It’s late, invariably I’m awake doing nerd things… Tonight, it’s getting worked up over the fact that I can’t submit to like.fm (my new favourite replacement for last.fm) from Audacious, my media player of choice on this wee machine. First port of call, checkout the code on git… After poking around, it turns out that I can transform the address that the program ‘scrobbles’ to in one line in the code (src/scrobbler/settings.h for those interested). …

Well, it’s time for a little upgrade to STAC, isn’t it? We’ve been here for a year now, and that’s a long time for no changes! There’s been an Icom UX-910 sitting in my drawers for quite some time, now, and it would be a waste of a considerable amount of money if it wasn’t installed. Some spare time and a bored me means it has been now! In short, this box adds 1.24GHz -> 1.3GHz capability to the station, in terms of radio equipment anyway. …

For the most part, the station has been tracking balloons this month as part of it’s duty in supporting university academic activities. The balloons launched were student built projects for masters projects, and they all worked to varying degrees of success. Initially we had Project Strathosphere, however this was launched on a day that I wasn’t able to track it and as such there’s no data downlinked, however it was launched and recovered successfully, admittedly with a little bit of luck. This used the base design for electronics was one that was developed with STAC providing the essential basics. This project had a wire dipole for an antenna. …

It’s happened a couple of times, you know. I’ve lost everything on the server, had to move on and set up again. Life as a geek is so hard, eh? Each time I learn a bit about what I should have been doing, but forget to implement it and repeat the cycle. So what did I learn this time round? Backups are priceless The amount of time I’ve spent setting up apache, mysql, pisg, and the numerous other things that I run has been unreal. My skills may be a bit out of practice, but I don’t intend to be a sysadmin, so I don’t need to keep them in check. …

So a while back I got one of those Android phones. The ones running that system that google develops, Android. More precisely, I got a white HTC Dream – The T-Mobile G1. From the outset, let me say, this phone’s a classic, in my opinion. It really started the modern smartphone era, where we’ve seen the rise of mobile operating systems, the race to and beyond 1GHz and multicore processors in mobile devices, and companies redefining themselves. It’s been great to watch as a technology enthusiast! …