I’ve had a plan to build a 1/4 Wave Ground Plane antenna based on this calculator and the data available on that site for some time. I’m doing the 2m band first (144MHz) - I’ve got piece of 4mm brass diameter pipe for my driven element, and 6mm aluminium pipe for my radials. The radials are to be angled at 45° from each other, at 45° below normal. Click the link for what that looks like! …

So I’ve had a lot of GPG issues over the last few months, and part of that has been me not bothering particularly to ensure I’ve got a consistent setup across my machines. Part of the issue is that I’m using a yubikey, and keep having to look at external references to make sure it works consistently. I’m going to keep this as a reference for what I’ve used recently to make everything work. …

Wow, 2019 came and went in a flash! It’s been an incredibly tough, rewarding and interesting year for me. There was a lot of change and turmoil in my personal and professional life, which made actually finding time to stop and do the things I love a lot more difficult. I’ve barely cycled, I feel like I’ve barely touched personal projects, and the memories of what I did in January & February feel a million miles away. …

I finally fell into the dd trap. I dd’d a FreeBSD Beaglebone black image to /dev/sdb, where my home directory lives. It should have been /dev/mmcblk0, but I trusted tab completion and didn’t check dmesg. After a quick check of gparted, it was obvious what had happened. I’ve nuked the partition table on the drive. Well done. The data in /home/hibby was intact, however. My home directory was still responding, I could load new files ith no corruption. A quick check of mtab tells me ~ lived at /dev/sdb6. It turns out the first ~200GB of data on the drive were taken up by an old windows install or something. So, I had to work out how best to recover that partition and that one alone. I didn’t care about the rest. Step 1: Do not turn the computer off, as it still works. …

I’ve been running FreeBSD on my primary server for a while. There’s a number of things I like, and I’m enjoying the challenge of getting to grips with how the system is put together. It’s been a good challenge so far, with many highlights. The idea of the server was to be VM host - bhyve is a lovely hypervisor to interact with, and I’ve tried a few management tools for it. Initially, i used iohyve which was lovely. It’s a really nice command syntax for interacting with VMs, and understands zfs which makes snapshotting dead easy. My favourite thing I managed was accessing the UEFI frame buffer over VNC - that was super cool. Granted, this is a bhyve thing and not restricted to iohyve, but it was still cool. …