I bought a very small laptop to use with radio work in the field, and the screen resolution is a bit small (1366x768). Pair the small display with current desktop environments' tendency toward chunky, touch-friendly interfaces, and it doesn’t allow one to cram much on the screen.

My desktop environment is Gnome, so I slimmed it down with some stylesheets:

WSJT-X is a QT app, so I scaled the fonts there to make everything fit better by setting the DPI in a launch script:

I created a little ReloaderJS script that I use with a couple projects. Upon applying the script, the page is always reloaded and up-to-date any time I switch to the tab or wake the laptop.

The script allows reloading at a period that matches the schedule at which the underlying site is updated. It also doesn’t bother updating when the site is unavailable (down or the client is offline).

It really stands out now when I see a site that’s tried to reload but couldn’t, so it’s showing an error page from the browser when I open my laptop. It feels good to have solved that problem for myself.

I’ve been playing with Hugo for other sites and liking it a whole lot.

I used it to host my next site, the KC3WWC Amateur Radio Blog. I’ll collect all my notes on amateur radio over there. I had been keeping a running document in org-roam, so it’s now time to make it public.

I have Samsung SmartThings automatically setting the thermostat and turning things on and off for me based on the location of my phone (and me).

Of course, it stopped working, so I needed to debug. All the other things connected to the hub were working fine.

The clerk/table component automatically limits itself to only showing 20 results. Other presentation components, especially text, have configurable elision behaviors, but it doesn’t apply to the table.

After searching, guessing at ways to do it, and even asking in conference talks, I finally realized that we can render our own HTML with clerk/html and hiccup. That HTML is not limited to any size, and building a table is easy. We used to do it all the time.

I wrote my own simple function to render a table, and I used that instead of the clerk/table. It takes the same parameters I was already using.

I have 73 feeds I currently follow. I have a whole system of prioritization, so I can listen to important things first. I’ve listed them alphabetically here:

I’ve used BeyondPod for over 10 years, since my first Android phone, to download, organize, and play podcasts. For at least the past 4 years, maintenance and updates to the application have slowed to a crawl. I had paid a one-time fee for the application, so I guess I couldn’t think they owed me updates forever.

I would try to find a replacement every once in a while, but the other podcatchers always lacked some feature upon which I relied. Even Podcast Addict fell short the last time I tried it about 4 years ago, but it’s been getting lots of updates.

I had previously flailed around trying to fix occasional WiFi drops on my Pop_OS(Ubuntu) laptop. The intermittency made it hard to know if I really fixed it or not, and it turns out I hadn’t.

I installed Arch Linux on another computer here on my desk. While it sat around idle, I found it one day having lost its internet connection just like the Pop_OS machine does!

Now I knew this problem with the network connection wasn’t isolated to one machine. To recap:

I started the search again for a solution with more information. I found some hints about power-saving options in NetworkManager.

On the Pop_OS machine, there’s a configuration file, /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf, that I changed to disable powersaving:

I had to add a file to the Arch machine in the same location to hold this configuration. Now these machines have been maintaining their connections for days.

My objects repository is full of OpenSCAD code. At the top of each file you’ll find a collection of variables in the code: the measurements of the model.

We don’t need to get bogged down with those exact values to start modeling, but we know that we’ll want to identify certain parameters to size our models. We can start banging together some shapes (with union and difference), and any time we’re tempted to guess at a measurement and plug it into the code, we want to first see if we can give it a name (a variable name, that is) and use that instead and define a rough value for that variable at the top of the file. Next we can think about that value and decide if it’s related to any other values we already have. Often, one value should be calculated relative to other values: overall_width = inside_width + 2 * side_thickness. Once a measurement is defined in terms of other values it’ll automatically update as we start providing more precise measurements.

By starting with some guessed values and later plugging in real measurements, we prove that our parametric model is being correctly calculated from the measurements. We should be able to use this code time and time again to generate variations on the model based on new measurements. Our SCAD model with all the parameters at the top is ready to upload to Thingiverse and the Customizer can let users easily provide their own measurements to generate new models from our code.

I bought my first new bicycle in December of 2020. I had been using my previous bike much more through 2020, so I figured I had proven I’d use an upgraded bike. Ben and I had been aggressively researching gravel bikes for a while, but any bike had been hard to find in stock.

We found a used cyclocross bike, the Redline Conquest Elite, that looked enough like a gravel bike. It luckily was a good size for me, a small. The drop handlebars were exciting and different for me.

Over the year I’ve had the bike, I’ve added lots of parts and swapped others. I made the carbon fiber bike heavier but it met my needs and made it look more like a gravel bike:

I know the bike’s not really a gravel bike, but I think I have myself convinced enough that it’ll work for me, and I don’t need to shop for the next bike. I’ve already ridden over 200 miles in the first 2 months of this year and 1100+ miles in 2021. I’m feeling pretty strong with this current configuration.

My Google Assistant on my phone has been refusing to turn on and off the 2 devices I have on smart plugs: "Can’t reach SmartThings."

I found an article about the Google Home doing the same thing. Fortunately, the advice there worked: go into Assistant’s settings → Devices → Add Devices. Upon clicking on the SmartThings entry that was already there, it gave me the option to re-link. Once I authorized access, I could again ask Google to control those devices.

Upon the release of Pop OS 20.10, my System76 laptop and my Arris router started having some disagreements. The laptop would drop connection every couple hours and not reconnect itself. I’d see the little question mark in the WIFI indicator, and I needed to manually turn WIFI off and back on to restore the connection.

I found mentions of this behavior in Ubuntu and in Pop OS forums, and supposedly newer NetworkManager from Gnome would fix it, so I suffered and waited for the beta of Pop OS 21.04 to be available. That didn’t fix it, so I started digging around some more in System76’s page for Troubleshooting Wireless.

I picked my way through the tips and applied some of them. Disabling band steering in the router finally seems to have fixed the problem. I’ve kept my WIFI connection up and running for days now. I didn’t need to name the 5GHz and 2.4GHz networks differently.

I have a desktop server running Debian Unstable in the house, and I occasionally reboot it without logging back into the local desktop session. If I don’t login, I’d later find the machine mysteriously inaccessible — asleep. It’s set to never sleep, but that’s when I’m logged in.

To disable sleep in the GDM3 Greeter, I edited the /etc/gdm3/greeter.dconf-defaults, found the "Automatic suspend"/[org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/power] section and followed the comments to add:

Now the machine will act a little more like it’s a server.

Mr Haki has a Java Joy article about transforming a stream of strings into a map using functional Java. I’m having a bit of trouble embracing it enthusiastically, since each example is 81 lines of Java code and a pointy pile of type declarations!

I dashed out the same functionality in 4 lines of Clojure, and I can understand it a whole lot easier. I’m not even sure this is the fewest forms, but it’s still nicer.

Update 2021-04-14: It can be done in one line of Clojure.

Written with Clojure 1.10.2.

I took the update to PopOS 20.10, and my Overtone setup stopped working. When I’d try to boot up the internal SuperCollider server from Emacs or from the leiningen repl on my music projects which all (:require [overtone.live :refer :all]), get an error in native libraries. I could also try to start the server with (boot-internal-server) or (boot-external-server), but it gives the same error.

Since it can no longer start the server internally from within Overtone, I start the server manually. I wrapped a script around the start up, so I can set the environment variables for configuring jack and starting up the synth:

To get Overtone going again, I disabled the automatic boot of the server within Overtone by switching all the requires in each file from overtone.live to overtone.core, and I connect to that external server from my REPL manually with (connect-external-server) before doing anything else.

Finally, Overtone was consistently failing to find my MIDI keyboard. When things were working well enough a couple months ago, it still had required a little dance of killing off jackd and restarting Overtone, since something had been tying up the MIDI interface. This workaround was no longer adequate, since scsynth and jackd needed to already be started. I disabled MIDI connection in jackd by removing the -Xseq option from my ~/.jackdrc.

I’m back in business, and it’s probably more robust with these manual steps now. I think I’m also seeing some other odd little things working with the external server that didn’t previously, like using (mouse-x) for reading mouse positions into the synth values. The built-in piano synth is also working where it hadn’t previously.

Update 2021-02-13: I had lost the ability to send desktop audio (pulseaudio) through to the Jack Sink with this setup, so I figured out to start qjackctl before my supercollider.sh. That gets the Jack Sink available again to pulseaudio and the desktop sound menu.

I’ve occasionally been using a SSH session from my Pixel phones for years to login to my servers and write Clojure code in Emacs. I’d often run into an issue where I find myself having a weird time switching between NORMAL and INSERT modes when I’d hit ESCAPE quickly and try to move the cursor.

Googling my random problems is a favorite pastime, and I’ve finally stumbled upon an article about tmux and vim escape key. I learned that it’s probably been tmux sporadically eating my ESCAPE key, so I’ve tried disabling the built-in delay by adding to my .tmux.conf: