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Adding Halikey Mode to CWSimon with ChatGPT

 On Tuesday, I mentioned that I'd be adding Halikey as an iambic keyer to the CWSimon game. Iambic keying enabled by Halikey is something I've been meaning to do for a while, but each time I start, I realize I'm going to need to start with serial port signal inspections, and set the project back aside. This is the exact sort of thing vibe coding is good for, pushing through the parts of projects you don't want to bother with. So, this morning, I put ChatGPT 5.3. A few minutes and a design coversation later, ChatGPT cranked out the web page for me that you'll see in the video below. Here's the app itself if you'd like to experiment with your serial Halikey. Halikey Serial Signal Test Bench Connect to a Halikey and watch for serial control-signal changes. Each change will be logged below with the signal name and new state. Connect Halikey Disconnect Clear Log Status: Disconnected
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Updating the APRS post with ADS-B

 Going on 15 years ago, I built an APRS airplane flight tracking tool . It was a lot of fun. I got to watch a variety of acrobatic airplanes via their flight paths and Google Earth. Here's an example. The app has been defunct for several years, first becuase Google cut Google Earth Web API support, and then because I didn't have the time to maintain the APRS screen scraper behind the tool. This week though, I learned about ADS-B , a different airplane tracking RF protocol. With any luck, I'll crank out a demo later this week using CesiumJS and the ADS-B Exchange API .
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Adding Halikey Suport to CW Simon

 The 11 year-old and I played CW Simon through two airports and plane rides last night. We got a little better at sending CW, and bothered absolutely no one. Haptics rock ! But what if you'd rather practice Morse with your own set of paddles, not on a smart phone touch screen? By the way, did I mention that the smart phone easily supports 20 wpm iambic keying ? Still want your own paddles? Ok, ok, ok, ok. We're working on adding Halikey support! We've got a code basis to work from becuase there are other apps in the Project TouCans portfolio, namely the CW Fist-ogram —a tool for practicing your dit/dah timing consistency—and the inter-person, internet CW transciever . that already support Halikey. Both those tools were built for the OG serial Halikey. I was worried that device was going away and therefore was delighted this morning when I saw that the serial version will continue to be sold along with the spiffy new MIDI version of the Halikey! I perused the new User...
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CW Simon: A Morse Code Game

CW Simon: Simon, but, you know, for Morse code Remember Simon from the ’90s? The handheld game with four buttons that played a sequence you had to copy back from memory? Each round added one more step, and you kept going until you finally made a mistake. KO6BTY built a phone game, Project TouCans CW Simon , using Gas Town that does the same thing, but for Morse code. Part of the inspiration for CW Simon was W1REX telling KO6BTY and I that he’d worked on Simon 2. You can hear more about that on Rex’s episode on HRWB. Why CW Simon Exists KO6BTY found that keying CW was helping her learn Morse more quickly, but she and I didn't always have enough time to get on the air together. CW Simon grew out of that. It is a quick way to get more sending practice in, one short round at a time. CW Simon gives you a way to spend more time sending, not just listening. Long Island CW Club points out: “At least a quarter of practice should be sending.” How CW Simo...
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ChatGPT 5.4 Confused this Morning oaicite index

 I asked ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking to write some JSON-LD text to summarize a blog post this morning along with alt text for the posts images and got this When I asked it to file a but report on itself, I didn't really expect it to succeed, but I didn't expect more oaicite index listings for the proposed issue description. (Kinda obviously, I also haven't had enough coffee yet :) Anyone else seeing this? Happenings of Interest   (radio and nature) Where was our skip zone at San Bruno? For example. QSO Log Table containing QSOs in text Callsign rx RST tx RST Time (GMT) Frequency KBTEST 539 559 16:42 14058.3 kHz (Add callsigns as post tags?) Unschooling Highlights POTA tx QSL: QSL rx album: References POTA ( Parks on the Air ) Local Ionograms https://lgdc.uml.edu/common/DIDBYearListForStation?ursiCode=PA836 (for example) Videos Demo
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Punching Through Sandboxes and Codex CLI --yolo

 Just a brief note to mention that when I was fighting Codex CLI earlier this week to call the OpenAI Whisper API , what was really going on was that Codex CLI was sandboxed. ChatGPT helped me modify the script I was creating so that the script itself punched through the sandbox by clearing the proxies that had been setup to keep Codex CLI in the secondbox. It's interesting that ChatGPT didn't just tell me to add the --yolo argument to my codex cli command line. I wonder if that's part of its guardrails, or if ChatGPT doesn't know about the arguments to Codex CLI yet through training. I saw similar things happen when  ChatKit was announced. ChatGPT wasn't quite sure what it was on the day of the announcement. The good new is that I'm now calling APIs without any shenanigans because I learned to simply add '--yolo' the following day. That argument comes with its own set of risks, but I'm ok with those for the moment.
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Linux on Windows? WSL Makes it as Easy as on a Chromebook

I finally got Beads working on Windows… sort of. The trick? I used WSL. I hadn’t tried to do serious work on Windows in quite a while, so I was genuinely surprised to discover that WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) just worked. I’d been struggling with Beads— a system that helps to automate workflows for LLM agents by essentially creating revision controlled context for them —for several days. Some of the things Beads wanted simply weren’t available on Windows. The big one was tmux (which I also needed for Gastown). I spent about three days fighting with that. Then I finally took the plunge and went all-in on WSL. And… it just worked. It worked especially well combined with OpenAI Codex. From WSL/Linux, I can fire up Codex CLI and tell it to install things for me. No worrying about which Windows installer to use. No chasing down extra packages. Everything just works. Need ffmpeg and Gimp ? You need merely ask.. I did have to start Codex CLI with: codex --yolo Then, with basic sudo ...
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