Thursday, 8th May, 2025

I got distracted the other night (haha) and made a little web app for finding unactivated POTA (parks on the air) sites. Other people have made these and better ones but I also found out some had data errors and ended up scripting a search across 10,000s sites worldwide to make a list and report it to the organisers.

What was I doing?

This guy has some really interesting projects, and very well documented online. A guy a work is building the 5600 synth, and this led me to the site.

Think I’ve decided on the tumbling barrels - using 110mm soil pipe and end caps. Although the same guy at work has a national geographic tumbler and said just buy that. But that’s no fun. I should order the parts so I can make it this weekend.

I was reading the thread on Forever Notes system on mpu, and it makes me want to get a Mac. It’s because it reminds me of how useful a Mac is out of the box for people. Windows may have gotten slightly better but it was really only an OS and not an ecosystem. Perhaps it used to be better with MS Works that often came with computers but it’s not useful as is. You can pretty much go everything with the stock apps. Now you probably don’t want to but I think that fact sets the bar high for 3rd party apps and why they’re often so good.

I want a Mac because I want my computer to be useful and not a collection of random shit that is sort of fine. The problem always comes back to that I don’t have “my” computer. It’s mine but everyone uses it, and I don’t think they care or want to use a Mac. So then I go down the rabbit hole of laptop or Mac mini and KVMs or VNC or etc. and then things just start to fall apart. I could try out just using an iPad. My iPad has been acquired by my daughter and has basically been destroyed after it fell on the garage floor but even before then it was sticky and yuk. Now I’ve abandoned it. In fact I should probably reset it and set it up on her account…then at least she can’t authorise things for herself and still be constrained by screen time. So she’ll love that.

Of course the real issue is that I don’t really need it. Or use half the stuff. I also want to spend less time on a computer. I’m not sure I really have that many notes for a system. I usually just add a new note and have one big list.