Author: Eugene

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Softrock Lite II ready to put on the air

At long last I’ve finally gotten around to putting the coax and interface cord on the Softrock Lite II receiver. The cord to plug into the sound card came from some old discarded speakers, and the coax is a short length of RG58 with an SMA connector that I picked up a while ago. I was originally going to use it for an antenna project for the VX8-DR, but figured I could always get another one later.

Softrock Lite II ready to get on the air

Now I just need to find some time to get it on the air. If I want to use the antenna, I’ll have to find an SMA (female) to SO-239 adapter, or make some jumper wires to connect the ends.

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PDF printing and Google Chrome oddness

Encountering some odd behaviour on the home computer with Fedora 18 that I have to dig into some more. I’m not sure if it’s Fedora 18 related, just something really odd going on with my installation, or some old config left over from versions ago.

Google Chrome (stable and beta) has been doing this weird thing on some pages where the page renders, but only a black page is displayed. I can move the mouse around and see where links are because they show up in the status bar, but everything is black. Page source is there and everything looks like it should render fine but nothing. Reinstalling Chrome and deleting ~/.config/google-chrome/ doesn’t seem to have helped. Very odd.

The other problem I’ve run into recently is printing PDF files. Pages with just text print out fine, but if there are any images on the page, only the first few centimeters of the page prints and the rest is blank. It’s like the printer is being told to print the page before it’s received all the data. Kind of reminds me of an out of memory issue. It’s not the printer, because I can print the same document from my laptop without any problems. More oddness.

Haven’t really had much time to sit down and do any serious troubleshooting. They’ve been more like annoying inconveniences than anything. Will have to sit down and do some troubleshooting.

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Reworking an old project

Now that I have my equipment database project living comfortably over at code.google.com, it’s time to think about how I want to rewrite it and what I want to do it with. The new version of whatever I end up creating will live over at github, since that’s what all the cool kids seem to be using these days.

Since PHP is what I know, it’s the most likely candidate for this new version (although I’m open to using something else). Leaning heavily towards using some kind of framework for it, although I haven’t picked one out yet.

I had a thought that I could maybe use Drupal to take care of the front end stuff with the back end being handled by modules that I would create. Each piece of equipment would be a Drupal ‘node’ and modules could be used to create the reports as ‘views’. I need to dig into Drupal dev more to see if something like this would be viable.

Lots of possibilities to choose from. All of them will force me to expand my rudimentary programming skills earn more skill levels in programming.

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I’m a VE!

My ARRL VE (Volunteer Examiner) credentials arrived in the mail today! Got a nice certificate to hang on the wall and a laminated card to wear at testing sessions. Now I can help out at testing sessions and help certify new hams.

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Children’s Day

Connie introduced me to the idea of Children’s Day, a holiday her mom came up with for the kids. It sounded like a great idea: have a little holiday for the kids in between the birthdays and Christmas and decided she wanted to do it for the godchildren, so she set to planning.

We had Children’s day at the house last weekend and it was a lot of fun. I cooked up some hamburgers for the big kids, and hot dogs for the little kids. We had lunch and I got challenged by a 9 year old (“Mr. Eugene, you’re a pretty good cook. Almost as good as me!”). We might have to have a throw down at some point.

 Ellie tried to pull a fast one over us with hand washing.

“Did you wash your hands?”
“Yes”
“What colour was the soap”
“… (goes back to wash with soap)”
(long pause, bit of back and forth moving)
“Miss Connie, how do you turn on the water?”

After lunch we watched the kids run around searching for their presents. Almost from the start, it became a race to see who could find all their presents first. They were more interested in the clue for the next present than the one they just found, which made it all the more fun to watch. At one point, I saw Mark spike the wrapping paper from one of his presents onto the coffee table, like he just scored a touchdown.

After all the presents were found, the kids kind of settled down to check out their surprises. Ellie had me help her with colouring in one of the colouring books. Then Miss Connie brought down the big box of Legos, and we spent some time playing with that. It’s been a while since I played with Legos.

We helped the kids make banana splits for dessert, went outside to throw a ball around a few times (which inevitably turned into game of Monkey in the Middle) and even played fetch with Simba for a bit.

Eventually it was time to give the kids back so off they went back home, minus the Nerf gun.

I think all the kids (big and little and even the furry 4-legged ones) had a great time playing, except for the cat who didn’t seem to like all the activity very much. The only casualty was a crayon that Simba snuck off the coffee table and snarfed down before we caught him. I guess when you’re a Lab, everything smells like food.