@ke8det@mastodon.hams.social
108 Followers
91 Following
180 Posts

This is my amateur radio profile in the fediverse. Interested in nearly everything ham radio, but primarily active on #HF operating #POTA. #DigitalModes, #SSB, but no #MorseCode yet. Too many interests and two little time to balance between that work thing, two boys, and the rest of life.

Also interested in #electronics, #kits, and learning much more about circuits, making, and #DIY projects. Also #3dprinting to make unique bits and pieces than you just can't seem to buy anywhere.

Pronounshe/his
Me, with less hamjevidl@ono-sendai.jevidl.net

Another Deep Thought: every minute spent tapping out a message about things you don’t like in the hobby is a minute wasted not doing what you do like.

Stop complaining and get on the air.

GOD I FUCKING MISS PHONE TREES

I would LOVE to simply hear a list of options and press "4" to pick one of them. Instead of a machine requiring you to say a sentence of human speech and then misinterpreting it completely

Alright story time, Rubylith: How I Cured My Insomnia With Masking Material

I was an insomniac as long as I've remembered. Had it real bad, medicated and everything. Slept through fire alarms. Lost jobs to lateness. After hours of tossing and turning and fretting over how little sleep I was gonna get and how tired I'd be the next day I'd give up and grab a book in hopes that it'd help me sleep; it'd quiet my mind down, but turning on a light would make my body all excited, because I'm part moth I guess.

Round about when people started taking smartphones to bed with them, all the "I've spent years researching the effects of artificial light on circadian rhythms" people started shouting OH MY GOD DON'T TAKE YOUR PHONE TO BED WITH YOU, and we all shouted back LOL I'M TAKING MY PHONE TO BED WITH ME WHO ARE YOU THE BED COPS and took our phones to bed with us, and that's when the midden REALLY hit the windmill.

"Blue light keeps you awake!" they shouted.
"Lol" we replied.
"No we mean it, it's REALLY bad!" they wheedled.
"Lmao" we explained.
"Look, even a SINGLE blue photon hitting your retina can WRECK your night's sleep! One photon! Just one!" they cajoled.
"Sorry, what was that," we guffawed, "I was busy buying an alarm clock with big blue LED numbers on it. And an iPod dock, because that is the style at this time."

Anyway I was already an insomniac so no difference I guess, I'll read me ebooks on me phone, fine. Does seem a bit bright though even on min brightness, tell you what, I'll set the text to like a dark grey on a black background. Cor this is a good book, I'm gonna read this until 4am or whenever my eyes start hurting.

YEARS pass without incident or difference until my mate takes me to a star party. A very dark place, lots of quietly-excitable blokes with glasses and laptops and they're all very eager to let you look through their telescopes and tell you stuff, a Generally Mild Fun Chill Time - but a very dark time, the sort of darkness where everybody's eyes are used to it, the sort of dark where if someone lights up a smoke everyone blinks and scowls and goes "ah" just at that tiny lighter flame. I peek over the shoulder of one of these star dudes and see an entirely-red Windows XP and say "Oh cool, you've cut the green and blue all together huh?"

He's like well, red light doesn't destroy your night vision, you can look right at a red light and still see in the dark afterwards.

I say, huh. And I remember that big old metal torch my dad got from the army/navy shop, the one where you could swap out the lens for a red one. And I notice he's got electrical tape over his hard drive and power lights too.

And I say so what'd you do, cut into the video cable and short some stuff to ground, he says nah and he peels back the corner of his screen and blinds me with Horrible Blue Light and as I'm blinking it away he says this is just a sheet of Rubylith, and if this were a film I'd have that moment in slow motion, "Rrrooooooo

beeeeeeeeeee

lllliitthhhhhhh"

~~~RUBYLITH~~~

A clingfilm-thin plastic sheet originally used in lithography and screen printing because it cuts so clean and nice, Rubylith is called Rubylith because it's Really Really Incredibly Red. Its Incredible Redness means that you can put a layer on top of a monitor and it'd turn your whites to an arterial pink and your brightest blue to the deepest inky indigo; another layer and the blue is black, it's gone, your whites are now deep blood reds. Your #ffffff is a #ff0000, there's Nothing But Red.

I must clarify, I'm not talking about sunset mode here, I'm not talking about tinting your screen amber - I'm talking MUCH further than that. Imagine a red heart shape made to look shiny with a white highlight; you wouldn't be able to see the highlight, it'd render the same colour as the rest of the heart. Hell, if the heart were against a white background you might not see the heart at all, because it takes red, green and blue to make white, and there's no green or blue. There's no pink in Rubylith land, there's no amber, there's no orange, red is red and white is red and pink is slightly dimmer red. Clouds are blood red against a black sky. This isn't your phone's eye-relief night mode, this is the complete eradication of two thirds of colour data and damn being able to determine what you're looking at.

Anyway, there was a bloke selling big sheets of Rubylith on eBay for a tenner.

(it's gone way up, he's asking $20 now)

Anyway I saw this astronomer and his Rubylith and I set my phone's ebook reader app (moon+ Reader if you're interested, I've tried literally dozens and it's still the best) to red text on a black background, and aye it looks like a goth's MySpace but it works, I'm getting sleepy as I read - until I get a notification or there's a picture mid-text and I get the DANGEROUS BLUE PHOTONS and I'm awake again.

Cut out a wee bit of this lovely red wonder material and slip it into my phone case at night, though, and we're sorted. I'm not worrying about how late I'm gonna be up, I'm just reading my Terry Pratchett or Spider Robinson or Michael Marshall Smith or whoever, and half an hour later I'm getting sleepy, I'm having problems focusing, my mind's off in that pre-dream playground and I put my phone down and I'm off, I'm in the land of nod, I'm sleeping like a Functional Normal Person and it's absolute magic.

I'm constantly amazed at how well this works, and how I spent most of my life being perpetually late for things because No Sleep, before I put two and two together.

Now these days I use rooted phones where you can cut the green and blue with a one-tap widget on the home screen, but if you can't root your phone or you need to red-only an iPhone or a laptop or smth then Rubylith is WELL WORTH YOUR CONSIDERATION MY FRIEND.

I'm not saying it'll definitely 100% cure your insomnia like it did mine, but it's cheap as chips and 100% worth a try; worst that'll happen is it doesn't work and you've got some interesting crafting material that cuts really nice with an x-acto knife for the next time you wanna make a Christmas card or something.

Hey lovely Mastodon folk. I've just released an HP-35, HP-45, HP-80 simulator called HP-1973 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the HP-45 calculator. (Free) standalone versions for Mac and WIndows (no need for any Python installation or knowledge) & Python source for Linux. It's been a coding marathon, so it'd mean a lot to me if you could boost this post, so it gets in front of the right people. Download here: https://sarahkmarr.com/retrohp1973.html Enjoy. #retrocomputing #calculators #python #coding #rpn
I'm gonna keep posting this until one of you fucking boosts it
@N3VEM enjoyed your discussion on Ham Radio Workbench about mixing rockets with ham radio. My youngest has recently expressed an interest in model rockets, so there may be some interesting overlap there :) #rockets #hamradio

Hey. So as major platforms start to fall apart, don't necessarily look for the next big one.

Dust off your blog.

Go back to establishing web-rings.

RSS feeds. Remember those?

This is the way to share good stuff. You don't need a centralized platform for that.

As hams, we should know that.

Today I managed to integrate an IKEA VINDRIKTNING with HomeAssistant.

Building on the excellent information provided in this git repo -https://github.com/Hypfer/esp8266-vindriktning-particle-sensor - it was clear how to tap the UART bus.

I could not get the software in the repo to compile however. This may have been my limited knowledge with PlatformIO and Arduino IDE.

The difficulty there *did* encourage me to look around and find that Tasmota has VINDRIKTNING support.

#electronics #aqi #homeassistant

GitHub - Hypfer/esp8266-vindriktning-particle-sensor: Wifi MQTT Data Logging via an esp8266 for the Ikea VINDRIKTNING PM2.5 air quality sensor

Wifi MQTT Data Logging via an esp8266 for the Ikea VINDRIKTNING PM2.5 air quality sensor - Hypfer/esp8266-vindriktning-particle-sensor

GitHub

To anyone thinking about joining BlueSky, especially artists: everything you post is sent to a third party for AI labeling.

BlueSky uses AI to label content for moderation, and to do that they use a company called https://thehive.ai. If you look through their privacy policy, you will see that they can use content sent to them to train models for all their services, which include generative AI for both text and images.

Update: https://meow.social/@FluffyDeveloper/110652053858910840

#ai #bluesky

Who are your favorite STEM and maker folks from the birdsite that are here now? I'm hoping some more of the ones I followed over there appear here, but I haven't seen them. Maybe you have?