On June 14, 2012, I presented to the Milford ARC group, and for the first time (in three), it was not a technical presentation. Since the business meeting agenda was full talking about the Milford Hamfest (which was June 16) and Field Day, my presentation was quick and to-the-point.  Below is the presentation.

During and after the presentation, we had a lot of joking because we don’t have a lot of opportunities to activate some of these here. So there were jokes about White Castles OTA or Waffle Houses OTA.  So, knowing that there are programs out there that I didn’t include in my presentation (like Interstate Rest Stops OTA), I googled for “Waffle Houses On The Air Ham Radio’.  Surprisingly, the second and third result was fellow hamtwit NR4CB’s Bionic-Nerd Road Trip Blog.

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It seems like I had time at one point in my life.  Unfortunately, that was then, this is now.

I just pulled up NetNewsWire.  It has been a while, probably 3 years.  Over 300 news items.  NetNewsWire is a great program for RSS feeds on OS X.  Maybe other platforms, I don’t know.

I used to follow a lot of photography, blogging, NASCAR, and other news feeds.  While I’m still interested in those things, I don’t do a whole lot of photography (it’s a hobby that I’ve not had a lot of time for), and I haven’t been following NASCAR nearly as much.  The blogging stuff started seeming more about blogs to make money.  I’m not making money on this blog, nor my other (siliconcreek.net).  This one is all hobby, and siliconcreek is part work (it has probably served me well as a marketing tool).

Part of what made NNW so hard to keep up with is many of the people/organizations I was following post for money, and others were news.  They post daily (or so).  It can get annoying when someone stretches for content.  Maybe daily postings work well to make money on AdWords or get you great ranks in search engines, but I can tell when an author stretches for words.  The interest fell.  I stopped using NNW and removed it from the dock on my MacBook Pro.

I can also find some really interesting stuff that seems refined.  In fact, this morning I started my computer day reading about a flood in 1941.  It was a long post, but it was so interesting  I couldn’t pull my eyes from it!  The author of that blog doesn’t appear to post on a schedule – he did 7 posts in November, 37 in December, and 17 so far in January.  I looked at another blog, two posts, it just started, but it looks interesting. I looked at another one, the last 5 posts go back to August – many contest and EME results. The posts aren’t long, but it is good to see others on the air, even if it is modes I don’t operate (I currently operate SSB and FM only, but that’s going to change… someday!).  I saw another that included several steps of building a kit radio – very interesting, but like the rest, posts aren’t to a schedule.

And there is NO PART OF ME that wants to try to get these guys to get on a schedule.  Forget that!  I don’t post on a schedule, why should they?  And they, like me, don’t always get their posts to twitter.  And twitter, well, I have hundreds of tweets in my timeline.  I can’t keep up.  I’ve adopted a “dip in and out of the stream” attitude (thanks Connie for the idea!).  I will on occasion look back, but generally what happens when I’m not watching gets ignored.

So I decided last week to clear NNW and start finding these guys’ blogs and put their blog RSS feed into NNW.

The clearing part feels good, man!

So I’m going to start reading the infrequent posts of some of the friends I’ve made on twitter and Google+.  I will eventually add that as a blogroll here.  Baby steps.

Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to start adding things to NNW.

EDIT: it appears I’ve selected a theme that doesn’t make it easy to find the RSS feed.  It is http://www.ac8jo.us/feed .  I will be fixing that sometime soon! 🙂

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There’s a lot of people that will call themselves geeks, but only a few of us can call ourselves Übergeeks.  Even worse, there’s probably a number of people that call themselves Übergeeks that really aren’t.  So because of that, I’ve got a few ideas – if you can’t do the stuff below, you may be a geek, but you’re not an Übergeek.

So first off, what is an Übergeek? The Urban Dictionary defines an Übergeek as An Overgeek. A geek who is either extremely geeky, or highly admired by geeks with similar interests. It is sometimes used as a humorous spoof of the German word “ubermensch” (a person with great powers or abilities).”

So, according to me, one who should be admired for their geekiness:

1. Knows at least 3 programming languages (and only one is based on BASIC).  HTML does not count.
2. Has built something cool with a microcontroller (like an Arduino)
3. Has fixed someone else’s computer.  You never know how to do anything with a computer until someone else screws one up and YOU fix it.  Minor upgrades don’t count.
4. Is a master on the command line, preferably a Linux/Unix command line; the stock Windows command line doesn’t count, but PowerShell does.
5. Have a geek job.  Just as much as I don’t trust a mechanic that doesn’t work on cars, I don’t trust a geek that doesn’t have a geek job.
6. Have a ham radio license and BUILD SOMETHING. There are some hams that buy everything, and that’s okay for a ham, but if you’re an Übergeek, you’ll build something.  Kits count.  Antennas count.  Wattage doesn’t matter – QRP Transmitters is fine!
7. Always explore how things work.  Always.  If you don’t know how it works, figure it out.

These are cell phone pics from a tour of the WLW Transmitter site in Mason, OH.  More and better pics: http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrew_rohne/sets/72157627513548945/

Rainmeter is an open source Windows program used for monitoring anything.  By ‘anything’, they mean it.

I’ve built a few meters that are probably of interest to other ham radio operators.  So far, I’ve created meters for the Solar Number, Solar Flux Index, A Index, K Index, and to show the X-Ray Solar Image.  All of these update from the NOAA Space Weather website.

I would love to hear any comments or suggestions in the comments section below or via email (andrew at siliconcreek.net).

Version 0.9.2 (31 July 2011)

Download Here

Made some changes to the look of the meters – added borders, changed the text to black.  Also added a ‘hot link’ to the solar X-Ray image to send you directly to the large image on the NOAA website.

I added the maximum fluctuations to the K-Index meter.  It seems a lot of sites show this, and while it seems that it really isn’t an absolute necessity, N0NBH’s Solar Weather Image shows that, as does the NOAA Space Weather WWV Report, so I went ahead and added it.

Also added two new configs for DX Spots.  After little investigation, I decided to set things up to go to the Ham Call DX Spotter.  This is because it is the only one I’ve seen that has totals by band.  I split the spots for HF and VHF/UHF because I anticipate that most people will be interested in one or the other.  This is setup with an update rate of every 5 minutes (it is in the .ini file with the code).  If you want to change it, make it higher.  I didn’t talk with anyone at HamCall.net prior to doing this, and we certainly do not want to irritate them by overdoing things.

Version 0.9.1 (29 July 2011)

Download Here

Added K index and solar image.  See the image below (shot on my Windows 7 computer).

Version 0.9.0 (26 July 2011 – First Release)

The screenshot above shows the A-Index, Solar Flux Index, and Solar Number.  So far, that’s all the meters I’ve done so far.  These are updated periodically from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center website.

I’m making this available to anyone interested.  I will be update this periodically with additional meters (K index and maybe something related to DX Spots).  If you have any ideas, feel free to leave them in the comments)

Download Here.

To install, start by installing Rainmeter from the website.  Then, unzip the contents of this in Documents\Rainmeter (so the files in the zipfile are under AC8JO and there are folders for the A Index, SFI, and SN).  Right-click on one of the Rainmeter skins and go to refresh. Then, you should be able to right-click on a skin and add any or all of the solar measure skins.

I remember when I passed my novice test.  It took 6 weeks to get my ticket.

I took and passed Extra last night.  I just checked the FCC ULS.  I am now AC8JO.  Less than 24 hours later.  That’s pretty darn impressive.

So with that thought in mind, I’m moving my website a little – from kc8unn.siliconcreek.net to ac8jo.siliconcreek.net.  Both links will work, though.

I use Twitter to do a lot of listening and a little bit of talking… well, tweeting.

Every so often, I get followers via Twitter.  Sometimes they are interesting people (look at the people I follow – they’re interesting people).  Sometimes they’re not so much.  I generally try to follow back on my ham radio account (KC8UNN – I have two others that I don’t necessarily follow-back on).

I generally employ the following guidelines:

1. If it is my @KC8UNN account, it has to be ham radio related.  I’m lenient on this a little if it is a local or prominent ham.
2. No spam.  Ever.  I’ve had people follow me that appear to be specifically to bash someone else.  I won’t follow crap like that.
3. The timeline has to be reasonable.  I don’t care what you tweet, but if I follow you, your tweets are in MY timeline.  I don’t want to see very much about politics, and I don’t want to see a gazillion tweets coming in unless they are very interesting (and at 140 characters, it is hard to be interesting enough to justify more than 10 tweets a day).  Less is more!

So, in short, if you want me to follow you on Twitter, follow me and don’t make me think I’ll regret following you.

I was unable to catch Ham Nation live last night (sorry, I was watching the Reds).  An in-depth look on iTunes and even TWiT’s website revealed no subscribe link (but they DO have the audio posted).  So, with a little digging, I found the address: http://leoville.tv/podcasts/hn.xml.

To subscribe in iTunes:

1. Open iTunes

2. Go to Advanced and then to Subscribe to Podcast…

3. In the Address window, paste the link (above)

4. Enjoy!

Update: want video?

Large size: http://feeds.twit.tv/hn_video_large

Small size: http://feeds.twit.tv/hn_video_small

I am about to take my very first trip to the Dayton Hamvention (which is pretty bad, considering I live around an hour south of Dayton).  Since I’ve been off the air so long, I thought I’d take in some of the forums and maybe learn a thing or two.

The forum schedule is difficult for me to really look at and use when you look at the web version – it is a PDF sorted by day, then room, then time, so it is difficult to see when each forum is going on (and easy to think that you could go to two… until you realize both are in overlapping times).

So I went to Google Docs and converted the schedule to something that looks a little more like a television listing.  You can see it here.  I hope it helps others out.

I decided to move my blog from Joomla to WordPress.

I did this for two reasons.  The first reason is that I want people to be able to post comments on the blog (something that you probably can do with Joomla, just I didn’t want to put in the time to make it happen).  The other reason is because I have been running a WordPress site for years and have heavily customized it.  I am much more of an expert on WordPress than what I will ever be with Joomla.

Joomla is a great content management system, but not for what I want to do here.