Follow Tom, WA5KUB live as he drives to the Dayton Hamvention. An absolutely massive exhibition/sale of amateur radio equipment. I wonder what goodies the big manufacturers will release this year?
All posts by j0n
Genealogy
After some conversations with my cousin Stephen, we have finally got off our asses and started getting our family tree (Ronans) sorted out. I happened across this quite nifty little utility that does a good job of drawing all the connections at http://www.simonward.com/cgi-bin/page.pl?family/tree
With a bit of luck and some work, we’ll hopufully manage to make it do something useful
Royster
Going sideways… as usual!
Ntp Vandalism
Have a read of this and you can see why a), one should seek permission, b) hard-coding is a (really) bad idea. If you have any Dlink products mentioned you might take some time to change the defaults.
Mars
Quite an impressive image of Mars can be seen here. This is the first colour image of Mars from the High Resolution imaging Science Experiment onboard NASA’s Mars Reconniasance Orbiter. Very cool!.
Someone somewhere is having fun.
I’m here in work this morning, the weather outside is crap, going through emails I come across this.
“Doing my best to enjoy it all – the weather has been ideal. It started to snow today and so I took it easy, and am now resting for tomorrow which should be a complete champion of a day with a dump of really fresh show.”
Now isn’t that just a kick in the proverbials!
IPv6
I was waiting for a Linux kernel to compile the other day, so I was attempting to use the time to clear out my inbox, when i came across an email on the amsat-bb mailing list. It was from g7iii announcing aprstlm.
A telemetry viewer for APRS telemetry capable satellites. aprstlm connects to an APRS server, and monitors the APRS stream for telemetry packets from the appropriate satellite. It can also (optionally) connect to a predict server, to retrieve details about the satellite, such as longitude, latitude, range, orbit number, and eclipse.
I was interested, as I’ve never really had the time to write one myself (and I’m supplying telemetry data for PCSAT2), so I downloaded the source and had a look. It compiled and ran first time, and, as I’m working in the general area, I fired off an email to Iain asking if he had any interest in adding Ipv6 support.
Shortly thereafter my compile finished, I rebooted and had to go again ( I forgot to include the IDE subsystem). As it was a slow machine I decided to have a go at adding IPv6 support myself.
As it turns out, it wasn’t that difficult. As aprstlm is only new, it was pretty much a clear cut case of following the examples given in this howto. Hopefully he will include my patch in the next release.
That then got me thinking again, why is there still code been written today to support Ipv4 only?
Bungy
Going through the rubbish in my office today, I found a DVD of the bungy I did in Queenstown. It is kind of fun to watch. It is a ‘VOB’, as I haven’t re-encoded it, so you might want to right click on the link and “Save as”.
Home
Its dark, bloody dark, how depressing. When we left Auckland we had to be careful how long we stood in the sun, when we arrived back in Ireland, it was raining and surprisingly dark. This week, the forecast is for a mostly dry and cold, which will hopefully also mean that it will be brighter.
Something that interested me in New Zealand, was that in almost every large town, there was at least one BP filling station with a solar panel covered forecourt. It turns out this is an initiative by BP. Quite interesting.
Homeward bound.
Well folks here we are in Sydney airport waiting for our flight. 6 weeks has really flown by.
Yesterday morning we left Rotorua and headed up towards Auckland for our final night in New Zealand. On the way we dropped into the Skyswing, as it was friday the thirteenth, I wasn’t so sure. We went up along on the gondola and had a look. I decided to have a go anyway. I was strapped in and then the “it was working yesterday” video camera stopped working. Not a good sign. By this time a small crowd was looking on (I was the first to go). The ride itself was pretty good I must say, on this one you have to pull the release mechanism yourself. It turns out that I have a propensity to swear a lot, this was borne out by me uttering “Holy Sh1t” (it was a great view honest), before pulling the release cord and yeeha 150kph here we come.
The rest of the spin up to Auckland was pretty tame in comparison (even with Dee driving), we had a look at a 4×4 place, but even Dee said it looked lame so we continued on for a quick look around the shops before they closed for the evening.
This morning we just had a look at the marina and downtown again (in case we missed anything). Then I had a go at what is called the Skyjump at Skycity. It’s basically a restrained (to 75kph) fall/jump from 192 metres (600 ft). The worst part is walking out the glass doors (still clipped to the platform), walking out on the platform, and then looking straight down (stomach flips a few times). The landing platform looks awful, awful small. Anyways, did it, have the tee-shirt, and then Dee decided she had enough of me trying silly things like this and we headed out to the airport.
C’yall soon!