Happy Pi day! Hope you are enjoying making pie (within your household/pod) and learning some new math stuff today! Matt Parker has an interesting video up on an attempting to calculate pi from a diameter of one-molecule thick droplet spreading on water:
Continue reading “Happy Pi day 2021!”Listening for a callsign on DMR with Hearham.live
These past few weeks have certainly been trying for some communities with power outages, winter weather and utility failures. Ham radio is a very good way to communicate in your local community, but what if lots of other people are on the local repeater? What if you want a notification if your child or buddy is calling you, but not every other kerchunk or distracting story on the local repeater? If you have a DMR digital radio and id and digital repeater nearby, the tools on Hearham.live may help – and help save your battery leaving a radio on all day 🙂
Continue reading “Listening for a callsign on DMR with Hearham.live”Review: Radioddity GD77 DMR Radio
The Radioddity is a fairly popular affordable amateur radio, and a good entry level way to get into DMR radio.
Continue reading “Review: Radioddity GD77 DMR Radio”Upgrading PHP Nginx on Ubuntu 18.04
If you have ever installed WordPress on Ubuntu 18.04 or similar you may have noticed the WordPress warning in site health dashboard for the included default of old PHP 7.2. – “PHP is the programming language used to build and maintain WordPress. Newer versions of PHP are created with increased performance in mind, so you may see a positive effect on your site’s performance. The minimum recommended version of PHP is 7.4.” Furthermore if you do any experimenting with Laravel you may have issues because the latest Laravel 8 is only compatible with PHP7.3 and newer, among other changes.
Continue reading “Upgrading PHP Nginx on Ubuntu 18.04”Mars rover has landed
If you haven’t heard the news or live stream, today the Perseverance rover landed, with the first extraterrestrial helicopter!
Continue reading “Mars rover has landed”The Master Algorithm Book Review
In The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos, the author has some interesting thoughts on the “master algorithm”. Just like physicists want to find a universal formula for everything, a similar quest is what some in the machine learning world are looking for, and could simplify or bring new insights to how the world works through collected data. Just as many useful algorithms can be used in different ways – for example a super simple neural net can find pi, or a neural net can tell the difference between a dog and a cat, why can’t there be one that could run all machine learning problems?
Continue reading “The Master Algorithm Book Review”Winter is a good time to think of prepping
As you may have seen on the news, this winter has been an especially hard one for folks staying home, staying apart, and now with icy weather causing blackouts it has been even harder in some areas. Time to stay home may give you more time to stay at home, focus on what matters, and more time to read and to be prepared… ideally before you need to be.
Continue reading “Winter is a good time to think of prepping”Remember to Composer Update for Security and Updates
Laravel updates and updates to various PHP libraries come once in awhile with little notice to your web application, and no notice is shown, no auto update runs – unlike WordPress. Once in awhile a security update comes, so how might you test it?
Continue reading “Remember to Composer Update for Security and Updates”Setting private user home directory on Ubuntu
Recently it was announced that Ubuntu 21.04 will have private home directories. This would affect new users and new installs, but you can easily change this on your computer (or any Linux/unix computer) after checking your current setting…
Continue reading “Setting private user home directory on Ubuntu”Analyzing a Zoom(link) hack:
Once in awhile a service may get compromised script or item in it – in a recent case, a Zoom link will actually take you to some random site as part of some sort of adware campaign??? However a closer look shows it is very important to test your links on email or sites:
The link I saw recently actually had a very odd looking script – script in a production service is generally minified sometimes, but won’t be oddly obfuscated or base64-encoded. The suspicious part of this script starts out in the <body> with an odd looking launchBase64:
Continue reading “Analyzing a Zoom(link) hack:”