@M0CUV@mastodon.radio
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M0CUV

@M0CUV@mastodon.radio

Software crafter/engineer (Rust, Scala, Perl, C++); open source developer; real-time/fault-tolerant systems; Transputer & FORTH enthusiast; radio amateur (MØCUV). Couch to 5K runner.

Let's stick with the past, 'cos the future won't last.

Used to be @mattgumbley on the bird site.

[Avatar: photo of me & my dog Oscar, a white cockerpoo; Header is a quote from the Postlight podcast entitled "Can We Understand Coders?"]

Pronouns: he/him

“AI is a lying machine made out of crimes” - Alex Falcone

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M0CUV, to random
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Windows 11 Recall a.k.a. Panopticon Edition is going to be taking screenshots of everything I do and feeding it to an AI that’s going to be local (yeah, right, sure). So glad my PC hardware is insufficient to meet its hardware requirements (runs Linux Mint just fabulously). What are these techbros smoking that makes them think people want this dreck?

M0CUV,
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@g7kse Yes that seems a very adequate summary!

M0CUV,
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@g7kse AI: Avoid Immediately/Indefinitely

M0CUV, to random
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But there’s a stack of books to go through in order to understand the maths of the FFT. I know what the RealFFT crate is doing: I can see the graph of amplitude/frequency output from the input time/amplitude data… but I have to know how it works. There’s a very good explanation in “Digital Signal Processing A Practical Approach” by Ifeachor & Jervis (with a C implementation) & the autodidact-friendly approach in “Linear Signals & Systems 2e” by B.P. Lathi is much appreciated. #Tsundoku

M0CUV, to random
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I’m also unblocked on #digimorse, now I’ve got the receiver’s Fast Fourier Transform working. Need to revisit the transmit side, to prepend the outgoing encoded data with a suitable Costas array. Then it’ll be on to the receiver’s detector and demodulator - which will be something of a “three pipe problem”.

M0CUV,
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@vk6flab I’m still very much at the edge too! The books I have are all very thick, and as I stopped studying undergraduate maths after two years, I don’t have the typical EE graduate facility with the content. Finding good books for autodidacts is hard. The two I mentioned seem very good so far, also “Probability, Statistics and Random Processes for Electrical Engineers” by Leon-Garcia is good. Other that this, working through articles on WSJT-X and its internals…

M0CUV,
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@vk6flab … the blog post at https://mattgumbley.wordpress.com/2022/04/03/introducing-digimorse/ is the intro, and there’s a PDF link at the end - lots more to do, including a complete redesign of encoding. Another good intro book that can be found on the Internet Archive: Wireless Digital Communications: Design and Theory by Tom McDermott N5EG (TAPR).

M0CUV,
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@vk6flab Plus plenty of experimentation with Rust and the PortAudio library. There’s a Rust port of the core FT8 algorithms- reading them in the original Fortran is a bit hard on the brain!

M0CUV,
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@vk6flab I really should shelve my dislike of Python - it’s a perfectly fine language, but I learned Perl first, and grumble that Python is so long-winded compared to it… Soft real-time signal processing suggests a deterministic systems-level language. And at scale, a proper type system.

M0CUV,
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@vk6flab I hadn’t realised it was that bad. Most times when I try running some Python applications it ends up in failure. Whatever happened to the idea of reproducible builds? (Docker promised to take that issue away, so people stopped trying to solve the actual problem?)

M0CUV, to random
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Made a start on the C compiler for my #Transputer system (with Psion EPOC16 an additional target); little more than a “Hello World” for the compiler driver and compiler. But it runs the (currently non-existent) tests, and builds in CircleCI. Planning to use #TDD thoroughly, which isn’t as straightforward in Rust as I’d like (far easier in Scala or Java). Following Nora Sandler’s “Writing A C Compiler” book. Way in the future, Jens Gustedt’s “Modern C, 3e” will be needed.

inlovewithpda, to random
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Human Sacrifice by Childish Gambino is such a great track. Good use of Tangerine Dream Samples...

M0CUV,
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@inlovewithpda an artist I hadn’t heard of, sounds interesting! Thanks for the tip :)

thelastpsion, to retrocomputing
@thelastpsion@bitbang.social avatar

It's been a great weekend at the Festival for Portable Computing. Thank you so much to everyone who came along.

I also gained a Revo (dead, of course) and became the custodian of a Geofox!

M0CUV,
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

@thelastpsion “interesting enough”? Well you’ve got the world’s finest PDA OS running in emulation on Haiku, and a plan to modernise the development tool chain. Could it be more interesting?! :) Glad you had a great weekend.

M0CUV, to random
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It’s that time of year where I wish Mastodon had smell-o-vision!

M0CUV, to logitech
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New feature in #Logitech Options+ (the “mouse driver” that had ChatGPT glommed onto it) - there’s now a setting to turn the AI prompt builder off, and it no longer starts when Options+ opens.

I couldn’t find an email address at which I could complain about this, but hopefully a message got through to them.

lukito, to random
@lukito@gamedev.lgbt avatar

Do you have “The Laughing Cow” cheese in your country? If so, what do you call it?

I believe its production/brand origin is French - La Vache Qui Rit - but I’m curious about how many other countries have it and if they use similar translations :neofox_think:

M0CUV,
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@lukito I’ve seen both French and English names in the UK

g7kse, to random
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What's the general consensus on 'things that hold small PCB's so you don't chase them round the desk whilst soldering' ?

Got something for bigger boards but the smaller ones get a bit of blu tack and that's probably not ideal

M0CUV,
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@g7kse BluTack is never far away in my shack :) I 3D printed a PCB Vise which really helped building my QDX.

Dtl, to science
@Dtl@mastodon.social avatar

When it's my turn to be god, I'm making all scientific instruments out put well commented, documented CSV files.
UV-Vis Spectrometer - CSV
Profilometer - CSV
Raman - CSV
SEM - CSV
Hubble Space Telescope - CSV.

EVERYTHING for CSV.

Until then I'll just sulk at this data I have that's not entirely commented as to what units it's using.

M0CUV,
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@FenTiger @Dtl CSV with mandatory header… I wonder if there’s a standard for having schema information in the header?

samebchase, to random
@samebchase@fantastic.earth avatar

I've gotten a dactyl manuform-esque ergonomic keyboard, but I'm not sure when's a good time to bite the bullet and switch to Dvorak.

I'm concerned it would result in a significant dip in productivity...

M0CUV,
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

@samebchase Colemak.. This Is The Way :) I used an online typing tutor starting at the beginning until I’d rewired my brain enough to know where everything was but very slowly. Then just switched. Never looked back. There is a huge dip in productivity at first, but it gradually starts to flow back.

M0CUV, to random
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Quite a successful day operating FT8. Slightly marred when a Shannon denier arrived to tell me digital modes are “not real radio” ie not CW or Voice. I’d like to have seen him work Brazil, Australia and Turkey with QRP on 28MHz on the day after massive solar storms wiped out the short wave bands. Not impossible, but why restrict yourself to pre-1948 communications modes? I don’t get it. Unless it’s for historical re-enactment or to keep ancient equipment running. Or you just don’t like progress?

M0CUV,
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@kn8cr yes; very closed minds.

M0CUV,
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@ve3qbz no, an “SSB and CW are the only true modes” operator said digital modes are not “real radio” because they like to talk.

M0CUV,
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@sergio_101 exactly. I would have asked him what my aerial was radiating if it wasn’t real radio. I don’t think it would have been a meeting of minds.

M0CUV,
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@sergio_101 yes, I’m 55.. it’s odd that there’s a discussion around “how do we get more young people into the hobby?” and we have people who refuse to advance past world-war-2 technology.

M0CUV,
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

@sergio_101 happy birthday! I use CW a little, it’s great fun & very rewarding. If I had time I’d try everything the hobby has to offer. FT8 fits in to the spare minutes of a day nicely when I’m busy with other things.. if I ever retire I’ll be able to devote more time to CW, SSB, satellites etc. That’s a long way off.

harshad, to FreeBSD
@harshad@sharma.io avatar

Strange.

My laptop running FreeBSD 14.0-R-p6 locked up during resume - it's been years since I had this issue. Power cycled it, and now my wireless device won't show up. I think I'm too tired to debug now, will look at it in the morning. Bummer though, hope it's not a hardware failure due to resetting the laptop while the wireless device was being initialised.

#FreeBSD

M0CUV,
@M0CUV@mastodon.radio avatar

@harshad @vermaden if there’s a separate WiFi card inside, try reseating it, cleaning contacts. Could be a thermal issue if it worked after cooling down?

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