Friday, 21st February, 2025

I’ve been in a writing paralysis situation. This whole week I’ve wanted to write all sorts of things here but I got sucked into “how am I writing” it. Including what keyboard. Why? I have no idea. I just got stuck. So whilst I “decide” I’ll just use my phone now…look it works just fine…

Did a hill today. Weather was wet and windy. I picked a summit with trees at the top so sheltered in them. Was exhilarating going for a walk in the wild weather. I was well waterproofed up so didn’t get wet. Meant I got home earlier than my usual 5 minutes before its time for school pick up. Tried to do some jobs but was too easy to faff about on the computer doing nothing. Plus the cats wanted to see me so I had to sit with them for a while.

Feel close to buying a Mac mini M4. A ham YouTube guy I like recently got a Mac mini and has been trying out radio software with it. He was 100% Linux up until then. Not that this was a big factor but it made me think about it again and how it would be nice to have it. I like the idea of having access to multiple operating systems to pick the best one for the task.

The ironic thing is, I’ve forgotten all the things I wanted to write about and now I don’t know what they are.

I’ve been messing about either my radio blog, setting up a process to make a nice map for contacts for each summit activation. Mostly involves wrangling ObservableJS, which is JS but also slightly different. I figured out that things need to be in blocks, ie curly braces, else it doesn’t like certain keywords. Why? Who knows. But now it meant I got it working. I might return to some of the other things I wanted to do that I ended up doing in streamlit.

Friend I met va SOTA who’s very active, Fraser, just retired today after 36 years at Tesco (supermarket chain). He’s 53. He has a lovely wee cottage on the edge of the Cairngorms. Think he might do personalised mountain tours once he’s had enough of doing absolutely nothing/anything he wants to do I’m sure he’ll come out with me on hill walks or at the same time now that he’s not working.

Eldest’s birthday tomorrow and I’ve bought her the Lego Hogwart’s Express. Not sure if it’s really for me or her 😅. My logic is that we can build a new town with everyone having their own part and trains between them. Probably in the Easter holidays. The boys really want a big box of just 2x4 bricks. So think I’ll order a load from bricklink for their birthday. It was a lot of fun at the Lego House in the “just yellow 2x4 bricks” area. People made amazing things with just a single coloured brick.

Still looking for more things to sell on eBay…

When nvultra?

I’ve been thinking of retiring Tiddlywiki and moving all my notes into Apple Notes, maybe using the Forever notes method. I do still react violently to the idea of putting all my stuff into this closed source, walled, system of Apple’s. What got me, was when I wanted to add a note about something from my phone, and it was a pain to open the browser, go to my wiki, log in, make a new note, etc. plus the mobile browser version of TW is fine when reading but not great when you’re editing. It’s almost to the extent that I just think “ah nevermind” and don’t bother. I’d probably leave my wiki online, as it costs nothing to do so, but I’d use Apple notes instead. I do have a few things that I’d like to write about which I don’t want on here, but I’ve never found anywhere useful for them. I think this Apple Notes thing is also coinciding with my thoughts on the mac mini. I almost bought one just now, but then I couldn’t remember which service I need to log into for the educational discount my wife can get and it’s probably best not to do it at night.

There’s nothing stopping me from trying the forever note, it is free, and I could always use it just for certain stuff. Probably the system will collapse quickly and I’ll not bother.

Been thinking about giving up my photos domain. It’s a nice domain but I don’t use it and it seems like something else to think about. I’m sure it’ll be immediately snapped up by someone and replaced with ads. Maybe when the renewal comes around I’ll decide.

Tuesday, 18th February, 2025

I was debating working from home this morning, well we accidentally scheduled the grocery delivery to be today instead of tomorrow, so that decides it!

More snow this morning. Supposed to be 11°C on Friday which is hard to believe.

Wife came into the office last night and looked at the RPi touchscreen: “why do you have a tiny screen when you have a huge one?”. I admit, I didn’t have a good answer. Perhaps this is also for eBay.

Monday, 17th February, 2025

I watched a ft857d auction come and go last night. I did place one bid but I knew it wouldn’t win. Not sure I actually want to get the radio now. It’s for such a specific use case. I did search to see if there was something better but there isn’t really anything. I’ll probably get it eventually but just not right now.

I’ve been thinking about a Dell Wyse 5070 as a small Linux machine for the office for the radio and general tinkering. I’m not sure why though. Well I am, because I want to buy it/something and it is good value, about £40 for a very capable machine. However, I have a better one just sat in the garage doing nothing. My problem is I’m still debating the server arrangement. I think if I could get rid of the need to store lots of things that would be good. Maybe I should get a nas device and use that and then the small computer (again). Ugh I don’t know.

I setup the RPi with the 7” touchscreen with the lofty goals of making this ham radio spotting, logging thing. Let me be the first to say…that is never going to happen. What I did think about is using it as a small notebook, or blogging device. I think the RPi has Bluetooth and so I could connect my new favourite keyboard up to it, sit somewhere else, and type. It’s not quite iPad freedom but it is Linux and I own it. Maybe I’ll connect the keyboard and find a nice text editor…although vs code is decent and I have my shortcut setup for the date in it. I could use vim but I don’t actually know how to do much in vim. I like have git and stuff built in…I think geary is an app I used before. Of course everything can be scripted so easily.

I just thought about Tinderbox. Maybe a Mac laptop would be more useful than a mini. I could sit elsewhere and waste time. Or the Mac mini and I remote into it from wherever I am.

My boss is on holiday this week. He didn’t even tell me, I saw from someone else’s calendar. I think that is plenty of authorisation to skive. I need to run the new coax to the 2m antenna and the office.

I’ve install VS Codium on the rpi, have linked the keyboard, although via a cable as it’s impossible to figure out how to pair it via bluetooth when not in windows (you plug it in with a cable and then it eventually appears on the bluetooth list ??) and a bluetooth mouse that was just sat on the shelf. VS Codium is way too bloated for this tiny pi. Probably Vim is the way to go… maybe skip the desktop altogether? The annoying thing with the touchscreen is that its default orientation is rotated by 180 degrees. The wiki says to use the deskopt manager’s settings to rotate it which is fine but if I skip the desktop then there’s various kernel parameters that need to be done but then the wiki also says they don’t work well with a desktop. seems a pain.

Well that was anther evening wasted doing nothing whatsoever. I should just go to bed and read my book.

Saturday, 15th February, 2025

Finally sold my radio. Ended up being to a local guy who I have met at the club before. He messaged me on eBay and I was a little skeptical, thinking it was some scam, but once I got his callsign we exchanged emails and phone calls and he was legit. We had a nice chat too about radios and setups. He paid in cash…not sure I’ve held this much cash in a long long time! Hoping I can pay it into my account via the post office as not sure if there’s even a branch in town anymore.

So now what can I buy! 🤣

Seeing the cash makes it more real - “wow I had this just sat about doing nothing”. Anyway, I like mountain radio activity and I should get the ft857 for that. Although I’m in no rush.

He was complaining of how quiet the repeaters are here, compared to other Scottish ones.

Friday, 14th February, 2025

Completely forgot it was Valentines 💝…but neither of us care so it doesn’t matter.

Did two hills today. They were a bit of rush as I wanted to do two and also get home to do school pick up so my wife doesn’t have to rush. I’ve done the 50 mile drive to Braemar many times now!

Friend got his computer I sent for his birthday. Was surprised which was nice. Makes me debate my home server setup. Whilst I’m debating that I also setup a raspberry pi 3 with the 7” touchscreen that’s been in the cupboard for years. It’s nice, makes me want to get a rpi 5 and use it as my main desktop. The idea is that I’m going to make a SOTA chaser dashboard thing where I can press a spot of someone and then it changes to radio to their frequency and I can enter their signal report and log it to the SOTA site and my log.

The hardware part was easy. The software is going to take a while. Thinking of using node red to do it.

Wednesday, 12th February, 2025

Was off work today as it’s half term and wife was at work. No idea what day it is. Keep thinking it’s Saturday and when I came to make this post I wondered how the week had disappeared and I hadn’t written anything since Tuesday. Which is in fact, yesterday.

Jack bought a Nikon Zf. Obviously I’ve not been thinking about selling all my Fuji stuff and getting one…anyway I’m getting a new iPhone for all my photography…right? The fun part is selling and buying stuff, probably tomorrow I’ll see how much short I’d be if I did do that! But I rarely use a camera and I’m sure it’ll be bigger and heavier than my APS-C Fuji setup. I’m too busy with radio stuff…I’ll come back to photography and cameras later.

Another ham contributed code towards my little streamlit app. That was nice.

Tuesday, 11th February, 2025

A local ham made this history video about his experience with ham radio, radio in general and what things were like back in the 60s, and 70s. It’s quite long but very interesting.

Monday, 10th February, 2025

This book looks interesting. And that “The pages in this volume are ordered according to the Japanese system. Please turn to the back of the book to begin reading.” I probably won’t buy it though.

I’ve got so many SOTA related scripts and tools in the works that need finishing and publishing somehow. Made me wonder about a dedicated website for them but then what’s the infrastructure for them? Streamlit is easy for the dynamic ones, and perhaps the others can be on a Quarto static site and just have a daily script compute all the info and I use Observable to show it. Would be nice to integrate them into a site though, vs. a bit scattered. I could make a flask webapp…I’ve not made one before but maybe now’s the time…although probably still need to figure out all the javascript? Or I host my own streamlit server and just make everything on that, plus then as a backup it can run on streamlit servers? Or do I did into 11ty and go all javascript…probably take me forever/I’ll never do it if that’s the way.

Maybe I’ll make a list of all the things I want to put together first, then try and finish them in whatever my current, easiest way is and go from there.

There’s a 2012 mac mini i7 on ebay that ends in ~3 hours which I’m watching. Needs RAM and a SSD, I wonder what it’ll sell for as it’s a bit janky and the auction ends at 3pm during the day. I don’t really want it but it might be cheap…sounds like a terrible way to decide to buy things. It’s 13 years old…I don’t need it. I’m meant to be selling junk to get a M4.

Sunday, 9th February, 2025

I’ve finally routed the coax into the office and today I did my first SOTA chase from the warm office. The antenna is still terrible but it worked. Not sure what I’m doing with VHF though. I’ve put up the antenna and attached some random coax I have, which is 19m long. So long but not long enough to be useful. It’s also super thick coax, so low loss but terrible turning circle. However, HF chasing will be much more useful. I mostly want VHF setup inside so I can use it and also play about with packet radio or ASL or APRS etc.

The best solution would be to run coax into the loft and then down into the office. However, that’s going to be difficult. I could just buy more and run another route…the HF one is 30m. Or I get another antenna on the chimney or somewhere else but that’s a hassle too.

Another option is getting a radio that has a remote head (like what you’d put in a car) and then run the cable to the office. Some seem to be able to work with a long cable. Probably the ultimate is then this setup with the base in the attic, and a short run of coax and then a long cable to the office. But there’s no power in the loft.

So for now…nothing…and I run outside to use it with the radio and battery.

I did go through a big journey of buying some other radio which may still be an option but I thought it would be better to use what I have… there is a nice icom radio IC-7100, that can do HF and VHF and has a remote head. So I could run both antenna back to garage then a long cable to the office. It would be a nice head on the desk too. However, the radio I have is a better performer. Anyway still waiting for the other one to sell.

Saturday, 8th February, 2025

Had a glorious day yesterday in the hills with multiple other radio operators. The weather was spectacular. We then met up for tea and sandwiches and a chat in a local cafe afterwards. Got five summits to catch up on writing about.

The lens sold yesterday as well, which is nice. I did think it’s 2/5ths of a Mac mini M4…given this lens has just been sat in a drawer it would be much more useful to have the Mac. Perhaps I can find other things to sell to pay for it all, then there’s nothing to regret or feel bad about spending.

Thursday, 6th February, 2025

I listed the mini pc I bought about a year ago (for a router which never happened) and it sold in about 6 hours. At a decent price too. Lens and radio still linger on.

I’ll have enough now to get a 1.8-525MHz power and SWR meter so I can measure the 2m stuff.

Today I snuck off early to go climb a summit and play radio with a new antenna. The weather was glorious. I was only going to be sat at my desk making a slide deck for a meeting next week, it doesn’t matter where or when I make it. So I told myself I’ll do it this evening. Well it’s now this evening, in fact it’s quite late this evening. I got distracted with packaging up the mini pc (and of course the printer wouldn’t print the label), installing Debian on the computer/server I’m gifting, writing a python script to look up which days has the most activations in Scotland - as tomorrow there are 15 summits planned (with 12 people) and is this going to be a new record? To which the answer is, yes it could be as the most was in August 2012 with 14 unique summits. Several cups of tea, the kittens escaping the kitchen, and browsing public wikis.

Oh right, I said I’d email the slides to my boss for him to review tomorrow. Okay…I’m opening PowerPoint now…

Tuesday, 4th February, 2025

Money can’t buy happiness. But it can buy you a boat.

Everyone in the house seems to be getting ill. I’m secretly, and selfishly, worried someone will be off school on Friday when we’ve organised 7 or 8 ham to go out into the hills nearby, and I’ll miss it.

Well I’ve been sucked into OSM editing. This is a delightful rabbit hole. The problem of working at home with sick kids is there doesn’t always end up being much working 🤣

I noticed my wife ordered a new hat stand. I worry it’ll still not be sturdy but I also did nothing, so it’s my own fault.

Monday, 3rd February, 2025

I found the camera classifieds, not sure how I missed it but was looking in my phone. No biters yet though.

Big decision circles on radios, but now have the IC-705 listed on a ham marketplace. Probably put it on eBay tonight to hope to get it shifted sooner. Started investigating getting coax into the office. Well thinking about it and watching YouTube videos on fishing cables. Should I just pay someone to do it…then it’ll be done…

I did start wondering how effective an antenna in the loft would be. Firstly, it would be infinitely better than my current situation of none, so maybe I should just try it. Would help with the visual impact side. I admit antenna look ugly, sometimes okay and interesting but often not.

IC705 is on ebay, sold some random RAM I had. Trying to sell enough bits to pay for a power and SWR meter, so I can finally test/fix and then sell the 2m Amp I have, and maybe one of the FM radios. I’m impatient now and want everything to sell immediately. Like the lens. It’s got me looking around for more things to sell. It’s surprising how much you can get from just a bunch of random stuff that’s sitting about. I kinda of want to get rid of everything.

5 minutes later…I’m looking at Mac Mini (2018) models. It started with 2012 models, which are cheap but oh so old now. 2018 lets you replace the ram. They’re not super cheap, maybe £250 for a decent one, but potentially could get one when the lens sells (at least there’s no net gain in junk). However, will I just find it annoying and instead get a M4. I have a N100 mini PC that I’ve booted up and letting Windows do 100s of updates. I thought about using it as a “shack” PC, to be plugged into the radio for stuff and then just VNC into it. It’s a bit noisy and slow, although perfectly fine for general desktop usage. I was going to install linux on it, but it comes with Windows 11 Pro and maybe I’m better off selling it. I do have another computer…in fact if you include rpis then maybe 3 which I could use as the shack computer. Anyway, the mac mini could also be that computer. So I could use Photos.app and Tinderbox…well install it and then never use it.

If I could stop buying things. Although I would like some headphones for cycling to work. I’ve not listened to a podcast in ages.

I do really want a big clear out. Takes time, and it’s hard to decide. I should just go to bed. Still not written up the 3 summits I did last week. That’s what I should really do in the evening.

Sunday, 2nd February, 2025

Trimmed, well severely cut, the willow igloo yesterday. Lovely physical activity which gave me motivation to do a bunch of other things. But then it was dinner time, kids bed routine and then I sat down on the computer and didn’t do anything.

Then at 10:30pm I decided to start working on my own logging software. That makes it sound grand. I use wavelog which is very capable but it annoys me having to make a new station location for each summit to capture my SOTA reference, such that I’ve not updated it in ages. I thought about putting them all into a single /P location but then I lose some information, although I gain the auto syncing with various services.

So I’m making my own processor for log files, specifically for SOTA, to create … something. A static site? In the first instance a big json (probably) file of all my activations and contacts. So far I’ve got a script that reads them and then makes a markdown table and html page with a map. That needs refactoring into processing then some page to display all the data. I’ll probably export a subset of the data to each page of my blog and have it make a nice map using observableJS in Quarto, as that’s easier to embed. Hopefully I can make a template which will automatically add that to the end of each post.

I also thought about making it a web app with flask, or maybe even Streamlit. But one step at a time.

Listed the Fuji 18mm f2 for sale. I never use this lens. Quite a few for sale though, so might take a while to sell. Hoping my “best offer” acceptance or using eBay global store will help shift it.

Been debating about the radios and chatting with another ham about it. Think I’ve concluded that I should sell both. Now just the matter of taking photos and listing them. I will put them on the radio used marketplaces so no eBay faff, but if they don’t go then I’ll resort to it. Seems the U.K. photo forums have stopped classifieds?