00:00.00 archpodnet All right welcome to the show. Everyone Paul how you doing. 00:02.46 Paul I am doing okay, um, the clock is ticking down before I head back to Iraq and I'm getting a little nervous about not just everything I have to get done before I go but also you know what the work's going to be there. But you know I keep on putting myself in these situations where I'm just a little nervous I think I like it. 00:14.61 archpodnet Ah. 00:21.56 Paul Think I like setting up a challenge and then you're rising to meet it. But let'll see this is this feels like I'm pushing myself a little hard this time Anyhow, speaking of pushing themselves. Oh yeah. 00:25.25 archpodnet Nice. Well, you've got the yet yet you've got the normal like travel jitters especially you know going halfway across the planet to another country and and then there's the whole thing About. Oh man am I bringing the right supplies for this field work. What are we going to do what what challenges are we going to encounter there I mean it's ah, there's a lot of lot of room room for anxiety So well,, that's good. Yeah. 00:51.79 Paul Um, yeah I don't get I don't get travel anxiety fortunately, so that's not part of it with me. Um, we have the equipment that we need with the exception of 1 thing so I got for the project. A. Very sophisticated flare boson thermal imaging camera and this thing is cute as a button. It's it's like it's barely bigger in any dimension than a um than a quarter. It's little itty bit thing. That's gonna we're gonna put on our drone but we also ordered from a different supplier a a custom built. 01:11.56 archpodnet Do. 01:18.75 archpodnet Ah. 01:28.64 Paul Gimbal and mount and batteries and transmitters and all that sort of stuff to go alongside it so that we can actually you know use that camera when it's up in the air and none of that stuff has arrived yet. 01:28.66 archpodnet Which is. 01:36.30 archpodnet Yeah. 01:41.42 Paul And so I have the camera and no way to actually use it. So I'm hoping that that gets here within the next week because yeah, but if if you're listening to this when it drops I'll be leaving the very next day so you know we're we're really running up against the wire here actually have I told you what we were playing to do with these thermal cameras. 01:45.92 archpodnet Ah. 01:55.29 archpodnet Wow I don't yeah, don't think we've talked about the thermal cameras yet. 02:00.79 Paul You might be interested. Yeah, so um, the site that we're at Laga I should say yeah, it's a very broad flat tell site with not a lot of time depth to it in that most of the site if you look at the the shirts that are on the site. Most of them are of the early dynastic. 02:19.57 archpodnet Um. 02:19.67 Paul Period in Iraq in mesotamia and um and when you look at the site from the air you can actually see a lot of very of architecture that's buried just just below the surface so ancient architecture and. 02:33.95 archpodnet Okay. 02:35.57 Paul Um, and you can get a lot of the sense of the buildings there the City wall The yeah, the neighborhoods the the the plan more or less the layout of how the city is put together and so we want to use this thermal imaging to use alongside other kinds of techniques. So. 02:46.16 archpodnet And. 02:55.45 Paul You know we have some visual imagery photographic and we're going to get some more in the spring I was there last in the fall and it was very dry and so it was kind of Crusty. The surface of the site and you couldn't see much of this buried architecture when we're in the Spring. It's going to be wetter. So we're hoping to have better visualization of of. That period architecture but that we're also are going to throw other things at it. So The first one that we're going to do is this thermal imaging to see if we can if that highlights them in any Way. We also have plans down the road to do magnetomemetry ands resistivity to also get at where the architecture is on this site. So. 03:22.70 archpodnet Um. 03:30.83 archpodnet Okay. 03:32.53 Paul You know it's It's one of a suite of things. So got this the camera again and don't have the gimbal and don't have the mounting hardware and don't have the transmitter and don't have the battery. Ah. 03:42.30 archpodnet Yeah. 03:44.29 Paul So I think I'm a little nervous about that in terms of equipment and then the other thing is just that you know it's a big project and I'm going to be there for five months and there's been family stuff that's gone on in the meantime that has kept me very distracted and yeah, there's going to be a lot a lot to do. 03:57.63 archpodnet Um, wait did you say five months ah I was like when did that change. Ah. 04:02.91 Paul I probably did say five months I mean five weeks because that's how distracted I am my wife daly is is telling me about things that I that I totally missate or forget to do like we we bounce around between the city and brewster. And yeah. 04:13.55 archpodnet Ah, yeah. 04:20.17 Paul I Forget to bring the dog's food with us and so then I have to so we got back up to brewster the other day and she looked and there was um, a whole bunch of dirty dishes in the ah in the sink I was like oh yeah, along with forgetting to bring the dog's food I forgot to do the dishes. 04:25.66 archpodnet The. 04:37.84 archpodnet Nice. Yep. 04:39.31 Paul Before I left so I have list and listen lists of things that I have to do before before I go and that's probably where that anxiety is coming from just looking at that list and hoping I get through everything and don't leave piles of dirty clothes and remember to bring underwear and you know all that that important stuff. 04:49.30 archpodnet Ah, yeah. 04:55.72 archpodnet I mean you can buy underwear in Iraq I'm sure they were underwear. 04:59.17 Paul Yeah, well, we're not allowed to go anywhere without escorts. So you know our? yeah so we're going to be on the site and in the digouts and that's pretty much it. So yeah I do need to have everything I got to remember medicines and you know all the little. 05:03.44 archpodnet Oh yeah. You need to have everything. Yeah, nice. 05:17.99 Paul Piddly stuff that you always forget and always have to bring and yeah anyhow blah Blah Blah You are very experienced at traveling. So this is my segue where are you now, but. 05:21.80 archpodnet Um, well that yeah. 05:29.30 archpodnet Ah, so literally today we moved the Rv to Palm Springs California we're only here for a handful of days we're in a um rv park we have ah what's called a thousand trails membership and there's various levels of that. So the level we have we get you know free. 05:44.87 Paul So. 05:48.97 archpodnet Ah, free stays here. The caveat is if you stay here regardless of the number of days I think that's true. You have to be out for seven days before you can come back in um and your maximum stay limited is fourteen days so there's some there's some caveats there and you don't always want to be in a park here. Um like this one is pretty well cramped. Like there's pretty tight quarters as far as the yeah, the rvs goes. Um, it's the weather's beautiful. We're surrounded by ah, there's probably 400 palm trees on this park. The really tall ones like the really cool tall ones that are like one hundred and fifty feet tall those ones are super neat. Um, but otherwise yeah. 06:10.60 Paul E. 06:25.35 archpodnet But see here. The cool thing is and this leads into what I wanted to talk about first we spent the last five days I think we got there Sunday on just a ah dispersed blm camping area south of basically south of Blythe California but on the Arizona side of the Colorado River and we were camped right down in a depression off the road which so it was kind of protected right next to a little um what I want to say is probably an overflow like flood channel for the Colorado wasn't on the Colorado but it was on. You know what? what kind of looked like to me almost a manmade side channel for the Colorado right? So um. That was super cool because we hardly saw anybody we didn't leave the whole time because we filled up on gas and groceries and everything we would need water all that stuff and we just kind of hung out and and worked the week and had a had a great time. Didn't have at and t cell service Verizon was garbage sprint was kind of okay. But starlink was perfect and it was just you know it was like we were home because that's where we are when we go to the Rv where we're always home and that's one thing I I really love about this this lifestyle so but 1 thing I've noticed about the starlink. And I mentioned this before about getting into different service areas and this is an update I wanted to give from. You know, two weeks ago when we talked about this when we first got it, you know I was looking around to different service areas and and because you have to move your dish to wherever you're going and the minute you move it. if the if the system accepts that address you lose service where you're at so it's not like you can just play around. You'll lose service while you're trying to play around right? So if you don't have a backup service to to try to you know, still access the internet and then move your service back? Well, you're done like you can't do it. Um. 08:00.99 Paul E. 08:12.10 Paul You paint yourself in a corner. 08:13.71 archpodnet So there's no basically yes yeah, um, unless you have a different like a second starling account but like I mentioned before I mean that costs you money whether you have the dish or not so um, it's ah it's not really cost effective to do that. So we kind of play starlink roulette. My wife came up with that term today where we're just like shooting around trying to trying to figure out where we can get ah where we can get a cell and when I was looking this morning here in Palm Springs I looked right at the campground. Of course you always start right in the center and it didn't say there was no service which was good but it did say it was at capacity. Means there's too many people here that have starlink and starlink does have enough capacity to to cover everybody? Um, so I started looking around and I went north because there's mountain ranges just to the north of us more rural areas I went south nothing I went back West East is just more city so I didn't even try it and. 08:51.90 Paul Immune. 09:09.88 archpodnet Wasn't having any luck so I was like okay well I guess you know for a few days because we're leaving here on Saturday it's Thursday now. Um, we're not going to have starlink. Well we get here in the camp wi-fi we can't even connect to it the at and t five g is absolute garbage I had a call right when I got here and it didn't work at all. Basically. 09:27.70 Paul 3 09:28.61 archpodnet Um, our sprint isn't working very well because there's too many people here on it too many people in this area and Verizon was okay, but we don't have enough data on Verizon to really last more than you know more than probably a day and a half or so so it was like. What are we going to do and my wife is like let me see that starlink account so she just started bouncing around on Google Maps and found something I think the driving directions were like eight miles away on the point that she found so but as the crow flies. It's probably 6 or 7 and ah it bounced the address right in I was like well okay, let's try it and. Sure enough. That's what we're talking on right now with this podcast and it's working great and we're getting anywhere from it's weird. We're getting anyway. I think it's because we're outside the cell but we're getting away from 30 to 90 ah megabits per second down and anywhere from like 20 to 50 up. So. That's pretty good and when we were in phoenix this the end of last week we were actually in apache junction which is outside phoenix I did the same thing except this time I was ten miles away from the address where we were at and we still had starlink working perfectly fine for us in ah in a non-service area. The. The place where we were didn't have capacity it said no service here and yet I found a cell outside of where we were now you have no way to know where the edges of those cells are but when I was bouncing out you know, just kind of ratcheting out the the pin there trying to look at the Google plus codes and bring them in. It was about ten miles so we were that far outside of an active cell and still were able to use starlink I'm very encouraged by that. So that's pretty awesome. yeah yeah I mean it's it really is allowing we we were I mean I have a new client and they're in. 11:04.84 Paul Um, good good. Well I'm glad it's working for you. 11:15.20 archpodnet They're in Belgium and they have people on the call that are in the Philippines and Australia and the only thing that worked for everybody except for me was we have meetings 4 times a week ah for 2 hours each meeting and it's at ten zero p m for me ten p M to midnight so so because of that I was like man I was already starting to look around before we got the starling to work I was like ah there's no way it's going to work here I have to screen share. We have video turned on like is there? no way. It's going to work and I was already like okay Starbucks leaves their wi-fi on overnight mcdonald's leaves their wi-fi on overnight even though they're 24 hours most of the time. So. It's a great source of wi-fi. Because nobody's using it and it's pretty high speed and I'm like where am I going to sit in the car and do this meeting at ten o'clock at night. But now that we have the starlink work and it's ah it's much better. So and that leads me to another update that we got from a listener. Ah and and. 11:55.36 Paul Me here. 12:11.90 archpodnet Had already looked because we weren't getting starlek service here. We're going to be in Visia California next week if you're listening to this in real time and you're at the society for California archeology meetings because this will be day one on the day that this podcast releases then stop on by the wild note booth Rachel and I are running the wild note booth for the whole. Ah, conference and you know we'd love to talk to you and and even just say hi even if you're not interested in wildnote just come on and say hi and ah you know if you're a podcast fan or something like that. So we'd love to talk to you but we're staying at the a campground near viceia and I'd already moved the service there. But I was getting a nice little red bar across the top that says we're experiencing degraded service in this area and are currently exploring the issues or investigating the issue or something like that and I had to wonder is it related to what I talked about last time with the forty starlink satellites that were deorbited because of the solar flare I don't know. I don't know if that's why they have degraded service there or not because I know they were all kind of in the same area because solar flares are relatively targeted but I wasn't ah I wasn't absolutely sure which leads me again to 1 of our frequent and appreciated commenters James. He always. 13:12.76 Paul Hey. 13:25.33 archpodnet Sends me emails about the episodes and he's just got such great, insightful things to say that I always look forward to his email to you know I was I don't always get a chance to respond to timely fashion James but I do read them and I very much appreciate them. But he's got you know he's got expertise that tells him. What the answers are and when I mentioned that the solar flare hit the satellites and I think we alluded to the fact that it was probably radiation or something that burned them up and then they deorbited I'm not sure if I actually said that but I also didn't really know what actually did it. But what James said is that the solar flare comes in these are low earth orbit satellites so they're pretty close to the atmosphere. And what he said is the atmosphere actually gets super heated by a solar flare expands like heated things. Do anytime you heat something up. It expands. Um and the atmosphere expanded and basically I think I'm saying this right? James they it encompassed the satellites or got close enough to them. That it added ah dramatically to their drag and and drug them basically back into the atmosphere. So their atmosphere basically reached out grabbed the satellites and pulled them back in That's the best I can do and I think I got that right? Ah so I know right? yeah. 14:35.15 Paul It's a nice visual. Ah. 14:38.70 archpodnet So I didn't even know that was possible but when you think about it it it has to be possible right? So it's ah it's really neat the way physics works like that. But um, yeah, anyway, so I think I just wanted to give you that update real quick and I wanted I want to mention something else that you know we don't really have time to talk about on this episode. Ah, but we'll finish out this segment talking about it back in June July Something like that. Um I saw and I think it was I think it was on indiegogo I get that mixed up with kickstarter but I saw this thing for augmented reality glasses now I've seen various augmented reality glasses come down the line before. 15:08.00 Paul Um, live it. 15:16.70 archpodnet But these ones just looked cool. Um, like even when you're not using the the camera features they're just like look like futuristic sunglasses and I was like well that's super neat. So. I I put down the money for them because I think they were going to end up being like 103 like $500 something like that. But it was like two fifty or something on the early bird indiegogo so called it a business purchase for research purposes and said let's do this and I finally got them about a week and a half ago because they were super delayed. Um, it's a chinese company. It's not just an american company or something that's having cheap labor in China it's legit a chinese company. Um and they were just they were having some issues with ah supply chain like everybody else is and then issues with shipping and getting everything out because they were supposed to deliver in like December but didn't actually deliver until mid-february. So. But now that I've got them I can report on it a little bit I didn't get because I was actually too early for this I didn't get the little box that they have that you can actually you plug the glasses into this little box it develops a wifi and then you can connect your phone to that and then see your phone on the on the screen. That's. Phone usages primarily how they they promote these augmented reality glasses because um, oh and I'll have a link to these in the show notes. It's called rocket air r ok id air. That's the name of the glasses I'll put a link to these in the in the notes so you can go check it out but the interesting thing is first off they don't have a battery internal to them. Um. They don't work at all unless they're plugged in to a usbc cord and that usbc cord has to be able to handle video I know it's a little weird. It's like it's not like you're just using these out on the street although they do show people doing that. Um, but what they what they're really intended for is Android users and there's a list of about 15 Android phones that they're actually. 16:48.80 Paul To. 17:05.91 archpodnet Ah, been tested with I'm sure they would work on some others but they've been tested with like 15 different Android phones and you download the rocket air app and then that app. Um, first off they have a store that probably doesn't have anything in it yet. But it's going to have augmented reality apps inside of it. There is some augmented reality functions which means you you have basically an overlay on what you're seeing in the world but to be honest, mostly what it looks like is just a screen in front of your face. That's if it's like if you were to take the the opacity and drop it down to about 80%. You can kind of see through it depending on what you're looking at um. 17:37.39 Paul Is it. 17:39.62 archpodnet But it's basically just a screen in front of you that is mirroring the screen that's in your hands. Um, and I think there's going to be more functionality, especially if I can get the rocket air app to work because we do have an Android phone here for testing wild. No things and I can't get it to work very well on there. It's got some issues so I got to figure that out. But um, otherwise I have had great success using this on my computer because the lenses are actually kind of small and I'm able to look under them really easily when it's sitting on my face I could just glance down and I can see pretty much whatever I want so I've actually used these. As a second screen for my laptop which it's less cumbersome than the oculus quest because that's all encompassing like I'm totally immersed but exactly right? but with these I can just use them as a second screen plug it straight into the usbc on my on my laptop. 18:21.48 Paul Yeah, that's what I was going to ask about. 18:32.56 archpodnet And then go to my display preferences I didn't think it was going to work at first because it it was auto defaulting to mirroring and I was like okay so it's the same screen but then I went in and just unchecked mirroring and I was able to basically take the rocket display and put it over the top of the laptop display and then I could see just fine. So I've been doing that and it's been. Phenomenal I really like it. The clarity is good and it's just been really fun to use so pretty much kills the segment doesn't it. Yeah all right? Well with that. Maybe we can comment on that on the other side but otherwise we are going to head straight into talking about something. 18:59.13 Paul Um, yeah. 19:10.90 archpodnet Feel like I've been mentioning for I don't know 5 6 seven years now which is identifying features and other things using drone imagery we'll be back in a minute.