This week, the New Zealand amateur radios on vhf.nz were added to the worldwide Hearham.com repeater listing. These are pulled in with permission and this now allows offline listing of the ham radio repeaters to work for folks in the Android or Linux version of Repeater-START (Showing The Amateur-radio Repeaters Tool):
Continue reading “New Zealand repeaters are up! and an intro to csv importing with fgetcsv()”SolarWinds hack shows importance of vendor trust, and why open source is so important
Much has been written about the recent SolarWinds hack – “Almost a cyber pandemic” that we may not know the true extent of for some time.
Continue reading “SolarWinds hack shows importance of vendor trust, and why open source is so important”Merry Christmas, and a Repeater Listing update
The repeater database has been udpated today as a Merry Christmas present for DMR Radio users! – over half of the radioid.net DMR listings have now been pulled in to Hearham repeater listing, with permission. This means users looking for DMR digital repeaters will find the RepeaterSTART app more useful in the future!
Continue reading “Merry Christmas, and a Repeater Listing update”Newegg Black Friday bug… yikes!
Once in awhile a purchase allows a purchase payment plan, which is often paying more… but this particular one I found on black friday was ridiculous:
Continue reading “Newegg Black Friday bug… yikes!”Review: Linux in the Ham Shack Linux
Budgie Desktop is an interesting Linux distro which you can see is the base of Linux in the Ham Shack, downloadable here.
Continue reading “Review: Linux in the Ham Shack Linux”Linux 5.9
Recently, Linux 5.9 was released! While folks are unlikely to see this in any distribution very soon, it brings some improvements that will be a clear reason that we will hear about it very soon (ok, enough ham radio jokes 🙂 )
Although it’s not something particularly recommended for your main system, but you could install it now – in fact with kernels of Linux you can generally switch it out and if it doesn’t work, just select the old one at the boot screen.
Better things to do this Oct 31st
This has been a challenging year for many of us, and while it may be tempting to go visit neighborhood houses for parties or candy, the extra sugar and staying out in the cold could possibly be a setback from healthy progress in recent weeks. Some say sugar worsens immune function. Instead you might consider activities including:
- Reading, study
- Watch some interesting Makerfaire videos, as most areas didn’t get a Makerfair this year 🙁
- Build something on the computer and present at a hackathon – there’s a Tmobile hackathon, a Here Maps hackathon, Post COVID Hackathon, hack-or-treat going on.
Announcing Repeater-START Amateur radio app for Android
In the past weeks, I have noticed hearham.com repeater listing gets many requests from Android devices. Furthermore, many ham radio people already have an Android phone and are still waiting on their Librem Phone to ship. So I started an Android port of the Linux open-data repeater app, Repeater-START.
Continue reading “Announcing Repeater-START Amateur radio app for Android”Human pose estimation with Python and Gluoncv
Human pose estimation is something useful for robotics/programming as you can see what position a person is in a picture. For last weekend’s Hackrithmitic I did an experiment for fun using computer vision pose estimation. To start with I found several possibilities with available libraries:
- Tensorflow js has been used to say, don’t touch your face, but it takes a massive amount of cpu.
- Openpose is a popular one, only licensed for noncommercial research use, and there is a Opencv example for it that doesn’t quite show how to use it.
- AlphaPose is supposedly faster and has a more clear license and possibility for commercial use – if you want that as a possibility. I checked out the install instructions and worked but for “python3” instead of “python”. It also misses obvious step of installing cuda for your Nvidia system before running.
- GluonCV is another, which seems more user friendly. This one I was able to get running in a few minutes with their example:
Autocorrect Remover is now up on Chrome Web Store
The Autocorrect Remover was approved to be shown on Google Chrome webs store! Now all students or teachers can access the autocorrect remover that I built with a friend recently. One month after publishing, it appears no changes on Google Docs have broken it, which is a good sign 🙂
Continue reading “Autocorrect Remover is now up on Chrome Web Store”