KJ6LNH

Back in January 2021 I wrote about a new project: I was going to ditch WordPress and build my own “serverless” blogging software. WordPress was running on an EC2 instance, burning CPU cycles around the clock to serve a blog that, by my own admission, mostly gets visited by bots. I figured I could do better with Lambda and friends, only pay for what I actually used, and have a fun project to keep my skills current along the way. ...

I’ve been away from the blog for some time now. Was doing the side-gig startup thing for a while. That didn’t work out and ended up getting a little burned out for a while, so I was more focused on hiking since then. Now, I’m ready for another project. Don’t care to do anything that requires a business plan, this is more for fun, keep some skills current, and do something that’ll help me out a little. ...

I’ve had some bad luck with computer hard drives over the last year. First, the hard drive in my home server failed. Then the hard drive on my laptop failed several months later. The backups for each had stopped working a while ago. I was able to recover some files using ddrescue. This is actually a really cool tool for doing a byte-for-byte copy of another disk, skipping over errors and going back to retry them later. Unfortunately for me, this was not only extremely time consuming (both times, I spent over a week on this process), but the blocks that couldn’t be recovered caused a lot of files to be irretrievable. <sarcasm>I had a lot of fun with the debugfs command trying to get some files recovered.</sarcasm> ...

Seen a few articles about people controlling their radios remotely lately and thought what most others were doing was a bit too complicated. It could be done a lot easier, at least in my opinion of what’s easier. First, rig control. Linux has the hamlib libraries that can control many different radios. I had built a simple CI-V serial interface for my ICOM IC-706 a while back. It’s not perfect, but can be made to work at 300 baud. The rigctl command line program is pretty simple to use. The manual page for it has all of the commands listed. Many don’t apply for my particular radio, but I can switch frequency, mode, memory channel, and a few other key operating parameters. I can read all of those parameters as well to make sure I’m where I think I am. ...

When Carrie and I got married, she gave me a very nice watch as a wedding present. It’s a kinetic watch (i.e. it is wound up by movement). I haven’t used it since the band broke a long time ago. Finally got the band fixed, but since it hasn’t been used, it’s not wound up at all right now. I can either wear a watch that’s one right twice per day for a while until it’s wound up, or I could put the continuous rotation servo I got a while ago to good use. ...

Haven’t had much time for any projects over the last year or so. Having a new baby in the house tends to do that. Now that she is a little older and on a good schedule, I might be able to get a little time to work on some projects. My wife drives a 2005 Honda Pilot. Recently, we discovered that the rear vents for the second row of seats were not blowing any air. Of course, this makes the kids uncomfortable and Kimberly kept complaining that her back was sweaty. I hadn’t really looked into it too much so Carrie did some searching and came across this blog. The short version is that the screen over the blower gets clogged with dust and a thermal fuse goes open circuit permanently. ...

In my last posting, I turned a Raspberry Pi into a media center PC. One of the things I left undone before declaring the project a success was to set up some kind of hardware based remote control. I was only able to control the PC using the web interface or the XBMC app on Android and the iPad. I originally wanted to build some kind of remote control that didn’t require me to have my phone next to me and unlock the screen every time I wanted to pause the show. I really don’t need another remote control in the living room. I already have one for the TV, one for the Blue Ray, and one for U-Verse. Fortunately, the U-Verse remote is actually a 4-in-1 universal remote. A quick Google found the manual, so I programmed one of the slots with a Sony DVD player code. It had enough of the buttons defined to be usable. ...

For a while now, I’ve been using DLNA to push video to my TV from my computer. The biggest problem I’ve had with that is that is my Sony TV is very picky about the video format. I’ve been stuck experimenting with options to pass to ffmpeg to convert the video from whatever format the file is in and the format that the TV likes, MPEG2. Among the many problems include poor resolution, out of sync audio, and no audio at all. I had been using MiniDLNA on my Debian box as the server for the content. It’s pretty simplistic. It’s little more than a file server that implements the DLNA protocol. I found another DLNA server, Serviio, that will do some conversion on the fly. This worked better. No need to convert video formats or worry if the TV would not even see the file. The biggest problem occurs whenever I pause a video. When I resume, the TV thinks the DLNA server has gone away. So basically, no pause, fast forward, or rewind. I’d consider that a show stopper. Several times, I have resorted to connecting my laptop to the TV using HDMI and playing the videos that way. ...

Today was RACES Exercise with Simulated Traffic 13-11. In the exercise, we were supposed to call up a net, contact as many other stations as possible using both voice and digital modes (QSO party style), and send a list of all of our contacts back to net control via voice or digital. In East Contra Costa County, things didn’t exactly go as planned. The net was called up by John KN6SQ with Lou N6VV co-located on top of the hill at Willow Pass that separates Central and East county. It’s a decent location that can hear most of East county. Initially, I was the only one that checked in. It wasn’t until the county emergency notification system was activated that others got on the radio and checked into the net. I think we had a total of 6 stations. We usually have a few more than that for these exercises. ...

I finally started a blog. I’m going to chronicle my exploration of amateur (ham) radio and electronics. So, let’s get to the first post. For the first post, I decided to go after something simple. My daughter has an Elmo guitar, the volume of which is, shall we say, earsplitting. I’ve been threatening to wire a potentiometer into the thing so it isn’t so loud. (for those that don’t know, a potentiometer resists the flow of electricity and has a knob to change the amount of resistance). ...