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.

SSTV, Slowly

Following up on last week's SSTV post, we're just about there.  Picked up a refurb MacBook Air for pocket change (more on this below).  Sideloaded Black Cat SSTV along with fldigi, and chirp-next onto it via dipstick drive, and again tested all on the FT-817nd & dummy load.  Went live with fldigi (a digital texting program) and made a few contacts to the usual easy places like TN, NC, & TX.  Then... started pulling a few images off the air.  Here's about the best of the bunch:

Live!  From New York!  (state)

The ionosphere is a noisy place, and it shows in this image.  Not bad at all for less than 100 watts and 3 kHz bandwidth.  You can look at lots of other images people have received and auto-posted at HF Underground.

Great, so that's all working now.  The question arises though, how good can the image quality be, ultimately?  That is to say, what does the scanning process do to the resolution?  Here are two images from my practicing on the image editor, then sending as audio from computer speaker to phone microphone:

input

output

Not terrible, maybe just a tad worse than the old 110 film cameras.  (I used that stuff extensively in an Astrocam rocket; no great surprise.)  A little more practice with the image editor and I'll do some actual transmissions later today.

Now a few notes on that MacBook Air and how it all interfaces with the radios.  It's an early 2020 Intel i3 processor from mac of all trades for 1/3rd the cost of new.  That's plenty of compute power for intended use.  The important thing is that the SSTV software requires OSX v13 or higher, and this is about the minimum machine that checks that particular box.  After that, this laptop only has USB-C ports.  The SignaLink radio interface box I'm using has a USB-A cable, but a $10 adapter sidestepped the problem seamlessly.  In fact, everything worked out about as well as I'd hoped.  The only downside so far is that the i3 is a power hog, and can chew through half its battery in about an hours' use (and that's after applying the full-on daemon killin' cron incantation to matters).  All the more reason to bring a solar panel into the field.

Now on to a few Linux notes.  One of the above-mentioned fldigi texting contacts reported that he'd just upgraded from an old Debian Linux distro to a new Mac M4, just because he couldn't get the Linux machine to talk to his Icom IC-7300 radio.  Linux man, it's a whole 'nother hobby unto itself.

Finally, I may have mentioned that my old Linux laptop's battery charging control system had died, which finally spurred me on to this upgrade.  In the midst of all the goings-on documented above, it mysteriously began working again.  Because how do you get a broken laptop to work?  You buy another one of course.  Eh, I'll keep it around for muddy days in the field.

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.

The (possible) End of Moore's Law

Article over at MIT Tech Review.  It's a short read, so set aside five or ten minutes.

Looking on the bright side, rolling to the end of Moore's Law implies the end of bloatware.

Winter Field Day 2020: Better Get Moving

Starts at 1900z (1pm CST) this Saturday, wraps 24 hours later.  Read about it at https://www.winterfieldday.com (site does not play well w/ Safari; use Firefox or something similar) and catch up on how it all went here sometime late Sunday, maybe Monday.

All for now.  Gotta get packing.

A Few Lines of Code that Changed Everything

Courtesy of The Darling Daughter, this article from Slate: https://slate.com/technology/2019/10/consequential-computer-code-software-history.html

Go and read.  This is the history of the last 60 years, and how it has changed humanity forever.

An Interesting, Upcoming Phone

Behold the 2019(?) Librem 5:

From the developer's site:

• Does not run Google Android
• Does not run Apple iOS
• Runs PureOS by default, can run most GNU+Linux distros
• Security focused by design
• Privacy protection by default
• Works with 2G/3G/3G, GSM, UMTS, and LTE networks
• CPU separate from Baseband
• Hardware kill switches for camera, microphone, WiFI/Bluetooth, and Baseband

I think that I just decided to nurse along this aging iPhone for a year or so longer to see how the initial release of this phone works out.  The company seems to have blasted through their pre-orders to be funded at 150%, so it's looking like I'm not the only one interested.

Now There's a Ringing Endorsement

Bill Gates switches to Android phone  Story over at the BBC.

Linux, Chirp, Programming Radios, and All That

Just got chirp up and running on my Linux laptop, and it could not have been easier.  Here are a few notes to help you along – or perhaps more like to help me remember, sometime in the distant future:

1. here's the how-to-download page: http://chirp.danplanet.com/projects/chirp/wiki/Download  Yeah, just follow the instructions there, it's all automagic.
2. I didn't need the "sudo addgroup "$USERNAME" dialout" from the subsequent troubleshooting link, which is fortunate because my machine griped at me when I tried it anyway.
3. The USB device chirp wants in the pop-up menu is /dev/ttyUSB0 which was the last one on the list, as it happens.

After all that, it was just the usual radio-specific Vulcan neck-pinchery, as spelled out in two posts last week, here for FT-60 instructions and here for everything else.  And remember kids, get the cable with the FTDI chip (costs more, but it's worth the hassle-free operation), and if when you get stuck, youtube is your friend.

Guess I'll have something to talk about at the next SMLUG meeting.