Copasetic Flow

 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...

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...

 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