ElectricLab

For the record: 'NetVariables' were designed to do two things: Have persistent local variables (my initial use-case was for storing a login session cookie), and to allow data transfer to/from remote hosts - things that were not yet supported by the TIPI code when I wrote them. I'd have continued developing them had I not been discouraged from making further commits.

My wife was watching that show: Hoarders where I caught a brief glimpse of a TI-99/4A, outside in someone's yard. I was sad to see it treated that way, and my wife just smirked - as if I have too many computers or something. pfffft.

Fixed!

If someone messaged me on myti99.com using their browser, please re-send here on AA. There was (and still is) a bug in that webpage that munges the data and I got a garbled email instead. I think it may have been about a password reset, but I couldn't tell.

I was listening to 20m HF this morning in my lab and also had my TI + TIPI running. I was running Stuart's web browser whihc was parked on myti99.com in the group chat, and as it auto-refreshed periodically, it made some amusing sounds on the radio. See video Even with the heavy shielding of the TIPI and PEB, it still makes a lot of RF in close proximity. Youtube Link

I have this book, I dug it too.

It's looking good, and I need another evening's worth of modifications to the web code to work with the new browser features. I plan on doing that tonight. I've done a lot of testing of the new browser and I've asked Stuart to publish it when he's ready. The chat tomorrow will work with either of the latest versions of the browser, if I can get enough hobby time in this evening

The Rasppi has been great for ham radio, and I've done a lot of projects with it. Anything from converting ASCII->Baudot and bit-banging a current loop on an old Teletype from the 30s, controlling a DDS chip to make a crystal-controlled radio be able to move about the band, running a local instance of Xastir for APRS, Encoding/Decoding PL and DTMF tones, etc, etc. A buddy of mine runs Packet BBSes from a Rasppi and has used Direwolf to emulate a TNC.

I prefer Yaesu radios, but ICOMs are just fine. I have an FT-991 as my main radio at home now, and I love it. Its DSP is incredible and makes operating in a noisy RF environment (suburbia) tolerable again. It used to be plasma TVs that got on hams' nerves, but nowadays there are so many RF-emitting gadgets/chargers in people's houses that operating on HF can be challenging, especially on the lower bands. I have an FT-857 in my truck and a screwdriver antenna for mobile operations, and an FT-817 for portable/backpacking.

Stuart has sent me a new beta version of the browser that supports some features that will allow for a better experience, including making the scroll-back work in a better way. I'll be testing it tonight and providing feedback to him (assuming I find anything wrong) so hopefully it'll be out soon!

I think you'll find ham radio to be a relatively inexpensive hobby these days. For working local repeaters, you can get a cheap Baofeng handheld transceiver for under $30 dollars. They're not half bad radios and if you live near any populated area, there're going to be repeaters on nearby hilltops and you can get on the air the same day. A decent outside antenna and feedline won't cost that much. For getting on HF, I've worked about every country you can with just wire antennas strung in the trees. You can do a lot with <100 watts and attic antennas if you can't put anything outside. When it comes to budget, it's like many hobbies - you can get started for a few bucks and be perfectly happy. You can gradually add things as follow your interests and go deeper down the rabbit hole. There as so many facets to ham radio that you'll never be out of new fun/shiny things to chase. You can or course spend may kilobucks if you can afford it on high-end radios and amplifiers, but to me the hobby has always been about learning how everything works and building as much stuff as possible as part of the fun. To each their own.

On HF, there a plenty of hams using good old SSB voice. There are still some RTTY guys on there, but I'm sure they're all running software-based systems and don't have any real teletype hardware connected up. (I have a small teletype collection and one day I'll get real iron on the air) Other digital mods have taken over. Ones that use far less bandwidth, have forward-error correction, and some that use custom software to do a rudimentary frequency sharing in the time domain, like FT8. There are a ton of good open-source software packages out there to get a station on the air, and most modern HF rigs have a USB-B port on them, so you can plug them right into a computer and have multiple sound card interfaces. Software then has full control of the rig, so you don't need to do anything special to get PTT to work. My new Yaesu FT991 is this way, and I run Ubuntu Linux on my dedicated ham PC. I run WSJT-X for the super-popular FT8 mode, and FLDIGI for just decoding things for fun.

You can even use a shortwave receiver and a nearby laptop running fldigi to decode some digital signals on HF, sans audio cable.

I fixed the SNEK game so all its files are present in all places, www or not. I think I forgot to publish to the non-www site after the game got big enough to be broken into more than one file. Yes, 'www.' is different than just 'domain.com'. Most people set up a CNAME record for 'www' it seems. When I set up myti99.com, I initially ditched the 'www.' just to save screen space, and it's really pointless anyway. Stuart's browser encourages the WWW by front-filling it in on the address bar, so I had to set up two sites to support it. On a modern browser, this is no problem since you can setup redirects on the server side which the browser recognizes, and point people to the right site. Stuart's browser does now handle re-directs, but doesn't change the URL on the browser in kind. So while I can redirect and serve content, the browser keeps on whatever URL you started with which isn't ideal and causes two separate sites to be maintained. I had planned on setting up Apache's Rewrite functions to make it so I have only one site supported by both, but haven't gotten around to it. I agree that it's super annoying that browsers remove or hide the www, and don't get me started on how irritating it was that all browsers conflate the address bar with a search function. I hate having to remember to add a trailing '/' to any hand-entered URLs when entering things like 192.168.0.nnn on my own bloody network. No Google, I didn't want to search the web for an IP address. So annoying. A lot of this BS is Google's fault, not just by forcing this stuff in their browsers, but their application of their voodoo search ranking that makes people do things like discouraging 'www', etc. Not to mention the increasing: OMG THIS SITE ISN'T SECURE!!! messages that all browsers are starting to show. Google is nudging/forcing everyone to use certs by ranking non-https sites less. Pretty soon, any input forms are likely to be disallowed if they're not served via https. While I agree that the web in general should move to TLS/https since there's no reason not too for 99.9999% of users, it is not something our old computers will ever be able to do. Us retronauts who want to use plain port 80 cleartext web like the pioneers did aren't going to be able to use the web without a proxying tool, which in our case could be done on the TIPI. At least certs are now free thanks to the LetsEncrypt folks, and their certbot tool is really great. These certs aren't useful for proving a site's identity, but at least the traffic can be encrypted to keep prying eyes out.

Ports <1000 in Unix are privileged, and I’m not sure the recent Pi code that does sockets runs as root or not. I sure hope not for security’s sake.