Copasetic Flow

The San Francisco Pen Show last weekend at the Westin SF Airport, 8/26/2023 was incredible! I hear people had parking problems though. We came across this one more from necessity, rather than being inherently brilliant, what with not owning a car and all. Here's how we avoided the parking issues at the pen show: Take BART to SFO Hop the Westin SF Airport shuttle out front. Arrive at the pen show venue. Enjoy the show . Signs in the shuttle mentioned that it cost $5. No one asked us for a fare, so I'm not sure about the validity of the signs. We did tip the driver $5 or more each way, so maybe that covered both things. In any event, $5 is proabably less than the cost of gas for a car to the venue, and then throw in parking fees, and... yeah.

I used ChatGPT to code a ham radio reverse beacon network filter for the Rockmite using telnet and Python this morning. It was my first really productive coding session with ChatGPT , and I loved it. Maybe the most fun part of it for me is that I get to make up stories as I code: And then, after I'd introduced Penelope, I got to explain her and, more to the point, my plight. ChatGPT proceeded to dump out very useful code that put me and the 12 year-old here who's learning to code in Python on our way. Later, we needed help sending in commands to the telnet server, so I asked ChatGPT what Penelope would do: There was a little confusion about how to get the exception handling to close the program on Ctrl+C just right, so I asked ChatGPT for more help: A few hours later, after we got home from the coffee shop, the kid and I had a script up and running: I'll tell you more about it in another post, but you can look at it here .

The 20 m Rockmite had a QRPp QSO with  SM5CAK in Sweden  last night! Might I add that the two stations involved were 5,360 miles away from each other, and that the little Rockmite, even with the cool power modification has an output of 3/4 of a Watt? It's all true. You may have noticed that in my many, many ham radio posts, virtually none of them discuss QSOs (QSO is ham radio abbreviation—a Q code— for a two way contact) made from the house. That's  because I don't, in fact, make a lot of QSOs from the house. There's generally a lot of noise in town, and while the antenna placment is apparently pretty good, things just don't pan out very often. That's the first reason last night's Swedish QSO was so legitimately strange. About 9:45 PM Pacific Standard Time, (that'd be 04:45 the next morning, GMT, Greenwich Mean Time; yes, again with the ham radio phraseology), I heard SM5CAK calling CQ DX (DX means they were calling for a foreign country with respect to...

 The little Rockmite and a sticker this time once again prove that the crotchety old hams of my youth whor wrote, "You've got to solder your RF out!!!" were just crotchety, not  correct. While I'll give you that soldering, done well, can make for a better connection, I wish ten year old me, who wasn't allowed to solder yet, had realized that it wasn't such a big deal. I could've gotten passable results on a lot of projects that I didn't even attempt. This is the second time the rf out to antenna coax solder joint has brokenn  while I was out and about with the 12, 10, and 8 year-old gang. This time we were camping at Pantoll Campground north of San Francisco. Last time , we were at LA State Historical Park hanging out in the mornings before taking the Gold Line over  to AlienCon in Pasadena. On both trips, the Rockmite also reached far further West than it usually does. On the LA trip, before the washi tape patch, the RM was spotted in Japan on the R...

One of the many, many benies of self-led weaning was.... No High Chairs!!! Given, this trick isn't for everyone. Some people want a little alone time with their meal. Some people, perhaps, take care of kids that don't hate being restrained. Siggghhhh, not so much here. That's what led me to discover what I later found out was called self-led-weaning . The kid, (each of the kids in turn), would sit in my lap during meals. They'd also sample my food, (that's the self-led-weaining) part. We never used the high chair. Here's the other cool part though. The kids got tired of siting in my lap when they could toddle, crawled out, and learned how to climb into their own chairs, so no high chairs at restaurants either. (Of course, my lap was also available there, so again, this trick might not be for you.) And then!!!! Becuase we were grad students and the kids came with us to grad student happy hours they also learned very quickly how to safely perch themsevles on bar s...

I swear there used to be a shortcut key to demote outline levels to body text in Microsoft word that was Ctrl+Shift+n. Wherever I picked up that piece of knowled it is no longer valid. The way to demote to body text when you're in outline view is now to type alt+u+b in sequence. The line your cursor is on will be demoted to body text.