Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
On the heels of Barcamp Charleston is the Charleston Uber User Group (CHUUG) meeting November 21 at Jack Russell Software. On the schedule are presentations on Akka by Brian Gilbert and Docker by Andre Dublin.
Feel free to stop in and join your fellow geeks!
Another BarcampCHS has come and gone. Got off to a bit of a late start (again), but once things were rolling, things seemed to go pretty smoothly from what I saw. There were some tasty breakfast items, and some great coffee by Coastal Coffee Roasters.
I limited myself to doing just one session this year so that I could actually go see some other sessions. Had orignally planned to talk about SELinux, but I couldn’t get that together in time so I went back to the Hamcamp session, and spent an hour talking to a few people interested in amateur radio. Tom/AJ4UQ helped out with a short demonstration of his RTL-SDR receiver and answered a few questions.
The first session I went to was one on nodecopter and node.js by Tom Wilson (@twilson63) from Jack Russell Software. Very cool with demonstrations of the nodecopter flying around and doing some simple tricks. They look like a lot of fun to play with.
For the afternoon sessions, I went to one given by Chad Hobbes (@itsallvoodoo) who talked about Arduino, Raspberry Pi and Beagle Bone boards and the differences between them. Interesting and informative, and it made me want to get some and start playing with them. I’m pretty sure there are a lot of radio related things they could be put to use doing.
The last session I went to was on digital audio signal processing by Ted Tanner (@tctjr). His presentation was a little mathy, but pretty easily digestible. Learned a few things and got my interest back up in learning more about SciPy/NumPy.
At the after party, I ended up in a discussion with Nathan Zorn (@thepug) and Dan DeMaggio about how to construct some inexpensive buoys to determine wave heights and direction, primarily to use for predicting good surf conditions. It was fun tossing ideas back and forth between the three of us.
And yes, I wore my blue Star Trek robe to BarcampCHS again this year (photo by @HeatherSolos).
In addition to the air variable capacitors, three of the parts bins contained a bunch of pre-wound antenna coils, including these that looked unused. One of them even had an instruction sheet.
Calrad CLS Loopstick.
They consist of two coils, one wound on top of the other and what seems to be a ferrite rod inside that can be tuned by turning the screwdriver or even a knob at the other end.
One was also in a box, a Miller A-5495-A with two separate coils and a capacitor. Looks like it has a tuning range of 540 – 1700 kHz, which is the AM broadcast band.
This one was tunable as well by turning the screw at the end.
Now, if I can find some Ge diodes, I wonder if I could use these in a crystal radio…
While exploring the component bins, I came across a couple of air variable capacitors, one of which was still in the box and didn’t look like it had ever been used. A Hammarlund APC-50-B air padding capacitor, complete with knob. Capacitance range is 3.9-50 pF. Looks in really good condition and turns pretty smoothly.
The other air variable capacitor I found is a little more anonymous but also looked like it hadn’t been used before. One of the rotor plates at the very back was slightly bent causing it to make contact with a stator plate. Aside from that it seems in good condition and turns pretty well.
I’ll have to see if I can straighten out that one plate. Would be cool to use it in something.
Five days after the wisdom teeth came out and the swelling is much improved. Finishing off the last of the antibiotics the dentist prescribed and weaning myself off the ibuprofen.
Still eating mostly soft foods. Still have to be careful of food getting stuck where teeth used to be. A gentle swishing and rinsing with some warm water after eating usually takes care of that though.
Biggest problem now is that my molars hurt (the ones that are left) and are pretty temperature sensitive, particularly the on the lower right. Makes chewing difficult. Still, I think I’m making pretty decent progress healing up. Ready to be back to normal though.