This is flat-out amazing: WPS: PostScript for the Web.
Author: scruss
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Awk day of the week function
Yet another in my series of awk functions no-one but me will ever use:
function dow(year, month, day) { # Modified from C Snippets "calsupp.c" public domain by Ray McVay # http://www8.cs.umu.se/~isak/snippets/calsupp.c # returns 0-6 where 0 == sunday # tested over 24000 days in range of unix timestamp, 1970-2035 day_of_week = 0; if (month <= 2) { month += 12; year--; } day_of_week = (day + month * 2 + int(((month + 1) * 6) / 10) + year + int(year / 4) - int(year / 100) + int(year / 400) + 2); day_of_week = day_of_week % 7; return ((day_of_week ? day_of_week : 7) - 1); }
Basically, all this does is calculate a Julian day number, then take its remainder modulo 7. I’d seen an example that parsed the output of ‘cal’. That’s one way of doing it; not necessarily mine.
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Worked All States – by my standards, at least
So I’ve managed to talk to at least one person in every US state. This is Quite A Big Deal for a new(ish) ham. To be more specific, I’ve done this using one mode – PSK31 – which makes it slightly better nerd-tuned.
But you’re going to just have to take my word for it now. In order to get a certificate, I have to get the 50-ish responds to log their details either on eQSL or ARRL’s Logbook of the World. And this is a bit more difficult.
On eQSL, I’m at 49/50. My lone North Dakotan QSO was from someone mobile from out of state, and eQSL doesn’t handle that well. North Dakota is very sparsely populated, and there’s very seldom anyone on the air from there. Every time I look on PSK Reporter, the emptiness of the state glares at me …
LotW is more of a problem. It says I still have ten more states to go. While it’s a very elegant system, the setup process for LotW is just a bit too complex for most people.
So here are my maps:
VA3PID Worked All States 
VA3PID Worked All States: West 
VA3PID Worked All States: Central 
VA3PID Worked All States: East I’d like to apologise to Vermont, whose presence is rather noted by its absence from the map. I’m actually surprised that more states ended up with all of their QSOs appearing inside, as:
- Towns tend to be by rivers, so that’s where you’ll find more hams
- Rivers often mark state boundaries
- Ham locations are given as grid squares, which are a few kilometres across
- Rivers are wiggly, and don’t respect arbitrary boundaries.
Absent making a blocky, 8-bit like political map, we’ll have to make do with these failings sometimes.
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best fail whale
▄██████████████▄â–█▄▄▄▄█▌ ██████▌▄▌▄â–â–▌███▌▀▀██▀▀ ████▄█▌▄▌▄â–â–▌▀███▄▄█▌ ▄▄▄▄▄██████████████▀
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help help I’m being harassed by the New Democratic Party
You’d think that Canada’s New Democrats would be a bit more respectful and techno-savvy, but for the life of me, I can’t get them to stop sending me e-mail. I donated last year, but I don’t want to get updates any more.
I’ve hit the unsubscribe page five times, and received confirmation each time:- on Fri, 12 Aug 2011 17:18:04
- on Fri, 11 Nov 2011 11:57:58
- on Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:07:21
- on Sat, 28 Jan 2012 14:25:09
- on Sun, 29 Jan 2012 11:35:33
I’ve now sent something via the contact form. Do I have to fax them, too?
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i liek this alot
Back when I was paid to really care about spelling, I made a crude little UK-US spelling equivalency dictionary. Typeset it in LaTeX, too:
I found the source files last night (including the entire database for the long out-of-print source book, in its own odd little text format) and I’m amazed how little of it I still understand. This is a shame, as I’m about to embark on another little typesetting project of my own … -
keep it short, keep me sweet
Most of my radio communications use a text mode called PSK-31. It’s popular and survives a lot of interference, but fast it isn’t. I tested sending 1000 random characters, and it took 5′ 33″. That’s about this speed:
Because the mode is so slow, I prefer to keep my transmissions and macros short, stopping just shy of Morse’s telegraphically incomprehensible VY FB CPY OM. My heart sinks when I’m in a QSO, and I see the beginning of a huge piece of macro text being fired at me. A one-way long conversation (like the dude who sent the entire wikipedia article about his hometown) isn’t a ragchew, it’s a barrage. If someone started wittering on at you for 15 minutes without a chance for you to say anything, no-one would want to talk to them. So please, check your macros, think before you type, and we’ll have more and more pleasant contacts. -
S100 things
I think I like the S100. It’s small, fast, handles well, and has a bunch of goofy features (like lomofy, fisheye, pseudo-tilt-shift, ultravivid). It also has a semi-useful HDR mode, and best of all, a built in GPS for photo-tagging. This does kind of eat batteries, though, so I’ll have to remember to keep it turned off unless I need it.
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fun trick noisemaker
I just built my first Atari Punk Console, a simple LM556-based noisemaker beloved of the circuit-bending crowd (and pretty much avoided by everyone else). Jimmie P Rodgers sells a nice board (or kit), and I bought a few boards a while back, and only just built one up now.
The board’s a nicely finished little thing:
… and yes, it really only needs three resistors, three capacitors, and the 556, plus the control pots, power, speaker and all-important on/off button. The APC sounds a little like a drunken, flatulent bee banging around in a lager can, so you really want to be able to turn this thing off.
Jimmie designed this to fit in an Altoids tin, but Catherine had discarded a LUSH Massage Bar Tin which looked just about the right size. The tin is made of butter-soft aluminium, so it’s easy to start holes in it with the awl on my Dutch Army knife. It’s bigger than an Altoids tin, so you don’t have to fight to get things in. Lastly, the LUSH tin is nicely curved, and fits in your hands well.
Wit the lid closed, it looks like this:
And the sound? Well …
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QRM Cat
Was having a nice chat with Gary, WB0RUR, this morning on 40m PSK-31. His signal was clear, he’s a very experienced operator — yet he was jumping all over the waterfall with every transmission. I couldn’t understand why, but after his signal jumped, stopped, started, moved again, I caught a very brief TX: “… QRM … cat”
Gary explained:
“Sorry about that … he stepped on the keyboard and stopped my transmission and also bumped the VFO … so I’m probably moving all over frequency.”
QRM would be a great name for a cat.
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archival, snarkival
We live in a Scarborough neighbourhood, so that means that people use the side door. Front door’s for people who know no better. So we need a Side Door sign to guide the unschooled.On the left is one I just printed. The one on the right — same printer (HP Photosmart C5180), same paper — has been taped to the glass on our front-facing screen door since December 2007, in full sunlight. It’s barely legible. (And yes, it has slightly different fonts/layout; the original was done on a PC in OpenOffice, the replacement in LibreOffice on a Mac.)
So whenever an inkjet crows about “Archival Inks!”, remember: four years to fade to white. Do you need your images to last longer?
