2025 Wrap-Up

In some ways, 2025 was a mercifully dull year.  OTOH, not a lot to blog about either.  Month by month, let's go:

• Winter Field Day Wrap-Up  Too cold to go camping and do it right, but still learned things.
• Port St. Joe Repeater is Back Up  Go check out the coverage maps.
• Santos Fat Tire Fest report  Yearly happening.
• iPhone Satcoms  A useful tool in the toolbox, and surprisingly easy.
• Pirates!  Only a book about them, not actually coming ashore here.
• Announcement of upcoming Project Hail Mary movie  Yee-hah!
• How Generative AI Works  Slides from a non-hand-wavy talk.  Informative AND comprehensible.
• New Gravel Bike  Things are working out well with it.
• Sentience, Self-Awareness, and so much more.  At least, in book form.
• Slow Scan TV, Finally  Been wanting to get this working for years.
• Air Show at the Apalachicola Airport  Definitely worth going.
• Holman on Deep Future, Deep Tech  Way out there, in both podcast & book form.

And finally, the Best Damn Post of the Year: 

If You're Going to Move to Apalachicola, Then Please Look Into These Three Resources

The most popular?  How to program several different radios; FT-60's, FT-70's, etc.  You can search for those.  No biggies, no surprises.

Finally, picture of the year:

Look at that August humidity in the background.  If you move fast, you may still find either this or something similar more to your liking on sale by following this link.

And with that, Happy New Year, and I'll be back in a few days.

Wright's Lake Trail, Once More

With the cold weather finally here, I drove north and hiked the Wright's Lake Loop Trail again.  It's looking a little rough, needs some trail TLC, but it's still perfectly hike-able.  Tried out new gaiters and permethrin-treated clothes, and the ticks didn't seem to like that at all, which means that I did like these items quite a lot.  Why gaiters?  Boots aren't high enough to tuck pants legs in, so gaiters just sealed up everything and kept the little creepy-crawlies out.  Treated the gaiters and boots with permethrin as well!

Brought along the FT-70, and made a few contacts through the local SARNET-FL repeater.  When I first pulled up to the user pay kiosk, the campground host saw my call sign hat and immediately asked if I could help him with his Baofeng radio.  Well yeah, of course.  He's not licensed, but enjoys scanning for and listening in on deer hunters, and now he can listen in on SARNET-FL as well (nb: I didn't program in the CTCSS tone code, so there's no chance of him transmitting into it).

Not a lot else to say beyond some earlier posts (1, 2, 3).  Here's pic of the bridge over Coffee Creek, a full four feet less water than I've earlier seen it.  Not much of a creek today, just a slowly meandering remnant in the bottom of the streambed.

Finally Watched 'A Christmas Story'

It was one of those astounding facts that turned heads at Christmas parties, but I'd never watched A Christmas Story until last night.  I hardly need to review it here, but the sweet, nostalgic, slightly askew, fond regard in which it's generally held seems about right, now that I've finally seen it.

Picked it up on the double-feature DVD that includes its 2022 sequel, A Christmas Story Christmas.  Maybe I'll watch it before New Year's, maybe I'll save it for next Christmas.  There's only so much sweet, slightly askew nostalgia I can take in one week.

ps: You might want to pick up a pack of these.  I was always a stickler about such when my kids were young.  Still am, for that matter.

pps: As if on cue, this showed up: Could A Red Ryder BB Gun Be Lethal?  15 minutes of interestingness.  Or if you don't have the time, just apply Betteridge's Law and move on.

Don't Gaze Too Long

A Coded Message for Christmas

At The Times, The coded message in our newspaper

And with that, I sincerely hope that you're having a very merry Christmas.  And I also hope that you're not in jail.

Hoo Boy

Legislators push for state takeover of Apalach water at The Times.

Presented for general information with no further comment on this platform.

Can't Wait Until Next Christmas...

... when this book comes out.  Here are a couple of teasers:

• A New Christmas Fable
• Joyous Noel!

Because this is how you get new scientists, engineers, and innovators.

It Never Gets Old

Watching boosters fall out of space for a soft landing and reuse never gets old.  Routine, yes, but old, never.  Article at The Daily Galaxy.

BTW, we don't know what the heck the NROL-77 super-secret payload is, and we'll probably never know.  And that's OK too, kind of the nature of these launches.  But watching the booster come back, man oh man.

BTW2: Marginal cost per pound for Falcon 9 launches is estimated at $389.  For the older, partially reusable Space Shuttle, inflation adjusted to 2025 dollars, this was $9565.  Draw your own conclusions.

Hm, I see Surly's having a sale.

If you're looking, Surly's got the older model (like mine) Stragglers on a 20% off sale:

• 650b (smaller)
• 700c (reg'lur)
• ps - and now I see they've got the model down Preamble on a killer sale too.  If you don't know what bike you want, this is the bike you want.

Availability is short, so shop fast.  And of course, you can just get the newer model – you know, the one with the thru-axle hubs – for a tad more.  Worth it?  Eh, that's up to you.  The geometry on the older model is more road bikesque, but the newer one does have the thru-axles and hydraulic disc brakes.

Anyway, (a) you can't have mine!

and (b), the Specialized gravel bike is still up for sale.  I'll take $450; contact me in any of the usual ways.

I'm gonna go adjust my front brake now.  Mechanicals, they're cool and have a certain funk-factor, but yeesh.

A DIY 'News Cruiser' Radio Setup

Jock Elliot over at The SWLing Post has come up with the concept of having a set of pre-programmed news stations in one or more at-hand radios in this article for gray sky days.  Great idea!  You go read now; I'll wait.

OK, you're back.  Here's a list of links mentioned in the article and in the comments.

• list of Clear-Channel AM stations at NOAA and at Wikipedia
• find local stations at Radio-Locator
• Emergency Alert System Primary Entry Point stations & some more discussion of PEPs

Because no blog post is truly complete without a graphic – oh, and I need a reminder to write some of this down – here's a map of the US's PEP stations:

Finally, while I was writing this post I had to look up the definitions of Blue Sky / Gray Sky conditions in the context of emergency management.  These in a nutshell correspond to "normal times" and "disaster conditions."  Along the way I stumbled across one more term, Black Sky Event.  Hoo boy.  Zero stars, would not recommend to friends.

Just Some Random Stuff

Random numbers have figured highly in my work for decades, but I've never had a really great random number generator at hand.  Oh, the ones out of Numerical Recipes have usually been more than adequate, but not provably adequate.  Now however, there's this...

• CURBy – the University of Colorado Randomness Beacon project
• Abstract on Bell-certified quantum random number generation

Probably more random than you bargained for!

QRPer Interview on Hurricane Helene, Radios, & Muddling Through

In this radio show / podcast, Thomas Witherspoon from the QRPer blog discusses his family's experiences in Hurricane Helene, solar power at their home, and of course, the utility of ham radio, all in generally accessible terms.  Length is a little short of one hour, so it's an easy listen.

Holman on Deep Tech – Pretty Wild Stuff

Back in September Jim Rutt posted an interview with Pablos Holman on the topic – and his new book – on what he terms deep tech.  Holman's central thesis is that we've gone too far down the software road, and while it's been a good road, we need to concentrate more on hardware and, you know, actually building cool stuff.  Autonomous shipping, mosquito-zapping lasers, safe nuclear reactors, high-speed rail, the list goes on.

And he does have a valid point.  In a 100 trillion dollar world economy, less than 5% is in the computer tech sector.  However it somehow vacuums up the lion's share of talent, venture capital, and press.  [Side note: I think a lot of reason tech has thrived over the last half-century is that it's largely immune to regulation and ignored by regulators.  Try to build a new computer operating system and The Man don't care; try to build a new type of trebuchet or nuclear reactor or choo-choo train and The Man will definitely inquire.  Close rant & back to the subject at hand.]

Some parts of both the interview and book come off as eccentric and out of touch with real developments in the real world these past few decades.  Take shipping for example.  Yes, cargo ships are still largely operated by humans.  However the number of crew required to run a ship is a fraction of what it was 75 years ago.  More importantly, containerized shipping has radically slashed port handling costs.  Overall cargo shipping costs have dropped by something like 90% since 1950.  Yes, there are always optimizations remaining, but come on, apply a generalized version of Amdhal's Law to the situation and give the industry another decade to catch its breath.  Dropping the remaining crew of ten to just one is insignificant when compared to what has just happened.

On the other hand, the guy was there at the start of Blue Origin, which just racked up a major success.  Furthermore, rocket boosters dropping out of the sky and landing on robotic barges has become something of an everyday occurrence.  Clearly it pays to think big, and especially in terms of making a profit.

Well, listen to the podcast interview (link above), read the guy's book, flip through the online footnotes for the book, then make up your own mind.  My take here is that, despite some weird twists and turns, the guy's onto something.

USB Port Color Code

Article over at ZDnet.  Huh, I did not know that there even was a code.

In case that link ever evaporates into the aether, here's the main part:

• Black: Denoting USB 2.0, this is the second most common you'll see on devices of all types, supporting speeds of up to 480 Mbps.
• White: These are first-generation devices -- USB 1.x -- with the slowest potential transfer speeds that don't typically exceed 12 Mbps. They're also some of the most common, found on devices that don't require data transfer or high power delivery.
• Yellow: These ports can support either USB 2.0 or 3.0, and are "always on", meaning they can supply power even when the device they're connected to is off.
• Orange: Like yellow, but with support for USB 3.0. Always on. You might see these on your pair of headphones.  
• Blue: Supporting USB 3.0 SuperSpeed technology and above, blue ports identify a device capable of fast data transfer: up to 5 Gbps (that's 5,000 Mbps) -- a significant jump from previous generations. Besides laptops, you'll see blue ports on thumb drives and external storage.
• Teal: Just like blue, but denoted as USB 3.1, supporting faster transfer speeds of up to 10 Gbps.
• Red: These are the newest and fastest devices available, categorized as USB 3.1 Generation 2 and USB 3.2. They support another significant increase in data transfer speeds -- up to 10-20 Gbps. Red USB ports are also always on.

Yes, blogging has been light lately.  Working on that part.