Author: scruss

  • Back in Baltimore

    I’m back in Charm City (which I don’t think anyone actually calls the place) for a solar conference. Catherine lived here for a couple of years, volunteering at the Learning Bank (possibly defunct) and at Mercy Corps. I used to visit here a lot, but it’s changed. The walk from Inner Harbor to Fells Point is unrecognizably gentrified. At least The Sound Garden and Brick Oven Pizza are still there.

  • happypoppies

    They never last very long …

  • Tallgrass Pixels

    Tallgrass Pixels | photography by Don Palmer is rather good. Don (W0PSK) lives near the Flint Hills in Kansas.

  • Only in Canada …

    Pink Snow in June
    Pink Snow in June

    A pile of candy-coloured snow on a hot day in June is no surprise to many Canadians. The photo location may help those outside the country, though it helps to know what a “community recreation centre” is.

     

  • Fixed WordPress memory problems on 1and1

    A ½-cup of Pasta
    A ½-cup of Pasta

    Well … sorta. I can’t upload any size of image, but previously I was limited to about 0.3MP (640×480). Now I can upload up to about 1.5MP without the dreaded Memory error. I can also use WordPress’s Auto Upgrade feature again.

    Daddy Hogwash’s “WordPress 3.0 Upgrade Complete after Solving Fatal Error: Out of Memory Issue” is what fixed it. His suggested number of 40M fixed the auto upgrade problem, while I upped it to 64M to get larger images to work with my host, 1and1.com.

     

    Update: There is no fix for this. Memory limit on my kind of hosting is ~34M. Any higher is not allowed. This seemed to work for a while, now doesn’t.

  • Banjo at home

    Got some better pictures of the banjo yesterday. And sounds, too!

    Please excuse the ropeyness of the following playing; I’d never played fretless until I built this:

  • Gourd Banjo workshop, day 5: the last day and the finished product

    Be glad you can't smell Jeff cutting bone on the bandsaw
    Finished bone tailpiece
    Gourd with neck test-fitted
    Pegs cut, drilled and doped
    Mostly strung
    Tailpiece, tail gut and cherry bridge
    Jeff's workshop
    Jeff helps Michael move some tacks
    Michael and Jeff
    Michael, Jeff, me — and our banjos
    The finished banjo
  • Gourd Banjo Workshop, Day 4

    Sam the shop dog
    My gourd, with the skin still wet
    Jeff and Michael's gourds
    My gourd, dried now
    Oiled necks drying in the sun
  • Gourd Banjo Workshop: the third day

    Sam
    Gourd: neck hole
    Gourd: neck and dowel stick holes
    Rough neck fit to gourd
    Lipstick for fit checking
    Final gourd/neck fit
    Almost looks like a banjo
    Artisanal Sound Port Installer
    Gourd with sound port
    Rooster
  • Gourd Banjo Workshop: Day 2

    Finishing tuning pegs with the devil's pencil sharpener
    Reaming the peg head
  • Gourd Banjo Workshop, day 1

    I’m taking a gourd banjo building workshop at Jeffrey Menzies’ place up near Innisfil.

    Uncut Gourds
    My gourd, cut and faced
    Rough neck blank
    Jeff removing everything that doesn't look like a banjo neck
  • who loves the sun?

    After my solar course, I’ve been messing about with the UO SRML: Sun chart program. It shows sun angles and day lengths throughout the year.

    Toronto: where I live
    Glasgow: where I'm from. Not much sun there, but looong summer days
    Phoenix, AZ is pretty sunny
    I think I'd freak out if I lived at the equator: every day is nearly the same length!
    Mombasa, Kenya: point your modules north!
    Not much sun in far north Alert; sometimes, the sun doesn't set — sometimes it doesn't rise
    I don't think I'd mind living in Glasgow — Glasgow, Guyana, that is.
  • Space Gamelan

    I picked this up just before midnight last night around 7305 MHz. It’s probably a digital mode of some kind, but I like it: 7305mhz-201105290357z.

  • Parsing ADIF with Perl

    In ham radio, we’re plagued with a data log standard called ADIF, the Amateur Data Interchange Format. It certainly is amateur, in the bad sense of the word. It looks like someone once saw SGML in a fever dream, and wrote down what little they remembered.

    Anyway, the following Perl snippet will parse an ADIF file into an array of hashes. It was based on some code from PerlMonks that kinda worked. This works for all the file (singular) I tested.

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
    # modified from perlmonks - TedPride - http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=559222
    use strict;
    
    my ( $temp, @results ) = '';
    
    ### Fast forward past header
    while (<>) {
      last if m/<eoh>\s+$/i;
    }
    
    ### While there are records remaining...
    while (<>) {
      $temp .= $_;
    
      ### Process if end of record tag reached
      if (m/<eor>\s+$/i) {
        my %hash;
        $temp =~ s/\n//g;
        $temp =~ s/<eoh>.*//i;
        $temp =~ s/<eor>.*//i;
        my @arr = split( '<', $temp );
        foreach (@arr) {
          next if (/^$/);
          my ( $key, $val ) = split( '>', $_ );
          $key =~ s/:.*$//;
          $hash{$key} = $val unless ( $key eq '' );
        }
        push @results, \%hash;
        $temp = '';
      }
    }
    
    # example: just pull out CALL and GRIDSQUARE for each record that has them
    foreach (@results) {
      next unless exists( $_->{GRIDSQUARE} );
      print join( "\t", $_->{CALL}, $_->{GRIDSQUARE} ), "\n";
    }
    
    exit;
    

    If you want some real code to manipulate ADIF files, adifmerg works.

  • The Accidental DXer

    Update: I have a much better Ham Radio QSO Map now.

    I had modest expectations when I set up my antenna and rig. I might’ve expected to work some of Canada, the northern US states, and maybe far western Europe, and that’s about it. But this map, extracted from my logs, shows different:

    New Zealand, Ukraine, Patagonia, Greenland, Brazil, the Azores … way beyond what I expected.

    I know the map’s not quite right. The lines should really be curved to be great circle lines on a Mercator map. Also, the NZ contact path was probably roughly SW through Hawaii. This round world doesn’t work on a flat page.

  • Baby groundhogs on Ashtonbee

    Catherine alerted me that there were baby groundhogs behind the S. A. Armstrong factory on Ashtonbee.

  • bixing

    I’ve been using BIXI every day, despite the rain. They’re slightly different from the test-ride bikes; the ex-Montreal ones had 8 gears, while Toronto flatlanders only get three. The brakes work better too; I’m expecting to get rear-ended any day at a stop sign, since I seem to be the only one who even tries to stop at these things.

    I’ve worked out a nifty route down St George and Beverley across the lanes to Simcoe and Queen. Takes me 10 minutes down, 12 back up. Fun!

  • Life in (Feld) Hell: The Dot-Matrix Printer Heard ‘Round the World

    I’m a bit of a sucker for odd digital radio modes at the moment. Sometimes, a whole new set of tones comes through the waterfall, and I’m left wondering what it is. I’d read about Hellschreiber before, and thought that no-one could possibly want to use a mode that turned your radio into a very slow dot matrix printer.

    Last night, I sent out CQ on 40m, and was immediately answered by Don (WB8MKH) in Michigan. We had a good long talk, and Don let me know about the Feld Hell Club and their monthly sprints. I didn’t think I’d be much for contesting, but this sets my nerd whiskers aquiver.