Computing ⁽³⁷⁾

I have an old netbook, a Samsung NF110 that is hopelessly underpowered now with only 1Gb RAM and a 1.66GHz Atom CPU. It used to run Windows 7 (can you imagine?!) and was ok for basic word processing when I got the thing and had a really good battery life. I installed Ubuntu on this a while ago and found it very slow. I recently put Ubuntu 18.04 on, simply because I use this on the desktop. Yesterday I wanted to see if it could provide another screen and run pskreporter and it sat there for 10 minutes allegedly loading Firefox. Hmmm. I remembered at that point that I had planned to put it on eBay anyway but wondered why on earth it was just so slow with Linux. Enter Lubuntu. Lubuntu 12.10 has given the poor little thing a new lease on life. It is actually usable and no Gnome awkwardness. I'd still rather it had a little more RAM (like, I dunno, 8 times as much!) but it always was a handy little PC so it can remain in the shack now. And on Lubuntu - well sort of - I installed LXDE on the shack PC as…

I finally decided to rebuild the shack PC given that just about everything was going daft. I suspect this is a result of various software installs while testing new stuff that were not fully deinstalled. Yeah I know I should test in a VM... Anyway, a complete fresh install of Ubuntu 18.04 with it formatting the disk has got the PC back to normality. Almost. Networking works again with the inbuild (un)helpful config rather than me setting it up by hand each boot via a script. And I remembered to sort Gnome out so I can get the classic view rather than the daft dock setup. But there are two oddities... first off, the rather annoying way the screen layout changes (un)helpfully (!) when you touch the to left corner with the mouse. This can be disabled but when done so the Applications menu - the leftmost top bar menu - is no longer accessible. No amount of permutations of the toggles via gnome-tweaks will sort that. But more annoying I have lost almost all decode highlights in wsjt-x. The only ones that work are CQ, tx and my call, nothing else. I've tried every combination. It's not wsjt-x (I…

So the Ethernet interface on the shack PC decided not to work at all today. It's managed by the network-manager stuff so no ideas why it had decided to go funny. Actually, it has been off colour for a few weeks now as at boot it does not see the Internet i.e. it fails to find a route but does see locally. Anyway, I've never liked network-manger, I would far rather get control of it all myself. I realise it's there for a reason but I favour a more handraulic approach. After battling it into submission and removing it from the startup scripts editing /etc/networks/interfaces has cured its tantrum. For now anyway! But I am wondering what is up with the PC now as USB failures yesterday and then a collapse of networking today... everything important is backed up so no worries there. However, I am not of the camp that these things fail slowly as I have had PCs running for years and years before. I may well use this as an excuse to get a midi-tower system I can dual boot (Windows and Linux) and get a couple of PCI cards into.

This morning the rig would not go into transmit via wsjt-x. It worked fine last night up to when everything was shut down and there were no changes to anything, hardware or software. Rebooting the PC made no difference. CAT control was working both ways and it was receiving FT8 fine. I noticed that transmitting would sometimes change the rig settings e.g. from data to non-data. I tried the flrig / fldigi combination but transmitting via this messed the FT450D’s settings up in that it was rapidly triggering tx and the rig decided to engage its internal tuner. Plugging the two USB connectors into the front USB sockets on the PC made it work but the transmit levels are mad - ALC is triggering and the rig does not generate any decent power with this turned down. ALC is on a knife-edge where it goes from very little power / no ALC via the SignaLink TX control to 50% ALC and proper power output with nothing in between. Fiddling with the audio settings on the PC and in wsjt-x makes little difference. But changing the Mode to Data/Pkt in Settings -> Radio does improve the ALC business. This was set…

Well that's a first for me. A dead Pi, or rather a dead SD card. I have a RPi 2 in the loft connected to a DVB-T dongle and ADSB antenna which sends data to FlightRadar 24. It's been up there doing its thing for ages, but last night I received an email from FR24 that it had stopped sending data. As it turns out that was a very useful email because everything else was running fine. It also logs temperatures from three 1Wire temperature sensors on the central heating pipes. As these are underneath the location of the Pi in the loft it was easier to run a wire down for the 1Wire sensors than cobble together another Pi and find a home for it away from the heat of the water cylinder and pipework. That logging and my network monitor indicated that all was apparently well and I had not noticed the FR24 status data indicated that the ADSB feed was down. The Pi is fed via a PoE supply as I didn't want a wall-wart and mains socket up there and it makes it easier to reboot. I logged into the Pi fine ad rebooted it from…