Category: Technology

I made a thing!

Actually, I made two things:

The first is a quarter wave ground plane antenna for the 2m ham radio band.

It’s based on the instructions in this video by K7AGE

The second is a semi-portable PVC pole/stand to get the antenna about 8ft in the air.

My initial plan was to raise the antenna up 12ft, but my quick-and-dirty design made with lengths of ¾in PVC wasn’t stable enough to stand on its own. I have ideas for fixing that, but this shorter version worked well enough to participate in a ham net on a local repeater tonight.

I’m going to see if I can hit a couple of repeaters down in the Bay Area later this week using this set up.

W7RAB 73

Hooray for Delegation

I use this site’s URL (http://blog.hooloovoo.net) as my OpenID. One of the cool things about OpenID is that I don’t have to run my own OpenID server to use my own URL, I can delegate a server to do the “heavy lifting” for me. I actually have several identity providers available to me, Vox, MyOpenID, and even AOL, (not that I use my aim screen name much anymore.) I’ve pretty much been using MyOpenID as my delegate. That changed this morning. I have nothing against MyOpenID at all. I think they are a great provider. So why the change? I’m using VeriSign Labs new OpenID service because I can use my PayPal/eBay security key (otherwise known as a VIP Credential) as part of the authentication.

Multi-Factor authentication for the win!

(almost) the iPod I’ve been waiting for

The new iPod Touch looks like a good upgrade to my 60GB 5th Gen iPod. I’ve been waiting for a multi-touch interface iPod to come out since the iPhone was announced (well, technically since before that.) AND it comes with WiFi and mobile Safari and and and…

I’ve got just over 40GB of songs and videos on my current iPod, And I still have a bunch of CD’s that I’ve yet to get around to importing. A copy of entire iTunes library (and then some) is stored there. If I were to get even a 16GB iPod touch, I’d have to start managing what I have synched, and thats even before I start buying things with the WiFi iTunes Music store.

Maybe I’m lazy, but I think I’ll just wait for a higher capacity iPod touch. That being said, if one of these were to make their way into my life as a birthday and/or Christmas present, I’d happily make room for it. 🙂

State of Flux

I’m toying with the idea of moving this blog to a new home. Namely http://hooloovoo.net (instead of using the blog.hooloovoo.net sub-domain.) Over the last few days, I’ve come to realize that I have no interest in updating (or even maintaining) the design/content of my old site.

The only substantial change I’ve made recently was adding a rule to my .htaccess file to redirect http://hooloovoo.net/blog to this site. Prior to that, I updated the homepage (and did a design refresh) in 2002, added the blog page (syndicating g-blog.net) in 2003. I also added an eBay directory last year for self-hosting auction images. (But I never linked that to the rest of the site.)

My old website has languished for 4 or 5 years. It’s time that changed. There’s nothing on the site content-wise that I can’t easily port into WP as a Page. So I think that is what I’m eventually going to do. For now, I’ve added a couple more rules to my .htaccess file, which is most likely how you got here if you just tried to visit http://hooloovoo.net.

(Tangent – I should clean up my category list now that I have control over it. Do I really need a “Testing GLUE” category now that this site is no longer on GLUE?)

A fresh start

One of the email servers at work had a “little” problem with file system level corruption of one of the information stores. 50 users were affected, I was one of the 50. IT was unable to recover my mailbox, and they just recreated it in another information store. I was not caching mail on my PC, so as of right now I have lost all my email. It’s not lost forever. IT should be able to recover it from a backup, and if I REALLY need something, I can pull it out of our Digital Safe archive myself. (The fact that we are using a ZANTAZ Digital Safe is one of the reasons I was not keeping mail archived on my machine.)

It’s really refreshing to have a completly empty inbox, (well except for the test message that IT just sent) AND a completely empty calendar. (Yeah, THAT will last…) I think I may just tell IT not to bother trying to recover my mail.

I’m also tempted to completely wipe all of my personal email accounts and have a truly fresh start.

Good point about Spotlitght.

Simon Willison has a couple of observations related to one of the new features in OSX Tiger (10.4) Go read it, even if you aren’t a Mac user.

The first one sounds like a GREAT idea, I’d definately use them. The second one is an important warning. I guess it’s good that I use IMAP to access my email. I should probably go through and clean out all my inboxes anyway.

Edited on May 4th 2005, 16:19 by Hooloovoo