Copasetic Flow

 I wandered a bit down a rabbit hole this morning when I was innocently enough thinking about teaching trig to kids using a smartphone for building height measurement. Turns out there's all sorts of information about phones that can tell what angle they're at using a gyrscope. It also turns out that my phone, a Samsung S23+ uses an STMicroElectronics MEMs gyroscope. Anyway, here are the cool resources: STMicro gyroscopes page has a very nice chapterized video on how all this works. I could not find the same videos on YouTube. If you're looking for the physics reasoning behind the devices, this is the page. Here's the Mozilla API for accessing this kind of thing in your phone via JavaScript. Here's the Google specific API . Here's the STMicro intro video to MEMs from YouTube Expect to see more soon.

 I've been following the introduction of RSE wire on VE6LK's YourTube channel. It's pretty spiffy stuff. It has nickel coated carbon fibers as its core and a rope-like insulator. Basically, it's cable that behaves like a rope. It can also support up to 300 pounds without breaking. The tensile sttrength is what caught my attention. Could RSE be used as a dipole with Project TouCans? Remember, when TouCans is used with a dipole, all 22 ounces or so of the rig go up in the dipole as well. I haven't worked out how to actually connect the wire to the antenna terminals yet, but assuming I could, and I pulled the RSE taught over a couple of tree branches, could it hold up the rig? It's time to do some physics. I asked GPT-5.1 to do the physics for me. Here's my prompt: I'd like to do a physics problem with you. I'm doing this to find out  if we can hold a radio in the middle of a dipole. The wire has a breaking ension of 300 pounds. The radio weighs 2 po...

 I made my first QSO on the Project Toucans CW practice app last week and it was DX to Brazil with  PY2UIA , Henrique. He also commented here on the blog . Henrique suggested the iambic keyer would be easier to use if its keying speed was adjustable. That hadn't occured to me since I usually use the straight/cootie key version. And, now it is! On the iambic version of the practice app, the gap+/- size adjustment has been changed to wpm+/- buttons: The keys + and - reduce the dit time, (the standardized time all the other iambic times are based on), by 5 ms, or increase by 5 ms respectively. Give the new controls a try on the iambic app , make a few QSOs of your own, and tell us what other features you’d like to see in the comments.

 Learning Morse code is easier — and way more fun — when you can practice with real people anytime, anywhere. KO6BTY and I have been building a phone-based CW practice app that lets you send and receive code with other operators over the internet, no radio, antenna, or license required. This post walks through the waterfall display, keyer modes, histograms, and demo videos so you can jump right in and start making contacts from your phone. KO6BTY and I have been working on a two-way phone based CW (Morse code) practice app for a while. We'd really love for people try it out, and let us know what to improve, or what to implement next. We've finally got it in a state where people can start to test it. If you'd like to practice sending and receiving code with other people via your phone anyhere you can get on the internet, read on. App Components Project TouCans CW Practice app is a Morse code tranceiver that operates over your phone, so no ham license, (or antenna), is req...

I put OpenAI’s gpt-5-nano and gpt-5.1 head-to-head on my psy-ops article scorer to see what you really get for the extra spend. Along the way I ran into pricing surprises, wild variance, and a reminder that ChatGPT’s shiny new memory feature can quietly bend your evals if you’re not careful.   A post on LinkedIn a few days back suggested using Small Language Models (SLMs) as opposed to LLMs for repetitive tasks. This seemed like a great idea in some regards for me, but I was curious about how it would apply to apps that were intended to perform lanugage analysis. Luckily, I have the psy-ops app up and running. Also? At the moment, it is using a close-to-an-SLM model, gpt-5-nano due to pricing decisions. I used it as a test vehicle to look at the difference betwween gpt-5 nano and full featured gpt-5.1. The testing framework I used: Starting from this article, I first did three separate anayses with gpt-5-nano, and then three others with gpt-5.1. I then used gpt-5.1...

 We're working on a promo video for our smartphone-based CW practice app. We had great luck last week using the sora-2 app to create B-Roll footage for the Gladych Files . This week, I'm hoping to make an entire scripted trailer for the CW app using sora-2. There are issues though. The first one is that while the sora app has a storyboard feature, (at least the one I can access this week), the API does  not. It does however allow you to pass in reference images to bridge scenes. That's pretty cool, and seems to work. I'm working on  a Python script to wait for bridging images between clips. That's worked out ok.  The real issue, so far, has been sora-2 moderation. Profanity and Real-Person Filters You cannot pass the image of a real person, (even one sora-2 invented), between clips. Moderation stops it every time. ( Moderation is what sora-2 calls its engine that decides if it's able to make your video at all.) This is what set off a cascade of moderatio...