Copasetic Flow

 At the time I'm writing this, United States I bonds are paying more than 3% interest. While they're not as easy to get as when I was a kid, savings bonds are still as good of a way as any for kids to learn about savings. The gang has been pestering me for two weeks, (pestering at my request, or I'd forgett to do it), to use a $100 windfall they came upon to buy savings bonds for them. I finally did it! Here's what I learned. Kids have to have an account managed by an adult I'm not happy about this, but there it is. Sure,  I'll write my politicians, but in the meantime, the kids' parent has to buy and manage the bonds in the kid's name. That means the parent needs an account on TreasuryDirect . This is not an easy task, but it's also not insurmountable. It's also something I set up for myself years ago and no longer remember how to do, so no info on that here except to click the link a few sentences back and have at it. Actually, one really big ...

 Halibut Electronics is working on a new satellite antenna kit! This is kinda cool for two reasons, first because we've recently started attending the high altitude balloon meetups at Noisebridge . Satellite antennas came up during one of the meetings. More tactically importanly though, the EggNogs docs inspired what be a better tuna can feedtrough for Projct TouCan's antenna! For notes, here's my original EggNogs documentation review reply : The documentation looks great so far! I've made it to page 17/22. One thing:     For those of us with partners heavily into fountain pens, those of us who like to print out manuals on JIS B5 paper and then store them in Kokuyo Campus binders, page numbers in the table of contents would be very cool. (I know, I know, such a niche group :) )   Mostly though, I wanted to thank you for jogging my memory into a, (I hope), better solution for Project TouCans antenna ports. At present, they're inverted bananna plug posts. Banana plug...

 Last night was a shorter run at things in general because KO6BTY, (the 13 year old known as Diaze here), and I got a later start. We spent what felt like forever, but what was actually only 12 minutes trying to share files from the 'usual' file side of the kid's Chromebook with the Linux side using file folders and whatnot. Nothing worked. For whatever reason, the Linux folders weren't visible in the machine's 'My Files' app. Sharing folders led to the machine basically hanging. Then! Then, we handled the issue like a couple of programmers, and instead of downloading in one system and trying to copy to anther, Diaze just ran the following from her Linux terminal wget https://data.cosmic.ucar.edu/gnss-ro/cosmic2/provisional/spaceWeather/level2/2024/203/ionPrf_prov1_2024_203.tar.gz That was snazzy! It just brought the file right in because, well, command line interface tools are just... snazzy.  Having a chat record of our work together is also really helpful...

 KO6BTY and I are making another run through Python. Diaze has learned a bit of Python in the past when she set up our QSO mapping app to pull in pertinent ionosonde data from the Digisonde ionosondes. Now, we're working with Python again to analyze data not from ground-bound ionosondes, but from the COSMIC2 constellation of satellits that provide ionospheric data includihng electron density profiles. That was the intro, and the application, but this post is more about how to informallly teach Python. What will work, and what won't? With unschooling, a lot of learning is initiated by something called strewing . Strewing as it's comonly defiined is, essentially, keeping things a little cluttered around the house. It's leaving reading material, projects, web sites, and so on, out where everyone in the house, including and especially the kids, can see them. I've widened the definition to include our entire indoor and outdoor lives, and the city and world at large . For...

I've been referred to a lot of indie web blogs of late, and it's paying off quite nicely for me Here's the latest example. Simon Willison--co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette--has a blog that led me to Maggie Appleton's site . Once there, I found a very nice, and very pretty primer on databases . Within the primer was a perspective I'd never seen before. There was an emphais, (certainly not the only emphasis, but an emphasis nonetheless), placed on columns, like so: from " A Shelfish Starter Guide to Databases " I, frankly, had never considered coluimns in any way except, as 'fields' that contributed to rows, and that could have conditions placed on them. A column as a whole entity unto itself? I'd never considered such a thing. A few days later though, while studying the netCDF format used by COSMIC2 missions among projects, I suddenly needed that column perspective, and I had it! netCDF files from COSMIC2 are very much arranged a...

 Image quality compare from Simon Willison and Claude! One of the many aspects of Simon Willison's blog that I've enjoyed is the set of posts about coding tools with LLMs (AIs.) The latest one was handier than most for me. It takes an image and downsizes more and more, presenting the different version on a web page so you can judge which one will work best for your website's view while cutting down on the amount of data your web site serves for that image. So, here's the faster version of this blog's occasional header Chosen from a variety of options: You might wonder if I went meta on this and used the tool to reduce the size of the screenshot of the tool, and I aboslutely did!  Cool stuff!

Nine year-old Tawnse and I got half-way to activating the park before the ML-300 Bluetooth transmitter gave up the ghost. I knew I forgot to charge something.  Tawnse was so entranced with the walled Philadelphia park she thought we should have stayed the extra half hour we would have probably needed to activate it.  What led Tawnse to this scheduling priority decision? Turns out the park doubles  as the neighborhood dog park. There's only one way in or out though a small and, of course, historic  cemetery. By the time the pups got to the wander-around-unleashed bit we were in they were far to transfixed to try to leave. Turns out two of the pups were aspiring radio engineers to boot .We ’ ll get to that. Because our antenna was low, propagation wasn't great on 20m at 15:30 UTC on the East Coast next to an interstate in Philadelphia. Even so right after I self-spotted a fellow ham immediately called in from South Dakota. After that, the QSOs came in every five minute...