I’m pretty fond of my OnePlus X - it’s the first phone I’ve owned that has performance I’m happy to call “adequate”. It runs along nicely, no questions asked. It never really stutters or has a little moan at me. Battery life is a little weak for my use case, but that’s fine. I’m almost always near electricity. I do a lot of work in the Middle East, and before I go I like to clear out my phone, study what I use it for and return it to being a lean device. My standard target has been CyanogenMod, which I’ve been running since it started. That’s no longer developed, so I need to take a little look at alternatives. The OPX mod scene is a little slow these days - the phone is discontinued and never had the biggest sales figures, so there isn’t the most motivated talent pool to keep it up. …

Soundmodem, ax25d and uronode This is mostly a repost of something that was on my now deceased wiki, spruced up a little for this platform. Start at the top and work down, you should have a basic, working ax25 packet radio system by the end. I shall address netrom at a later date. I’m using soundmodem as it presents me with an sm0 device I can easily configure in the following steps, however I have also tested direwolf for this successfully. …

I’ve had a problem with my home router for a long time - the LAN side of the set up has been falling over with frustrating regularity. For me, it means my Audio Streaming setup stops playing Spotify. For my housemates, it means lost time on Overwatch! It’s happening just enough now to be a frustrating lost 5 minutes a few times a day, so it’s time to fix. My home network has always been a pretty simple affair (apart from when I’m borrowing BTOpenzone) - just the ISP provided modem/router. I am, of course, an engineer in the Telecoms Industry. I can do better! …

I installed the Riot desktop app (for matrix) tonight on Debian Stretch (my current laptop). It’s an electron app, so it’s more or less a packaged webapp. Here’s how it went wget -qO - https://riot.im/packages/debian/repo-key.asc | sudo apt-key add - sudo vim EOF /etc/apt/sources.list.d/riot.list # Riot deb https://riot.im/packages/debian/ stretch main deb-src https://riot.im/packages/debian/ stretch main sudo apt update && sudo apt install riot-web Simple. Unfortunately, because I did SSL things tonight I don’t have access to my testbed home server, so I can’t test it. …

It’s no secret I like music. I get pretty excited about my favourite tunes and take great pleasure in finding new stuff to listen to. I’ve been using last.fm since 2005, when it was known as audioscrobbler. I’ve got a lovely long history of stuff built up there, tracking my music taste over the years from Flogging Molly to Sigur Ros to James Blunt and to whatever kind of a mess it is now. I fall in and out of scrobbling as time and convenience allows, so my annual listens aren’t that accurate. It doesn’t account for podcast mixes (which accounts for a large amount of my listening) and music I listen to in my car, as well, but that’s not that much these days, comparatively. …