Compare and contrast:
Same game, 404% more expensive on the Nook. No free demo versions from B&N, either, but they do want to sell you books. Maybe before completely spinning off the Nook brand, they should let us run Android properly on our capable little tablets. Hey, sure beats dying of dysentery …
XLD‘s “Import Tags From a Text” is teh nifty for importing new or small-distribution CD (like Glass Flesh) metadata. Just paste in the track listing, define the format, and hit Apply. Done!
I like epost. I’d like it even more if they hurried up and processed my direct payment ability — which required a form and a void cheque mailed to an address in Toronto — but it’s a pretty good service. I get my bills, viewable and payable online, on the day of issue. No paper. This is good.
This is good because every single filing container I buy eventually ends up full of (paid) bills and financial administrivia. Less paper = less messy Stewart = happy Stewart. Some messes, like my electronics table, could be classed as glorious, however, and therefore joyous in their creation and use. Not all tidiness is good.
So I got my first Visa bill by e-post. Yay! Reviewed it, paid it. No hassle. But since this a PDF facsimile of my bill, something mighty odd has happened to my address:
It’s a perfect substitution cypher of my name and address. I’ve been out of the prepress industry for long enough not to immediately recognize it as a font encoding error. I’m confused why it might have A, T, E & N, but no M. Odd indeed.
Thanks to Seneca, I now have this noisy, slow behemoth in my basement.
It’s kind of neat that Ubuntu supports this 24 year old printer out of the box.
For a reason best known to the Unicode consortium, there is now the symbol U+1F4A9 “Pile of Poo”: 💩. If you happen to create a web page with this delightful character in the title, Firefox does something special:
Yep, that’s a smiley face poo, a bit like Mr Hankey. Oh dear.
Actually, it seems it might be an OS X Emoji thing, because Safari renders it in the title like that, and in the text as (enlarged to show texture):
iOS has it covered too:
Blackberry’s browser just shows a small black square. Android, rather sensibly, shows an empty square. It must be an Apple thing.
“Thanks†go to tchrist‘s comment in unicode – Why does modern Perl avoid UTF-8 by default? for alerting me to this character, and letting us know about the Symbola font that supports it. Yeah, cheers Tom …
Following on from Creating secure digital QSL cards with your LoTW certificate, here’s a Bash script to generate encrypted signed PDF QSLs. You will need to edit the certificate file name, the QSL blank file name, your call sign, your LoTW password and the PDF encryption password. After doing so, please keep the script safe, as whoever has your LoTW password can pretend to be you.
The only checks that this script doesn’t do (and probably should) are if you have pdftk and PortableSigner executables in your path. PortableSigner is rather weird the way it runs; you need to specify full paths for all files, or it dies.
The script is called like this:
mkdqsl.sh callsign date utc mhz mode report
for example:
mkdqsl.sh VE3KPK 2011-10-02 2341 7.03581 CW 499
Code below the fold.
I found the good old Kodak Photo CD sample images on the site linked through from the photo. Test images for MFSK image radio transmission, here we come!
I got this CD with OS/2 Warp back in early 1995. My machine didn’t like Warp at all; it repeatedly fork-bombed in the file manager, so it was essentially a £40 paperweight. So burned was I with commercial software that I bought a Slackware distro so I could run something more fun that Windows 3.11. I’ve been happily running Linux since then.
Hams have sent out QSL cards since the hobby began. It may be less popular than it used to be, because mail seems slow now (especially when QSL bureaux are used), and there are online alternatives like eQSL, QRZ.com, and the ARRL‘s Logbook of the World (LoTW).
LoTW has been criticized for being too complex. It uses an X.509 public key signature to verify your submitted log entries, and a QSL is confirmed when the other party sends in a matching entry. In a way, it’s rather elegant, as the LoTW server does the work of matching the entries, so QSLs “magically” appear in your log. You don’t get a fancy QSL card in the mail or on your screen, and I think a lot of users miss that.
X.509 might be a bit unweildy, but props to ARRL for setting up a industry standard, robust (-ish; X.509 has its flaws), general purpose signing infrastructure. Since other file formats — notably PDF — support X.509 signing, you can use your LoTW certificate to make other data tamper-evident.
Here I document a method of creating a digital QSL card that can be e-mailed, and subsequently verified by the recipient as being legitimate. Any alterations to the file will break the signature, and the file will just appear as a regular PDF (or not display properly). The process can be used to sign any other Acrobat file. There are probably more streamlined ways to do this, but I only came up with it last night as the beginning of a scriptable solution.
You will need:
(Quite a bit of what follows was learnt from the two pages Your first PDF form with Scribus – Scribus Wiki and filling in forms with pdftk, so thanks to the authors of those for the guidance.)
First, make your QSL card. Since you’re not going to print this, it can be any size you want, but postcard size is standard. At the very least, create spaces for the recipient callsign, the date, the time, frequency, mode used, and signal report.
Under these headings, I’ve made six PDF text form fields. Scribus creates form fields like text frames/boxes. I used plain text fields (which are selected by this icon: 
), centred text, and with the name of the field set from the PDF Options → Field Properties context menu. Each field needs a different name. I used callsign, date, utc, mhz, mode, and report.
Save your QSL card as PDF. It might be an idea to check it to see if the form fields are really there and editable:
Now it starts to get really nerdy. Adobe specified the Forms Data Format (FDF) to allow PDF form data to be slung around. FDF looks a bit like PostScript or raw PDF:
%FDF-1.2 1 0 obj << /FDF << /Fields 2 0 R>> >> endobj 2 0 obj [<< /T (callsign) /V (VE3KPK) >> << /T (date) /V (2011-10-02) >> << /T (mhz) /V (7.03581) >> << /T (mode) /V (CW) >> << /T (report) /V (499) >> << /T (utc) /V (2341) >> ] endobj trailer << /Root 1 0 R >> %%EOF
If you think of the T & V values above as Tag and Value, you can see that the file defines callsign=VE3KPK, date=2011-10-02, mode=CW, and so on. This step can be easily scripted. If you’re not sure what the fields are called, pdftk has a “dump_data_fields” option that spits out the field names as plain text.
pdftk is also used to put the data from the FDF file into the PDF template. It’s a slightly hairy command line:
pdftk QSL-blank.pdf fill_form VE3KPK.fdf output QSL-VE3KPK.pdf flatten
Here the source file is QSL-blank.pdf, the FDF data is VE3KPK.fdf, and the output is to QSL-VE3KPK.pdf. The flatten option turns the pdf form into regular, uneditable PDF. (These details are from a real QSO, by the way, and by utter coincidence I’m writing this in a hotel in Ken VE3KPK’s home town in Northern Ontario.)
Checking that this worked in Adobe Reader:
For many people this is probably enough (or perhaps, too much already!) but I really want to have a digital QSL card that will stand up to some scrutiny. This is where your LoTW certificate file comes in.
PortableSigner is a java application for signing PDF files. It seems quite happy signing the files made in this workflow. It can run from the command line, or as a windowed application:
You use your .p12 signature file and its password to sign the PDF. Once the file is signed, you can send it to your contact, and they can prove (and hopefully, any certification/contest agency will agree) that the contact was confirmed.
Viewing the signed document is deeply unimpressive:
It’s not such a big deal that Reader says that “the validity of the certification is unknown”. It’s just that Adobe doesn’t have the ARRL’s certificate loaded into everyone’s reader (what!? mock outrage!) and so it doesn’t match a certificate it knows about. You have to dig a bit deeper into the signature panel to check out who is responsible for this.
Well, that’s a start; at least it was signed by someone with my e-mail address. There’s more under Show Signature Properties:
There’s the ARRL signature in there. Buried deep in another properties tree is my callsign; can’t find it today, but I saw it in there last night. Either way, the digital QSL PDF is now signed and certified that it came from me, as an ARRL LoTW user.
Hey Citrix, just quite changing your product names, willya? How are we supposed to find your ^(*(&&*^(&$# plugin if it’s called something different this week from last. At the one place I’ve worked, it was initially called “ICA Client”, then the mysterious “Xen”, and now it’s called bloody “Receiver“. Good word choice there. Not like “receiver” has ever been used for anything else before. Gah!
Anyway, now I’m a bit calm, if you are trying to connect to a Citrix server from OS X Lion, this worked for me: Citrix Receiver for Mac 11.4. Yes, you’ll need to register to download it, which is a royal pain in the bum. And for all of Citrix’s “o we are TEH SEKYOOR and care deeply about ur securitee“, they send your password in plain text, by e-mail. Gits. They should be forced to watch the eye-painting guy video (tnx regretsy) five times for this crime.
I guess my ancient post  When you really haven’t chosen not to trust: Citrix, Mac OS X, and Entrust certificates can get retired now, though it still gets a ton of hits. The vast number of semi-irrelevant links in this post is in no way an attempt to make up for that. Oh no.
After being used as a wall-hanging for approximately 20 years, then surviving an intercontinental trip in my luggage, the Synertek SYM-1 is running. I think a few segments of the display are iffy, but it responds to the keyboard and beeps. Next step is to hook up the serial port.
These single boards sure do produce a lot of RFI. Waving the almost exactly ten year old radio near it produces howls and churrs.
A UK 50p coin is just perfect for blocking the snooze light on a MacBook:
Those seven sides stop it rolling away.
Last night I picked up a weird signal on 14.074 MHz that wasn’t quite Olivia, and wasn’t quite Contestia. After a while I worked out it was MFSK16; but only after I started calling CQ nearby in Olivia and the original caller, Don (W5VRX) in Arlington, TX, told me what it was.
Don told me that MFSK could send pictures, and that Fldigi supported it well. It’s a bit slow, can be subject to noise, but you can get quite clean results. Here’s what Don sent me:
Got a couple of spare NOOKcolor Charging Cables, since (grar! gnash!) it uses its own special twist on the USB Micro-B connector that just doesn’t work with anything else. They came in a middling size box, and then each cable was packaged thus:
That’s a 120×75mm box with 70×70mm blocked out, leaving only 50mm for the cable. Stay wasteful, Barnes & Noble …
I’m talking about radio next week at TLUG. More deets: Meetings:2011-08 – GTALUG.
The slides are here: http://scruss.com/talks/02011/radio/
So we’ve all got our shiny Google+ accounts now. I’d use it, if it weren’t for this annoyance: every few seconds, it pops up this:
Thing is, I don’t want to chat with people. If I click either button, it comes back. It won’t go away for more than a minute. I’m annoyed.
OooOOooh! teh pritty! I’ve temporarily rooted my Nook Color to run the latest version of Android from microSD using the following instructions: [ROM][CM7] [v1.3] Size-agnostic SD Card image and CM7 installer for SD Cards. – xda-developers. It’s a bit slow.
Perhaps the hardest part was getting this screenshot. I got it using the Android SDK ddms tool, which took some hitting with a virtual Stillson wrench to get going. If, on OS X, the command adb devices returns a blank list, you will need to add the Nook’s USB vendor ID to the ~/.android/adb_usb.ini config file. Stop the server (adb kill-server), then enter the following command:
echo 0x2080 >> ~/.android/adb_usb.ini
then restart the adb server (adb start-server). adb devices should return something like:
List of devices attached 2010830023232004 Â Â device
and now all tethered Android joy can be yours.
