Back in January 2021 I wrote about a new project: I was going to ditch WordPress and build my own “serverless” blogging software. WordPress was running on an EC2 instance, burning CPU cycles around the clock to serve a blog that, by my own admission, mostly gets visited by bots. I figured I could do better with Lambda and friends, only pay for what I actually used, and have a fun project to keep my skills current along the way. ...
I’ve been away from the blog for some time now. Was doing the side-gig startup thing for a while. That didn’t work out and ended up getting a little burned out for a while, so I was more focused on hiking since then. Now, I’m ready for another project. Don’t care to do anything that requires a business plan, this is more for fun, keep some skills current, and do something that’ll help me out a little. ...
I’ve had some bad luck with computer hard drives over the last year. First, the hard drive in my home server failed. Then the hard drive on my laptop failed several months later. The backups for each had stopped working a while ago. I was able to recover some files using ddrescue. This is actually a really cool tool for doing a byte-for-byte copy of another disk, skipping over errors and going back to retry them later. Unfortunately for me, this was not only extremely time consuming (both times, I spent over a week on this process), but the blocks that couldn’t be recovered caused a lot of files to be irretrievable. <sarcasm>I had a lot of fun with the debugfs command trying to get some files recovered.</sarcasm> ...
Seen a few articles about people controlling their radios remotely lately and thought what most others were doing was a bit too complicated. It could be done a lot easier, at least in my opinion of what’s easier. First, rig control. Linux has the hamlib libraries that can control many different radios. I had built a simple CI-V serial interface for my ICOM IC-706 a while back. It’s not perfect, but can be made to work at 300 baud. The rigctl command line program is pretty simple to use. The manual page for it has all of the commands listed. Many don’t apply for my particular radio, but I can switch frequency, mode, memory channel, and a few other key operating parameters. I can read all of those parameters as well to make sure I’m where I think I am. ...