Posts

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QST magazines available

Last summer at one of the radio club meetings, one of the older hams brought in a small stack of QST magazines that he didn’t want any more and asked if I’d be interested in them. Being newly licensed, I said sure!

I’ve gone through them a few times now, and with Connie’s collection of QST, these are duplicates now so I thought I’d pass them along to someone else to enjoy.

There aren’t a whole lot of them. I have Oct 2011-Feb 2012 and April-May 2012. Would prefer to hand them off to someone local, but I’d also consider shipping them.

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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.