Copasetic Flow

 I'm working through McConnell's tensor textbook, the one I used in general relativity class at New Mexico State. I'm probably not going to be looking at spacetime a whole lot this time as I'm more interested in machine learning model implementations this time. The first video in the series is shown below. Each video has a link to the next part in the series. You can find the textbook on the Internet Archives.

 You can now play the CW Simon game on your desktop with your own iambic paddles and a Halikey Serial . (We hope to have support for Halikey Midi soon.) I was a little worried that the serial version of the Halikey was going away , but I'm super-psyched to see that it's back! I'm still pretty psyched about phone keying, so expect to see more features there, and maybe some hardware as we move forward, but there are a lot of hams with iambic keys, and so, voila! The video walks through the basic process of using a Halikey with the game. If there  are any questions, suggestions, or issues, please let us know in the comments below. References More on the CW Simon game

 This... is interesting. The oldest kid here is taking Calc III, The Calculus of Multiple Variables. There's a whole thing every week where she winds up spending a lot of time transcribing her homework into a more readable form so that she can turn in her work on the assignment's due date. I wondered if an LLM could help with that. I tried out ChatGPT 5.3 with this picture to start. Believe it or not, this contians two homework problem, (and, accidentally, my foot.) I asked  "Please write these two math solutions as laTeX and write them to a pdf file." I wasn't too surprised when it replied with  --------- "I only have one photo so far, and parts of it are too hard to read reliably to typeset without guessing. From the visible top portion, I can make out a problem that looks like T ( x , y ) = 60 1 + x 2 + y 2 T(x,y)=\frac{60}{1+x^2+y^2} T ( x , y ) = 1 + x 2 + y 2 60 ​ with partial derivatives like ∂ T ∂ x = − 120 x ( 1 + x 2 + y 2 ) 2 , ∂ T ∂ y = − 120...

 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

 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 .

 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...