Reading (For Dummies)

Finding a Rhythym

I've had a slow month or so as far as updating-the-website is concerned. Oye.

I mentioned a bit ago that I started the whole house-buying process. I have concluded the process, and took stewardship (I won't say ownership, because the bank owns the thing) of a property.

What Wood Is That?

I've been doing a lot of work to the place already, including ripping out the carpet (yuck...ugly brown shag carpet on top of beautiful beautiful hard oak floors), ripping out sixteen layers of kitchen flooring, and ripping out some hair in frustration at the tar that was used to hold the bottom layer of kitchen flooring to some Douglas Fir floorboards in the kitchen.

The view out the front window...WSU buildings and a butte beaut

Laura is back in town as well, after a summer-long hiatus. We are now surviving in the basement while we wait for the upstairs floors to dry. We're waiting as well to enjoy the view that our front window provides. She has turned into something of a slave in the kitchen, chiseling away at stubborn tarpaper while I'm at work.

The "Kilivistüdenroom", which combines kitchen, living room, study, and den...

For now we live in the basement, sans furniture, which makes life a little interesting -- spices are mingled with undergarments (clean, at least), computer cables are in boxes with dress shirts, and finding things is a bit of a chore. At least it makes me realize that I have too much stuff, so I'm starting to bleed worldly possessions...a few trips to the donation pile, and quite a few things are up for sale on craigslist. I'd like to stop acquiring so much crap...it may be my new year's goal.

Day in the Life of an Astronaut

I'm not sure why I find this video by astronaut Garrett Reisman so compelling -- possibly because his mannerisms are so geeky and remind me of myself? It's long, but entertaining in an engineering sort of way.

GMFSK on a Modern Linux Distro

Last weekend was the Amateur Radio Relay League's annual Field Day celebration. I took part, for the first time in my life. It was quite nifty -- Ron Schwartz (N7CE, and one of the executive-folks at my little company), Dan Ransom (K7MM, and ditto...he's another guy that has been with Schweitzer pretty much since day one), Joe (missing his callsign, he's another SEL fellow) and myself took shifts at a couple of radios in Ron's shack.

Dan was nice enough to set up laptops with logging software and automated whizbangery that made the radios sing, or speak, or go 'tweedle deedle', depending upon whether we were running morse code, voice, or a data mode. It wasn't a great year due to sunspots, but we collectively racked up about 200 contacts, which ain't too shabby for two radios.

Now that I'm hopefully moving into a house, I'm pondering putting up a few nice wire dipoles to play around on HF. It was certainly nice to get a little tutorial on how things are done from folks in the know.

I purchased a Signalink USB sound card a few months ago hoping to tinker with some of this stuff. The Signalink has made a nice sound card for my new linux box in the meantime, since the Creative Labs X-Fi sound card that I bought has no linux support...

I finally loaded up some rtty software on said linux box, in the form of GMFSK. I'm running Ubuntu 8.04, though, which uses ALSA for sound. GMFSK and just about every other ham program I've played with for linux depends upon the OSS interface to sound cards. Some of the ham softmodem packages included with ubuntu are even pre-OSS, which makes me wonder how the packages keep getting included.

I started tinkering with aoss but did not have luck. Strangely, my system already had a /dev/dsp1 on it (/dev/dspX is the format that OSS uses for sound devices). I don't know two shakes about how sound works under Linux anymore, but it seems to me from reading a bit that OSS only allows one program to talk to a sound device at a time. It seems that the Ubuntu install wraps OSS in ALSA? That is, ALSA uses OSS as its sound output device. ALSA is able to let lots of program use it for sound, so if ALSA gains exclusive access to the OSS sound device at login, it can share it accordingly (but only with programs that use ALSA). A program that uses OSS will be out of luck for output, as ALSA doesn't seem to let go of the sound output device by default. Keep in mind that this is pure speculation on my part, but experimentally my explanation makes sense.

I found that if I log in to Ubuntu, let it play its little "Ubuntu login theme," and then unplug the USB sound card and plug it back in, I get the best of both worlds: ALSA suddenly plays nice and opens the OSS device when needed, closing it when finished. My sound card's name changes, though, from /dev/dsp1 to /dev/dsp. And, of course, if an OSS program has the sound card open, ALSA is unable to play any sound (backing up my suspicion).

Anyway, my point to all of this is that if you are using a Signalink adapter on Ubuntu 8.04, try unplugging the adapter and then plugging it back in (do this after you log in). You should then be able to 'ls /dev/dsp*' to find the device name of your sound card, and set it accordingly in your RTTY program of choice.

Good luck, and happy hamming...

AT&T's Latest Ad a Sick Joke

AT&T has struck a new low with their latest ad for the "Online Liberation Movement."

Nothing to hide from a company that illegally wiretaps its customers...

At least they concede that she has a little to hide, although they'll be happy to violate her rights anyway...

June Showers

Today was one of those unusual days that deserves a post just because it is where yesterday wasn't. I woke up a little later than usual due to (finally) overcast skies that kept the sun from shining in my face. I looked outside without my glasses on, and thought it was raining. I put my glasses on and realized it was snowing. In June.

When I got to work a few minutes later, a co-worker wondered if my apartment was okay. Apparently the apartment building across the street from me was on fire. Could it be the Pullman arsonist again?

Four baby coyotes. The mother lurks nearby.

At work, another co-worker managed to snap a gem of a photo demonstrating just what it is that I love about this place. There was a minor work stoppage as we gathered around the office windows to watch the pups playing in the snow. There is a fairly active pack of coyotes in Pullman. Last summer, I often fell asleep to their howling and yipping -- a beautiful sound that gives the area a bit of a wild edge.