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.