, from this Amazon listing by seller NooElec (who also sells on eBay, I hear) (note: not actually $20). One of the complications in this story is that different (later?) models of the same device have slightly different hardware which cannot tune as wide a frequency range. (Side note: when buying from Amazon, what you actually get depends on the “seller” you choose, not just the product listing, and as far as I know, any seller can claim to sell any product. If you see a product with mixed “this is a fake!” and “no it's not!” reviews, you're probably seeing different sellers for the same product listing.)

Of course, the point of SDR is to turn hardware problems into software problems — so I then had a software problem. Specifically, my favorite source for unixy software is MacPorts, but they have an obsolete version of GNU Radio. GNU Radio is a library for building software radios, and it is what is used by the first-thing-to-try recommendation on the Osmocom RTL-SDR page (linked above), multimode.py. The MacPorts version of GNU Radio, 3.3.0, is too old for the RTL-SDR component, which requires 3.5.3 or later. So I ended up building it from source, which took a bit of tinkering. (I'm working on contributing an updated port for MacPorts, however.)

I've had plenty of fun just using it “scanner” style, seeing what I can pick up. A coworker and friend who is into aviation posed a problem — receive and decode VOR navigation signals — which has led to several evenings of fiddling with GNU Radio Companion, and reading up on digital signal processing while I wait for compiles and test results at work. (It sort-of works!)

This is also notable as the one time in my life where a ferrite bead on a cable actually did something — putting one on the computer end of the USB extension cord noticeably reduced the noise level. (And, of course, there remains a large, metallic hardware problem: antennas!)

(I could say more, such as the detailed fiddling to build GNU Radio, and various useful links, but it's taken me long enough to get around to writing this much. Let me know if you'd like me to expand on any particular technical details.)

Whoa. They even called it a powerbox as we do.

Apple has chosen to solve this problem by providing heightened permissions to a particular class of actions: those explicitly initiated by the user. Lion includes a trusted daemon process called Powerbox (pboxd) whose job is to present and control open/save dialog boxes on behalf of sandboxed applications. After the user selects a file or directory into which a file should be saved, Powerbox pokes a hole in the application sandbox that allows it to perform the specific action.

— Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: the Ars Technica review

It probably ain't capabilities (no bundling of designation of the resource with authority to access it, unless they've replaced file pathnames, which I doubt), but it's a big step in a good direction. UPDATE: Ivan Krstić says “The implementation uses actual capabilities under the hood.”

(Link) Insufficiently known POSIX shell features by apenwarr.