Aww, kinda sad about AX.25

I think my packet radio setup might be fucked by that.

I use it only as a reader, so can’t comment on notes.

As a reader, it’s great. I love that the backlight has color temperature control, so I can adjust the white/red balance depending on the time of day.

Koreader is pretty good software. It took some time to identify and configure my preferred settings. My only gripe is with “discoverability” of my library. Koreader has a very basic file selector, and I wish I could search titles, metadata, etc without needing another program (probably calibre?).

Battery life is definitely not as good as your proprietary ereader. If I leave it suspended at 100% charge, the battery dies in 3-4 days if bluetooth and wifi is on, and maybe 7-8 if they’re off. Meanwhile, my old nook could go several weeks without usage.

My least favorite part is anything related to typing. The screen keyboard feels unresponsive at times, which is hard when you’re typing passwords in a terminal session. For any shell work I connect to a TTY over USB, or I have a little bluetooth keyboard.

Bought a PineNote last year.

A wonderful device! But it’s pretty expensive ($400 before import duty) and required some hands-on terminal work to get set up properly.

I knew what I was getting into though. As a Debian Linux e-reader, it was worth the effort and money.

The California bill was approved and signed into law back in October:

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043

Your profile looks fine to me. Viewed from a web client.

In the US it’s up to individual states to set laws that require breaks.

Fucking insane, and very sad.

I recall that during the cold war, US intelligence agencies were worried that American hams might be sending secrets to amateurs in the USSR. They commissioned some report and the findings were basically “The only thing these nerds talk about are signal reports and radio equipment”.

A good friend of mine is quitting their (once) dream fed job, counting down the remainder until their last day. They work for the government to enforce engineering safety standards, but can no longer stomach the gutting of safety regulations that their department manages. Upon raising ethical concerns, they got dragged into a room with lawyers who relayed a parable about ethics. The lesson was: Be “a good soldier” and ignore safety regulations if you’re told to do so.

I go to work everyday and feel like a mail clerk in the Death Star

- My friend to me

Does this mean it should be possible to have 30 simultaneous JS8Call transmissions on a single SSB CB channel?

Yes. If you play around with JS8Call, you’ll notice that the UI picks a frequency offset from the SSB band and parks itself there. If you move the offset frequency to be near other traffic, the messages from nearby offsets will auto-populate in the yellow text box.

Do people have to transmit after each other or can they transmit at the same time while being spaced out within the the same channel?

Data frames are synchronized to 15 second time windows (I think). You can transmit during the same window as anyone else, as long as you’re not both on the same frequency offset.

These are really cool! I’ve been meaning to get a 6m antenna ever since I got my IC-705. Now that this page has taught me about the hentenna, I think I might build one.

I was AMAB (Assigned Marketing At Business school) and coming out as sales was really stressful. I’m glad someone understands.

He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.

Doesn’t want to do that? Just like how 6 months ago, Sam Altman said he didn’t want OpenAI to do adult content? Hopefully I’m overreacting, but I’m worried more about this kind of thinking than an AI feature.

My friend told me this story from his antique radio club:

One club member is an audiphile and a former vibrations engineer for automotive companies. He disassembled his speakers and arranged custom housing for the drivers such that, based on his preferred listening spot, the peak of an average waveform from every driver would synchonize exactly at the spot where his ears should be. This, according to him, produces an unbeatable sound. We’re talking about opening a speaker and moving its tweeter, like, half a millimeter back.

No, I don’t understand how this is supposed to work, let alone consistently.

git commit --amend --author="Automated CI Action <no-reply@github.com>" --no-edit

I had to look up what possible edible someone might confuse with a death cap.

Apparently there’s an Asian mushroom that can be confused with death caps. The secret to not confusing it with a death cap is knowing it doesn’t grow in the US. I wonder if this is AI identification going amok, or if there are people from Asia who are foraging it and not realizing the problem until too late.

A sad reminder to make sure your foraging guide is tailored to the area you are in.

I’ve been on that $55 300 Mbps plan, and it dropped data whenever two people took zoom calls at the same time.

I once got assigned a work project to add new functionality to the web service of a recently-acquired company.

The meat of their codebase was a single lua file to handle web requests, query value from Redis, and then progressively filter out items in a loop. Of course, because Lua has no continue statement, the file was a long series of if / else blocks. It was clear that the development style was to just keep adding new things to the loop. There were, of course, no tests.

I asked the former CTO of the acquired company (now in a sales) why they went with Lua. His reply was something about how if Lua is good enough for fintech, it should be great for web services. He must have been good in the sales role, because when I learned how much our company paid to acquire this crappy Lua script, my jaw dropped.

Anyway, that’s all to say that in my sample size of 1, Luarocks has been the least painful part of Lua.

TempleOS was written mostly in HolyC, not assembly.

You inspired me to test on 6m. Not a good match at all (SWR 40+). Gonna explore more, but from what I read about moxons on Wikipedia, they don’t lend themselves well to multi-band operations. I guess the measurements can be very band-specific.

Honestly, my plan is to use it as a minor propaganda tool: Call up a local ham friend for a “radio check”, and “just happen” to mention that there’s a protest going on and nobody is being aggressive, etc. I hear way too many maga guys on the airwaves, I want to do what I can to counter it.

Plus, if the cops do get violent, there’s no downside to having a communication tool that doesn’t rely on big tech or cell phones. One more way to get the word out.

Of course, something like this could be adapted for tools like meshtastic, or used with digital modes in order to coordinate a group.