Copasetic Flow

 It's been a busy and fun week again! Most of my time was spenting finalizing what the elevation profile Datasette enrichment would look like. I finally found the last piece of the puzzle laying around in a pile of Jinja template use practice. One of the goals this week will be to release the elevation package. I made my first pull request for an open source project, datasette, in this case. (I make them at workr, but this is my first foray into the wider world.)  ChatGPT provided the final kick to get the elevation maps plotted really eaisly. Subsequently, I learned about the Pyplot package and how to add labels to charts. I got a start back towards writing about dadding. I spruced up some writing I had lying around about cleaning the kitchen with the gang. I found another older piece that I love while checking out old blog entries here: Meerktas and Ravens . Oh, and then this one about what unschooling with toddlers lools like. Goals Release the elevation package Relea...

 I learned how to arrange labels on PyPlot charts yesterday.  I've mentioned that the scales on the ham radio QSO elevation profiles weren't entirely comparable to one another. Due to the variety off hills, mountain ridges, and coasts the kids and I make POTA activations on, the vertical scales on the elevation chart y axes range from three meters in total to dozens of meters. What's important (and interesting) about the various sites though isn't the sheer number of meters of descent or ascent, but rather, the angle of the terrain with respect to level. That angle gets subtracted from the natural radiation angle of the dipole that houses Project TouCans and, theoretically, extends the distance that TouCans can transmit before bouncing off the F2 layer of the ionosphere. Consequently, rather than determining a scaling algorithm to make all the elevation profile graphs returned for the various QSOs comparable, I elected to simply calculate the slope of the terrain over...