Last week I gave a quick introduction to the Mac OSX program called Buster (for accessing the DSTAR reflectors) and something called AMBEserver (Which leverages the NWDigitalRadio’s ThumbDV or PiDV products). Here is a PDF of the slides.
Several weeks ago a hot water line busted in the ceiling above my office/radio shack. While I caught it quickly enough to prevent any serious equipment damage, I pretty much ripped out about a 1/3 of the ceiling finding the leak and creating enough room to fix it. I called in the pro’s to re-do the dry wall on the ceiling and decided since I had already emptied the room, I might as well replace the carpet as well. So this weekend I have been ‘completely’ emptying the room and prepping the ceiling to paint it tomorrow.
This has of course meant the relocation of everything in my office to the family room. And a massive clean out has take place over the last two weeks as this process has occurred. Today I finally got down to emptying the closet and I have found some really interesting items.
Most of the stuff went straight into the garage, I think there has been at least three garage bags take out so far. I kept the USB modem and the SupraFaxModems for sentimental reason. I am now going through the ZIP drives before tossing them. I was amazed that my Windows 7 netbook was able to enumerate the drive and read all the ZIP disks so far. To me that is actually even amazing than the ZIP drive actually working, even though it is a prototype and has been sitting on a shelf for decades. Most of the disks have been blank, so I am thinking this isn’t the first time I have gone through them. Actually all but one of the disks has been blank.
Charlie Stross has a new Laundry book coming out this summer. Nightmare Stacks is taking another turn and being told from another characters point of view. (But he promises that Bob will be back in the follow up) iO9 has the details…
Tags: twitter
Tags: twitter
Tags: twitter
I got a Icom ID-5100 for Christmas and a couple weeks ago finally pulled it out of the box and put it on the air. There are a number of things I like about it, but there was one glaring issue, it didn’t play well with my homemade DSTAR repeater. Some Google searching reveled this is a common problem, the ID-5100 is very picky about the signal shape, which means I don’t have the audio levels set quite perfect on the GMSK modem.
So I have been ‘planning’ to upgrade my DutchSTAR GMSK modem to a DV-RTPR board on the repeater for a while. (Like maybe three years?) Since fixing the ID-5100 problem was going to require messing with all the stuff to update to the DV-RTPR board, I decided to finally just make the switch. I found the partially built cable to connect it to the repeater and finished it, then dragged everything into the repeater room to hook it up. Getting the DV-RPTR to play with the repeater was really easy, which means it was time to put the new computer I built for the DV-RTPR into place as well.
That is when the plan feel apart a little. The Ubuntu OS installation was so old, it isn’t supported anymore. So before I could do anything, I had to rebuild it. Since I have a serious issue getting USB thumb drives to boot anything, this ended up taking hours. I finally got it to boot and started the installation before going to bed. Of course it stopped a short time later needing some input and I had to un-wedge it this morning. It is still going, but at least appears to be at the stage where it is installing packages.
Since I’m stupid, I decided to check the version of Ubuntu on my desktop linux box and found it was also running the out of data version now. The thought of flattening it and starting from scratch pained me, so I just told it to auto-update itself. I figured the worst that will happen is I need to flatten it and start from scratch anyhow. So it is also now unpacking a butt load of packages.
