Field of dreams?Back in Part 1, I emptied my soul laid out the rough qualifications for a somewhat minimalist solar-powered ham radio station. Today, I'd like to walk you through my process for selecting the solar panels for this lash-up of geekery. I thought picking out solar panels for …| Das Bityard
How hard can it be?There are many things you can do in ham radio and one of the things I like doing is contests. In a contest, you get on the air and try to rack up as many contacts are you can. A "contact" is essentially just getting …| Das Bityard
(Disclaimer: No AIs were used in the writing of this article. My intelligence has been frequently questioned, but has thus far never been accused of being less than natural.) At this point, it's fair to say most tech-oriented cyberspace denizens have at least a passing familiarity with the basic concepts …| Das Bityard
Internet Mail, or email, or whatever kids these days call it, was one of those things that terrified me very early on when I was a strapping young System Administrator. Everything else that I was doing at the time seemed comparitively easy: Linux/BSD installs, system setup, automation, and such …| Das Bityard
I'm able to get a good grasp on big-picture stuff relatively easily. However, I don't have a great memory for technical details, even stuff that I do almost every day. I imagine my co-workers are freqently amazed that I can even remember how to put on pants in the morning …| Das Bityard
So I have this motorcycle. It's a lot of fun. I could talk at length about the general awesomeness of the late 70's to early 80's Suzuki GS muscle bikes. But! We only have so much time until the heat death of the universe. So to keep it brief, I …| Das Bityard
(Alternate Title: How to Shut Up the Ubuntu MOTD, the Long Way) Sometimes, the simplest questions take you on exciting journies. This was, in fact, the most powerful and motivating force that got me into doing computery things from a very young age. I would ask a question, how do …| Das Bityard
Let's begin--as they say--at the beginning. As one who primarily self-identifies as an introverted computer nerd, it did not seem likely in retrospect that woodworking would end up being one of my major hobbies. Now, understand that I'm the kind of person who likes to have nice things but who …| Das Bityard
Remember the good old days when neighbors knew each other, cars had chrome bumpers, and nobody had any idea how much electricity they were using until a bill came in the mail? Well, a few years back, my local power company started offering a mobile app that customers could use …| Das Bityard
At work, we use Docker for developing, testing, and deploying applications. For the most part, it has simplified our lives greatly at the cost of a few annoyances and headaches here and there. I just spent the better part of a week dealing with one of them and since misery …| Das Bityard
The Beav in all his geometric glory.Even though I have been using some Linux distribution or another pretty much daily for roughly two decades, I have not had occasion to write a review on one. Today, opportunity knocks not once but 18.04 times. Background Just who in blazes …| Das Bityard
I have accumulated quite a lot of sockets over the years. Some were purchased as a set, some were given to me by my father (a former auto mechanic) from his extensive collection. A few just turned up out of nowhere unexpectedly. I looked for a long time (years, in …| Das Bityard
It was a dark and stormy night. My eyes were glued to the screen as I watched the Ansible playbook make its way through the myriad configuration changes across dozens of production hosts. Of course all of this had been tested in staging but if you work in technology, you …| Das Bityard
The BITX40 is a QRP (low-power) transceiver kit for the 40 meter amateur radio band. Although it is low-power (nominal 7 watts), and restricted to a single band (7 MHz), the $60 USD price tag makes it very attractive to those like myself who like to build things and play …| Das Bityard
My Raspberry Pi arrived in the mail earlier this week. However, work, family, and other commitments meant that tinkering with it had to wait until the weekend. Until today, all that I managed to accomplish was to download a Debian-based OS image, flash it to an SD card, hook the …| Das Bityard
Just finished up x0xb0x #3. All of the basic functionality seems to work and it sounds just like a 303. Well, better than a 303 in my book but I guess I'm probably biased. They gray knobs were special-ordered from Korg Europe. They were made for the Electribe ESX-1 and …| Das Bityard
I'm almost done with x0xb0x #3. This one is being quite the problem child, actually. Two note LEDs flat-out didn't work, so those had to be replaced. The TEMPO LED had to be replaced because I scratched it to hell and back. The TEMPO encoder was replaced because the first …| Das Bityard
To make up for the rather non-trivial amount of money it cost to build my x0xb0x, I decided to make another and sell it on eBay. I've been working on it since January (often while I should have been studying) but finally got it done after about 2 months of …| Das Bityard
Just when I think I know everything I need to know about OpenSSH, I end up learning something new and tremendously useful. Today, that would be the -D argument. Many times I have been stuck on an "untrusted" Internet connection and need to log in (insecurely) to a certain site …| Das Bityard
It occurred to me today that I hadn't put up many pictures yet of my x0xb0x whilst under construction. It further occurred to me I had not taken many pictures of my x0xb0x whilst under construction either. Besides the one a few posts down, this is it: Here the power …| Das Bityard
In system administration, you spend a lot of time typing into and reading back information from a terminal. Although all terminals pretty much do the same thing, they can differ somewhat in their UI features or which desktop they were designed to be integrated into. A few years back I …| Das Bityard
This, my friends, is what is called a "ghetto-sistor." It's what you get when you need a 1K ohm resistor, but don't have a new one handy, and instead have to settle for ripping one out of an old telephone before you realize that one leg is going to be …| Das Bityard
And by god, it is blinky.| Das Bityard