When somebody stole my car last year it came back sans-radio. Well, sans everything that wasn’t literally bolted down but they still took it. Also took my head-rests as well for some reason.
I forgot if I read it here or not, but I once read how in the 1980’s at dealerships cars that came without radios were actually in higher demand than cars that came with them even at the same price point, as radios just made you a bigger target for thieves.
When I was a fleet manager in the 90s, we had three cars stolen just for the wheels. It was probably done by the same people, because they were all found upside down with all the wheels, missing. This was when alloy wheels were just becoming popular.
You guys are way too high-tech for me.
Grandma had a clothesline - metal, stretched between 2 trees. A bit corroded, it was.
I had one of those little crystal earphones.
By moving the earphone jack along the clothesline, I could pick up few stations.
Of course, it helped that we lived only a mile or two from a couple of the highest-powered radio stations in the US.
The Pi and the Arduino are just the tip of a huge and growing iceberg, but they’re the best for complete newbies precisely because they’re the ones most complete newbies are using, so they’re the ones most introductory material is centered around. Once you branch out a bit, you can buy things like the ODROID-XU4, an eight-core system with an OpenCL-compatible GPGPU for less than $100. If you have enough technical knowledge to know what I just said, you can see why this is a renaissance of hobbyist computing and electronics.
Really, whining about how Radio Shack, a specific company which largely dumped the hobbyist electronics world in favor of cell phones and finished retail electronics twenty-plus years ago, is declining isn’t so much missing the forest for the trees as it’s missing the interesting forest for a specific nearly-dead tree in a different forest altogether. It reeks of a bizarre brand fetishism, as opposed to simple pragmatism. Or, more likely, being blinded by nostalgia.
I was just watching this video on what happened to RadioShack. Hint: Doubling down on cell phones and shitty, overpriced consumer electronics is a bad move.
A diode turns alternating current into direct current.
WW II prisoners used a pencil on a razor blade to make a diode and receive radio signals. One needs a coil and an antenna also. The clothes line was an antenna, I’m not sure how the rest worked, but as you say, being close to high power radio stations helped. 
What caused you to move your head phone jack along the clothesline? :dubious:
Since it’s been 18 months since the thread started these are very slow ninjas. Perhaps they’re retired, elderly, and now sneak about with walkers and canes. Sword canes of course.