Hurricane Season '25 Outlook

Meteorologist Levi Cowan gives the news behind the extended forecast for this year's season here.

TLDW: Above average, but not as bad as next year.

You can find his continuing coverage at his main site here.

Good luck, all.

Was that the last cool front?

A little thunderstorm just passed over, and here's the radar image:

65F by morning?  Yeah, I think that was a cool front.  Last one of this spring.  Pack it up 'til October.

Resolution to self for next fall: More camping trips.

In Which Apple Declares War On Its Customer Base

These last  few years, I've noticed my Mac Mini (Intel CPU, purchased late 2020) has been running hotter and hotter with every OS upgrade.  Sleep the machine at night, and then it's almost too hot to touch by the morning.  Digging around, it seems that Apple has installed some media-scanning software that runs in the background, categorizing faces, places, songs, etc.  I've spent a couple of hours trying to turn this stuff off and keep it off – it automatically turns back on within minutes – and digging for solutions.  It seems that there were work-arounds for all of this, but Apple reads the various relevant forums and has been diligently thwarting these efforts.  About the only thing left that seems to work is to launch your own search-and-kill job that wakes up every minute or so to hunt down the offending daemons and zap them.  You can read about how to do this here (search down to the large font "If you are on Big Sur (11) or newer, forget about all*the above solutions, none will work!" for how to deal).  I'll get around to doing just this later today, and I am reasonably sure that Apple will come up with a lock-out even for this in the next round of sidegrades.

Linux man, it's looking better by the day.  I don't need another hobby though.

ps, a few hours later: All seems to be working fine, with the computer's temp down to something reasonable.  The three minute cron cycle seems to be working well on my Mac.  Also, don't forget to make the script in the above link executable; you can see how to do this in item #3 at this link.  Which, by the way, contains some excellent general info on cron which makes it worth reading to both give you some confidence when running crontab and for your own knowledge base.

pps: Apple, fix this business ASAP.  If it's ticking off a die-hard like me, imagine what it's doing to more casual users.

Where the Hurricane Seasons Are All Above Average

The National Hurricane Center yesterday issued its pre-season extended forecast for 2025, and it's not great but not the end of the world either.  Here's a link to the NHC's announcement, but – spoiler alert – here are the main points:

and the main quote:

The season is expected to be above normal – due to a confluence of factors, including continued ENSO-neutral conditions, warmer than average ocean temperatures, forecasts for weak wind shear, and the potential for higher activity from the West African Monsoon, a primary starting point for Atlantic hurricanes. All of these elements tend to favor tropical storm formation. 

The high activity era continues in the Atlantic Basin, featuring high-heat content in the ocean and reduced trade winds. The higher-heat content provides more energy to fuel storm development, while weaker winds allow the storms to develop without disruption. 

This hurricane season also features the potential for a northward shift of the West African monsoon, producing tropical waves that seed some of the strongest and most long-lived Atlantic storms.

Eh, these extra-extended forecasts have a way of being about 40% correct too.  Check back next November.

Harsh Critics

A short cartoon about what various authors have said of others – and occasionally themselves – at SMBC.

(Canceled) Reservations About the New Yaesu FTX-1

Thomas W. shares his thoughts about canceling his pre-reserved purchase of the new Yaesu FTX-1 QRP radio here at the QRPer blog.  If you search down to my thoughts on the matter you can find them there, or here, just have the list now:

• Yeah it's big.  Closer to 'car camping big' than 'backpacking small.'
• But of course it has to be big to put that beautiful waterfall display on the front.  I've really come to like this on my FT-710 (pics, more details), and am glad to see it here.
• Speaking of FT-710, the front panel looks very similar.  I wonder if they kept much the same UI or re-arranged it "just because"?
• That roll cage really splays out from the controls, both making things even bigger overall and giving less protection to the controls.
• Does the roll cage come with a panel that snaps over it to cover the controls when it's shoved in a pack?
• 
  Still beating on the roll cage, whoever designed that thing has never operated a radio in the wild during a backpacking trip.  It's more about "looks tough" than "protects controls."  Portable Zero will probably come out with something much better soon.
• Yes, it does seem to be all-mode on 2m & 70 cm, which puts it into the 'rare gem' category of radios.  That is some good news.
• With the 100w amplifier, that more or less makes it into an FT-710 with VHF/UHF.  For about twice the price.  Hm.
• Picture at right shamelessly stolen from the above-linked article at QRPer.  I hope the author doesn't mind.  Mostly, it's to show how big this thing is with a hand for scale.
• Here's another guy who opted out.  Jump forward to the 8 minute mark for his reasoning.

It all comes down to this thing is a hoss, too big for what a lot of people want to do with a QRP radio.  I'll keep car camping with the FT-710 and backpacking with the FT-817nd for the time being, and wait a while more before deciding on a purchase.  But overall, probably not.

So what do I really want in a new QRP radio?  Starting from the old FT-817/818 series as a baseline:

• First, note that this is just a baseline for a versatile QRP radio, not a call to bring back a dinosaur.
• Add an IF DSP.
• Add an internal speech processor.
• Do a full weight reduction project.  Replace everything steel with aluminum, etc.
• If you've just got to go SDR with a waterfall display, have the waterfall in a separate, optional outboard unit.  Leave the lightweight dial-twiddling joy of a simple QRP radio as still an option.

I see this new radio as something with a lot of promise, but I'm not sure that Yaesu was listening to their growing POTA/SOTA user base that was hoping for something else.  Something a little more field-worthy.  A lot of this seems to be confusion over the concepts of "we can" and "we should."  Time will tell.  But I do see a small number of people who had previously put down deposits walking away, and my prior enthusiasm has considerably cooled.

ps, 5/26: Well, this guy is having a good time doing POTA with his!  FTX-1 is still in the running.

All The Stars

Sure, I'm a week late in posting this, but The Panhandle Players' production of Little Shop of Horrors hit the ball right out of the park.  Community theater usually isn't my thing, having had my fill of coerced theater by the fifth grade.  However, it's kind of fun to sit back anonymously and enjoy the show upon occasion.  I believe I'll be attending more often.

Also, it was a treat to be back in the Chapman High School auditorium.  It's a wonderfully solid old building that brings back school memories.  It's built of proto-brutalist concrete, poured like they don't pour it anymore, with added flourishes like they haven't done since the 1930s when it was built.  Pecky cypress woodwork everywhere.  The bathrooms however are much upgraded (and generally less violent and cigarette smoke-filled) than I remember.  I guess some things do improve with age.

Pirates!

While poking around Sundog Books last (very rainy) Saturday afternoon, I tripped across The Penguin Book of Pirates.  First thing, I had to flip to everyone's favorite New Orleans privateer, Jean Laffite.  The five-page mini-biography ends its tale with "He was the mildest manner'd man, That ever scuttled a ship or cut a throat;"

With a glowing recommendation like that, passing by this book was impossible.  Not sure I'd want him along fishing offshore however.

No mention of Capt. Pitcher however, and that is quite a tale.  (If you really want the story right now, here's a somewhat rambling 14 minute video.  And no, you could not give that accursed chunk of beachfront to me, not even if you threw in a lifetime supply of rum.  Because I suspect it would be a remarkably small quantity of rum to match a correspondingly short life expectancy.)

Good Basic Advice

Over at The Bugscuffle Gazette, Ian (aka Lawdog) delivers a brief and useful treatise on socio-political epistemology titled Why do you still listen?  Go read the whole thing, it'll take about two minutes.  

While the author focuses on the night terrors of right-leaning readers, this advice applies to all poles of the political spectrum.  From which, I must add, I've heard a constant keening about 'teh end of democracy!!' this and 'zomg book bans!!' that for the last decade or more.

We all have friends and relations who are so afflicted (again, I stress of all persuasions), so recommend this essay to them.

Also, the AI-generated art is pretty damn awesome.  Worth the click-through for that alone.

Last Saturday's Build A Bucket Event

Hurricanes, MREs, multitools, car rescue tools, radios, all those sort of things were featured at last Saturday's Build A Bucket event in Carrabelle.  Story at The Times, including pictures.

Over at the radio tent, we put up a 2m/70cm Comet pole antenna, hooked in the FTM-7250D dual bander, and ran it all with the 27w solar power system.  Setup time was maybe 15 minutes, break down was maybe 5 minutes longer, but only because it's easier to stretch out coax cable than it is to properly roll it back up.  Talked to a guy in Orlando via SARNET, but nobody was around on the Carrabelle repeater.  Mostly though, we talked with people going through the Build A Bucket line about radio as a lifeline after a hurricane.  Overall a successful day.

Given the Current State of Star Wars

... the old joke about "May the fourth be with you" is replaced this year by:

Today's Quote

I ordered a replacement antenna for my bedside radio and a few other parts from c.crane last week and they arrived today, along with a paper copy of their catalog.  The quote from the cover gave me a smile:

Anyway, c.crane; they're good people with good radios, built for everyday folks to use.  Hurricane season draws nigh.  You should probably go poke around over there and get a radio before the season.  Here's the LINK to their site.  If you can't decide or are otherwise overwhelmed by the choices, just get this one.

ps: A link to a description of the radio and why I bought it to begin with.