Radio Frequency Exposure (RFE) Calculator

So far in my amateur radio career, I have not been able to offer much that may be of use to other hams. That changes today. A while back, when I was dreaming about where to put my antennas safely, I did a lot of research about radio frequency exposure. I poured over OET Bulletin […]

Combating SpamBots

The war against spam is ever escalating. Two weeks ago I took my anti-spam tactics to the next level. I want people to be able to post comments to my website without registering. Anonymous comments (or rather unverified authors of comments) should be available if the webmaster sees fit. But I have found that in […]

Callsign Change

I recently had the itch to change my Amateur Radio callsign because the one I had chosen before (NV2M) is from region 2, and I live in region 7. I didn’t think it mattered that much, but it seemed that half the time I would tell someone my callsign, they would question me and ask […]

Musings on the transition to IPv6

As a part of the he.net IPv6 certification program, you have an opportunity to earn extra points by daily activities: IPv6 traceroute, AAAA dig, IPv6 PTR dig, IPv6 ping, and IPv6 whois. Among those, I would say the most commonly used by me are ping and traceroute, then the digs and finally whois. But I […]

Server Tinkering

I was born to tinker. I think this must be the opposite of the optimizer. I see a project in anything that I could tweak to make it a little better. This not only applies to computers, which are the easiest thing to tinker with, but food, DIY projects, and more. This particular post is […]

IPv6 Certified

Some will care and some will not, but I can now boast that I have finished all the IPv6 certification tests at at ipv6.he.net. The last one was a real stinker. A while back, I registered mauery.org because I wanted to tinker with DNS stuff. But it turns out that I registered with a […]

MythTV 0.23 running on Lucid

Bella, my mythbox has been overheating for the past few months when the furnace has been running. Whenever we would watch HD content, decoding (and likely resizing) the stream to our screen would take too much CPU horsepower. Watching an HD stream would use nearly 100% of one of the two 2.1GHz Athlon cores. Then […]

Defeating a Ninja

I was recently asked if I had ever used Ninja on any of my machines. I had not even heard of such a thing. I found that it was available in the Lucid repository, so I installed it and configured it for my system. The two changes I made were to have it constantly poll, […]

AVR junkie paradise

I have been pining for some shiny tiny hardware that would look good in the CW (Morse code) paddle that I am making. Arduino had been a first choice for several days. I was on the verge of buying a couple of boards when I came across PJRC’s Teensy. It really is teensy. But […]

RF Probe

A quick test of my SWR meter that I have been working on for the past few weeks told me that something was awry. It is a slight modification of that circuit, adding a couple of capacitors and replacing the two ammeters with an Atmega8 microcontroller’s ADC unit. I figured if I could stabilize the […]