💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2022 › 202202 › 20220206-recent-technological-tinkerings.gmi captured on 2022-03-01 at 15:07:50. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I've been playing with a few different pieces of technology this week.
I use a headless git repository as a "master" repo to which I push all my changes, and the directory served by gmnisrv simply pulls from this headless repo. Until now, I've kept the headless repo on the same Raspberry Pi that serves the capsule, which required configuring the Raspberry Pi to accept SSH connections from the public Internet so I could push changes to it. That always felt insecure to me. This week I set up a separate Alpine machine as my SSH entry point, and I moved the headless repo to it. I had to troubleshoot many pull issues from the Raspberry PI as a result, but it was a fun exercise nonetheless.
In 2017 I received an FCC Technician license, but in the years since then I've done almost nothing with amateur radio. I currently only have a small Baofeng UV-5R handheld radio; my father-in-law, a lifelong ham radio enthusiast, loaned me a larger Yaesu radio for a while, but I returned it to him after it sat unused in my closet for years. Gemini and other small-Internet projects have given me the inspiration to change that. I tried to connect my Baofeng to my desktop a few days ago, with the hope I could control it with software such as GNU Radio, but I discovered that the Baofeng data cable can only be used to program the radio, not operate it. I probably need to invest in some new, computer-friendly equipment if I want to get into it seriously.
I've been trying to cycle more often, and as part of that effort, my wife bought me a Bryton GPS and cycling computer. The official software for computer only works on Windows and Mac, but there are some efforts to reverse-engineer them to make open-source Linux programs. I might try my hand at analyzing the device firmware and figuring out how to customize and upgrade it. Failing that, though, the device is perfectly usable as-is.
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[Last updated: 2022-02-06]