by srhuston

Situation No Win

I can’t go on, so I give in
Gotta get myself right outta here

–Big Audio Dynamite, “Rush”
Image of my mixer with all the cables plugged in and channels labeled, finally where it belongs again.

Finally, everything is where it belongs. As mentioned previously, I had received a mixer for Christmas but found a problem with it and swapped it for another. That one had a problem too, and then I got a different one completely. That one had a problem, and I realized those problems weren’t a problem at all if I did things a little differently, but then it had another problem. It was returned for another, and then I waited. And waited. And waited. After about a month I asked the vendor if they could tell me anything about availability, and they said they could not, but offered to change my gift card (which they created while waiting for the restocking) into a normal refund to my original payment method. I agreed with that and thanked them for their help, and then made the order with another vendor that had them in stock. And that one arrived last week. After work I unpacked everything and made quick work of getting things connected yet again – a bit easier of a task since I had everything noted down in Joplin for where things will go and all the appropriate settings – and after testing as I went I even made up the new labels for all the channels and got everything squared away. At last!

Last night after everyone went to bed, I started fiddling a little. One thing I was unsure of is the audio levels from the mixer into the mic input of the radios. I do have a roughly 40dB T-pad in line there that should be making the audio level decent, but I was afraid that it might be too hot now that I am connecting it differently. On the old mixer, I used the Aux Send 2 (post-fader) rail to feed the T-pad and my microphone switch input, which meant anything was mixed down to mono to head there. But on the first mixer I tried to put here, Aux Send 2 was now used as an input to the effects processor. I could still use it if I wanted to, but that meant if I wanted any effects I would have to choose which to use it for at the moment, and if I wanted any effects to go into the radio (no idea why I’d want to, but it’s a possible option) I wouldn’t be able to. So I thought, why not use the main mix output? Well, by default it’s stereo, so truthfully I should use something to mix that down to mono. But then again, what would possibly come out of all this that would be stereo? Well, the only thing that is likely to be stereo in the mixer at any time is music, and I won’t be playing music into the radios, so that’s not an issue. Anything else I can or should be able to mix down to mono as it comes in. So, I simply and arbitrarily chose the left channel to feed the pad and the radios.

The issue would then be, is the audio level OK? Audio checks are very subjective – you’re not only depending on your transmission, but the other person’s reception, and their perception of it all. I don’t like that kind of variability, I’d prefer something a little more … scientific. Or at least subject to my own opinion! So first I went to websdr.org to find a device somewhere that would hear my signal. Neat thing about websdr locations, you can usually record a short bit and have it sent to you, so not only can you hear what it sounds like live, you can play it back and compare it. So I found one that heard me, made a couple recordings at a couple different microphone gain levels, and downloaded them to my computer. Only… they sounded pretty much the same. I noticed, however, that the automatic level control (ALC) meter on the radio was bouncing quite a bit at one gain level, and didn’t move at all at the other. ALC is used when the audio signal going into the mixer in the radio is too high and needs to be attenuated a little so it doesn’t overdrive later stages. If you’re running digital modes, you don’t want that meter to move at all – if it is, you’re overdriving things and since those signals are steady you can and should turn the input to the radio down until the meter doesn’t move or else it might distort things. But for voice, you want it to be there a little bit, because it means you’re driving with enough power to fully load the radio’s later stages. Turn the audio down a little, and maybe some of your voice won’t be loud enough to fully drive power output; turn it up too high, and you’ll saturate things and start clipping and creating bad audio.

To solve this, I loaded a webpage that lets me generate a constant tone. 400Hz works fine for this purpose, and I sent it to a different output of the computer and therefore input to the mixer. I could then adjust it so that the level coming into the mixer would be just around 0dB, as “normal audio” should be going into it. Next, turn the radio’s power down as low as possible since I don’t need to really transmit anything over the air for this test (a dummy load would be better, but I don’t have one and would have to swap cables around to use it anyway – limiting test transmissions to as short as possible, and as low a power as possible, is also good practice). Finally, hit the button to adjust mic gain and key up the radio. Now as I adjust the setting, I can see what the ALC meter is doing, and since the audio going into it is steady it’s easy to tell if I’m on track with my adjustment or not. I set it so that it got a little less than 30% of deflection, meaning with a 0dB audio signal it would be just a little too high for the mixer stage in the radio and need to be attenuated a little. Now, turn off the audio tone and try it with voice, and huzzah! I could see the ALC moving while I talked, but didn’t see it hitting more than about 60% meaning there’s still room to attenuate if I get loud, but I’m fully driving the radio’s amplifier with the most audio I can. That’s a lot more scientific than “how’s my audio sound?”!

Last, I wanted to do something similar for the Yaesu VHF/UHF radio. Unfortunately it doesn’t have an ALC meter to look at, but I can very easily listen to its output. I pulled out an audio cable and adapter and plugged my handheld into the mixing board, then routed that audio to a different input on the computer. Fired up Audacity and told it to record on that input only when there’s a signal present, then turned the FTM-100 down to low power and made a few tests. Plain FM, low mic gain and normal mic gain. Then C4FM, normal and low. Listened back, and normal gain not only was louder and easier to hear, but it didn’t sound distorted at all. I probably should have tried high, and then tried it with the stock mic as well.. maybe that’ll be an experiment for another time.

So, everything is finally done. New mixer is in place and working extremely well – I’m happy to have real mute buttons, and two extra rails (one new and one newly opened up). I’m using three of the four stereo inputs already, but don’t really have a plan for the fourth yet though I’ve had an idea or two for the future. I’ve got four mono inputs available as well for things I might want to do. It’s every bit as versatile as the old setup, and quite a bit more. And let’s be honest… it looks freaking awesome.

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by srhuston

After Midnight

Not much going on lately; left hand’s been arthritic, right hand’s still suffering from tendonitis. Was a crappy work week with some events going on that took away from what I needed to get done, so while I worked a full week I don’t feel like I was productive. I have been playing with the Altair quite a bit, just tonight I found a disk image with Rogue on it. Figured out after I tried to boot it that it needs a Z80 CPU, but then it didn’t want to work right anyway. Not sure if it doesn’t like the VT100 output or what, but I was really hoping to get Rogue, Hack, or something like it running on there. I know I did see one of them on the PiDP so that’s an option too. Otherwise, torn between looking for something new to get into and waiting for Thursday when Assassin’s Creed Shadows is released. Maybe I should make some on-air contacts again, been a while since I’ve done that.. or actually call CQ and make some voice contacts, though that’s easier to do when people aren’t going to hear me in the house (or wake up from me talking).

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by srhuston

But You Can’t Tune A Fish

I’m singing this note ’cause it fits in well with the chords I’m playing
I can’t pretend there’s any meaning hidden in the things I’m saying

–The Who, “Getting In Tune”

A long long time ago.. back when I wrote here a little more regularly, or at least tried to, I talked about some problems I was having with the tuner for my HF station. The first part of that story was posted here. Well, technically I guess the first part is this post, but that took place the day after the other one because I don’t always think linearly. Anyway, after all of that ended – which was some time later – I wrote a draft to just put a bow on the whole thing, and around that time stepped away from posting entirely. I kept looking at the draft now and then when I’d login but didn’t write it up. When I recently revitalized things I wondered if I should delete these draft posts, and I did take some of them away, but this is one I figured I could still write up and be relevant. So let’s finally end this thing, shall we? At least I hope it’s ended, I haven’t been using my HF station for a while lately and with my occasional luck I won’t be surprised to find a new gremlin took residence somewhere.

The tuner left my house around the end of March 2021, and I got notification from MFJ that they had it. Some weeks went by and there was no word, so I reached out to ask for a status update. They got back to me saying that apparently one guy was the one to work on them, and he had a backlog to get through and hadn’t got to mine yet. They promised an update, which I seem to recall they didn’t deliver on time, and I think I sent yet another follow-up asking for information only to receive a shipping notification that it was on the way back to me. I never did get any word on what was actually wrong, just a couple hand-scrawled notes about replaced components that didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but the tuner was back in my hands three months later. I remounted it and it seemed to be working better, but not for long. Strange problems like the SWR would bounce between infinite and 1:1 while tuning, on almost a regular period like something was swaying in and out of the way. Whatever it was, I wasn’t happy – I’d spent three months waiting for this to be fixed, was told it was fixed, and it was most certainly Not Fixed.

I’d been hanging out in IRC with a group of hams, and a smaller group of them who are somewhat local to me, and come October I grumbled about my antenna problems in there. Three of the folks in channel – Andrew (KC2G), Chris (K2CR), and Jeremy (AC1LQ) – started walking me through some troubleshooting steps. I knew I was too “in the middle” of it and greatly appreciated an outside look, so I took their advice and reconnected the old unun transformer that I originally bought with the antenna. Back then, I used an antenna tuner inside the house, plus with a specific length of coax the whole system worked well and I was able to operate 160-6m. But trying to do that here wasn’t working as well, at least in part because I didn’t have the same length of coax between the tuner and the antenna anymore (which would change what point a standing wave node would be, and makes the tuner easier able to adjust – though it doesn’t do anything for the signal coming in or going out). So I figured the solution was to get a tuner that is as close to the mismatch as possible – right at the antenna – and that might help things to work better. Only, it wasn’t working out so great after all.

Back to the present, I hooked the unun up as close to how it was back when I first setup the antenna. Then, the whole length of the antenna was “hot” and the ground only connected to the ground plane and wires run along the grass. When the new tuner kit installed, one step was to isolate the bottom most antenna section and make that part of ground, and then everything from that above is hot. This shortens the antenna by one section, but supposedly is the better way to run it – I wonder if it’s because that’s also where the tuner mounts, and it keeps RF from being radiated right into the side of the tuner that way. Either way, the tuner is now seeing the entirety of the mismatched antenna right at its inputs. So by installing the unun and connecting that, then running through the tuner, now the unun will take up some of the mismatch before the tuner gets to it. Headed back into the shack to test things out, and .. eureka! The tuner was working much better, on all bands except 160m (to this day I still have no good way to tune up there, though I have ideas I just haven’t got around to trying to build something for it).

I made one more trip outside to reset the tuner’s memories completely, since I’d now mucked with the whole antenna system to the point that any learned tunings for a frequency would have to be relearned. To do that you have to open the case and have power applied while holding down certain buttons inside the case – the tuner is basically the same as the desktop model but without a meter or display of any kind, but the button switches still exist on the circuit board. Anyway, while I have it open and am looking at it, I found something else too:

Close up image inside my antenna tuner showing a complete lack of solder on the wire connecting the ground lug to the circuit board.

Turns out when it came back to me, the ground lug that connects to the ground for the antenna was never soldered. It’s just barely touching there, and probably making sporadic contact (and arcing I’ll bet too). Not an issue now that I’m using the coax connector to talk to the antenna, but when it was connected through that lug, I definitely wasn’t getting a good ground. Pretty good chance that was around 90% of the problems that I had when I set things back up, and of course I didn’t catch it because why would I open the tuner and look inside when I got it back from being repaired? Ugh.

Now I just need to get on the radio more often and make all this worth it. As mentioned, this all happened in 2021, and by the time it was all wrapped up I had just started to fall out of radio again. Made some contacts in February ’22, and again in October ’22, then a smattering in ’23 and ’24 but nothing much. Maybe with the recently upgraded audio board, cleaned off workbench, and a little rearranging of things in the shack, I’ll get back on the air again.

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by srhuston

Basking in the Green Glow

Love will find a way, if you want it to

–Yes, “Love Will Find a Way”

This makes me almost inordinately happy. Yes that’s an IBM Model M “clicky” keyboard. PS/2 output on it connects to a PS/2 -> USB adapter plugged into the Altair’s VT100 emulator port, and a VGA monitor displaying the nice green glow of a terminal. I wasn’t thinking I needed to do it, but now I feel like I really do need to get the VT320 hooked up and working on this – even if it’s deeper than this LCD monitor, it’s smaller and would fit better somewhere. I don’t know where that would be, because I wasn’t planning on having a display next to this normally, but… love will find a way.

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by srhuston

You Are In A Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Alike

He spoke of lands not far, nor lands they were in his mind

–Yes, “Wonderous Stories”
Image from the Atari 8-bit game "Jewels of Darkness" showing a half screen drawing and the opening text of the game.

As I’ve been getting into more retro computing (see thing one and thing two), there’s some things that a lot of people ask when I mention the new equipment. One of the first was “does it run ZORK?” While the answer is yes, Zork isn’t a game I ever really played – just kinda knew about it. Again, it predates my start in computers a little, and while it did still exist in other forms I didn’t hear about it until much later when the shine wasn’t as bright for me. But there was a game that I played a lot of, and I found it was there. First, a little history.

When I was a kid, a friend of mine had an Atari 800XL 8-bit computer. We would play with it a lot when I came over to his place, and a couple times he brought it over to mine when we’d have a sleepover. Lots of games on there that I remember playing and enjoying. At one point, he was looking to part with it – he wanted money for something else and hadn’t been using it anyway – and I happily offered to help. The transaction completed and I became the proud owner of it and a wealth of accessories (tape drive, disk drive, large box of floppy disks, even a few cartridges). I still have it all today, and have shown it to the kids, but the video output leaves a bit to be desired anymore and so while we still play Atari things we do it with the Retropie system running the atari800 emulator.

Well one of the games in there I really enjoyed, even though I wasn’t very good at it. It was called “Jewels of Darkness” and contained three text-based adventures that had 8-bit graphics drawn on the top of the screen like a storybook. The first of the games in that group was called the Colossal Caves Adventure, and I’d heard about it a little bit even back then but didn’t know much overall. So flashing to recently as I’m looking at some of the history for the Altair and the PDP, and I see mentions about Adventure. I dug in a bit more to find that Adventure was written on a PDP and spread out in the early days of the ARPANET, and eventually found its way into many platforms and systems including personal computers. As I was reading about some of the versions, I saw a familiar name: Roberta Williams. I knew her name well, as the founder of Sierra Games and creator of King’s Quest, one of the first games I played when we were getting our first computer (an IBM PCjr, the system for which the first King’s Quest game was created). Turns out Roberta got into gaming in part because of Adventure, and in 2023 she wanted to share that with others. Enter “Colossal Cave“, a first person 3D game which takes all of the gameplay from the original game and wraps it around wonderful landscapes and room designs and brings it to a new light. Once I saw this – and that it was available on the PS5 – I wasted no time adding it to my cart and checking out.

I spent the day playing through, and remembering how far I’d got in previous runs as a young one. Not very far, it turns out, because I never made detailed maps (which is almost a requirement) and wouldn’t notice things in the description enough to know there was something I should do. But when the game auto-maps areas as you enter them, and you can physically look around to see what’s in the space and what you could interact with, it’s a whole different kind of experience. On my first playthrough, with only having to remind myself of a few things (where is that damned trident anyway) I only fell short of a perfect score because I opted for the instructions at the beginning, which deducts 5 points. But not only did I have an immense amount of fun playing, I know at least one of the kids is interested in playing as well because it’s a puzzle type game that he can intuit from clues around what to do – like Hello Neighbor without absolutely needing to go find a walkthrough on IGN because there’s a valve handle hidden under the third potted rose, which there’s no way you could have ever known without looking it up.

Looking forward to starting Adventure up on the PDP soon and playing it as the original text game. Maybe I’ll even fire up Jewels of Darkness again and see what some of those half-screen images look like since I know I didn’t get to the end before. Then I guess I’d better start on Zork…

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by srhuston

It’s a UNIX system! I know this!

Old days, Good times I remember. Fun days, filled with simple pleasure.

–Chicago, “Old Days”

As mentioned last month, I picked up some kits to put together recently and had a blast doing so. I’ve already detailed the Altair 8800 kit that I assembled, so now it’s time to talk about the next one – the PDP-11/70 replica called a “PiDP-11“. It was every bit as much fun as the previous kit to assemble, though a bit more challenging!

[Note, in order to see captions on the photos, you’ll have to click through to the gallery on Google Photos]

This kit was shipped to me from Panama, so it had a bit different packaging in case it had to be opened by customs (mine wasn’t). Sorting through all the parts I found everything was in good order and re-read the instructions for assembly (much like the last kit, I’d already read through them quite a bit before things arrived). The only thing which is not part of the kit is a Raspberry Pi itself, and while I had one at home that I could use I wanted to be able to use wireless to talk to it; when I realized the wireless adapter would be about half the cost of a new Pi 4, I decided to just get the new Pi with the built-in abilities. The extra power wouldn’t hurt, even if it’s emulating an old machine!

Since this time I wasn’t starting until after dinner, I knew I wasn’t going to have a lot of time to work on it before it would be time for bed, but I figured I’d get some of it done at least. I got as far as seating the LEDs into the board before I called it a night. By then I had all of the diodes and resistors installed as well as a couple other components, and had come to my first conclusion about this kit: the pads for all the components are extremely tiny. I use a fairly small soldering tip on my iron with a wedge shape that works well on through-hole work, but for this I really should have swapped to the pinpoint tip that I have for doing SMD work. Unfortunately I didn’t come to this conclusion early enough to make it a worthwhile change, because it would have taken too long to wait for the iron to cool off to swap tips the first night, and on the second night I was soldering things that were landed on larger pads anyway so it wasn’t a problem anymore (and in fact, I was going to be doing the switches the second night and definitely wanted the larger tip for those).

Testing the kit before the switches went into place was nice, and involved seating the Pi on the back panel. One nice thing is that it’s mentioned multiple times in the instructions that you need to put something to insulate the Pi from the back of the board to avoid shorting out any of the LEDs, however the socket has been redesigned to be extra tall now so when the Pi is seated on the back it sits high enough off the board that there’s no danger of shorting things unless you leave large tails on the components and don’t trim them. Since I don’t do that, everything was fine, and the test succeeded. Time to move on to the switches, which was definitely the hardest part of things. By the time I was finished, my fingers were in a bit of pain (not just from arthritis) and I found myself thinking, “this is good enough.” Now that’s not a way to say I was giving up on it, and things do look good, but maybe they aren’t aligned perfectly side-to-side or up-and-down. As a replica of a PDP-11/70, maybe it’s not exact in that sense, but I’m perfectly happy with it – there’s no part where I look at it and wish I’d done it better.

So how do those switches get installed differently than the Altair? Well with the Altair you set all the switches in place and then rest the front panel over top to line them all up. On this, however, there’s two stencils that come into play; one stencil goes just on top of the circuit board and the switches go through it, and it also contains the information on it for which direction each switch goes as well as the color and type (momentary vs. toggle), and the other template goes over top of the switches to hold them into place and keep their spacing up-and-down and side-to-side. Once everything is plugged in, you are supposed to “wiggle” the lower stencil up over the sides of the switches and then use some zip ties to hold the two stencils together which in theory keeps everything where it’s supposed to be. In practice, this was still an extremely difficult endeavor and left me wondering a few times if I was going to get it right or be horribly disappointed. In the end when I started soldering, I realized that I was chasing perfection at the expense of a good result, and I was going to either hurt myself or damage something if I continued at this rate. And you can see yourself in the photos linked above, some of the switches may be a little closer to each other than others, and some may be a little higher or lower than others, but nothing looks like it was slapped together without a care and assembled poorly. It may not meet the rigorous standards of DEC in the 1970s with a manufacturing plant at their disposal, but I think it’s perfect for me.

After a few more touches everything was done, and it was time to close up. I did leave the back panel off for a bit because I wanted a different power cord than the one I’d bought, and I installed an oversized grommet and a couple zip ties to create a strain relief as well. At some point I may want to install panel mount USB or Ethernet ports, but for now I’m perfectly fine using SSH over the wireless network, and I can use VNC to display the rPi’s console as well if I want to get more out of it or do other things. And now I have two retro computers with immense amounts of history to explore and learn more about since they were far enough before my time to have been gone when I became aware of the digital world. I’ve already started with a few things, running CP/M or 2.11 BSD, various flavors of BASIC, and of course entering in small programs via the front panel which is part of the whole purpose! Oh, and if you’re curious about the title of the post, the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11/70 is the machine that helped UNIX gain a foothold in the world, having been ported to it from the earlier PDP-8 where it started at Bell Labs. So aside from the blinkenlight factor, I really wanted a PDP because it’s kinda the reason why I do what I do in the end.

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Look, Ma, No Wires!

Out in the woods, or in the city, it’s all the same to me.
When I’m driving free, the world’s my home, when I’m mobile.

–The Who, “Going Mobile”

I was about to type up the post about my next soldering project, but I decided I’ll jump a little out of order. I finished that one before I did what I’m writing about here, but this finishes up the Altair 8800 that I posted about earlier, so let’s wrap that one up first. As a friend of mine likes to say, “that makes sense. Let’s do it anyway!”

Close up photo of an Arduino Due board with wires soldered on the very tiny pads of the RX and TX lights to "steal" an additional serial line from the board.

First things first, I looked at the Arduino and the tiniest soldering iron tip I had and thought, “hold my beer.” Yep, I was going to try to solder on top of the LEDs for the TX and RX lines and squeeze one more serial port out of this sucker. And ya know what? I did it. One line went on easily enough, and the second one I thought I had but it popped off when I moved the wire to route it nicely, so I tried it again and it stayed put that time. The wires themselves are breadboard jumpers I got for solderless breadboard work – I cut one end off and stripped a tiny bit of wire, then tinned them (and left a little extra solder on the end so it would be easier to affix it to the Arduino). I routed the wires through the ICSP header on the board and out through one of the mounting holes for strain relief, and everything went really smoothly. I just kept saying to myself, “Red for RX” so I knew which was which. These LEDs are normally usable by the Arduino through software, but not actually “attached” to any of the I/O pins on the headers, so if you want to use them for something other than a light show you have to do this. Who would be crazy enough to do it though? Well, someone who didn’t want to give up either the physical DE-9 serial connector on the back of the Altair, nor the VT100 emulator built-in and attached to a daughter card on the back. Now there’s four options for talking to the “console” of the Altair – USB directly to the Arduino, DE-9 serial, VT100 emulator via VGA and USB, or Wi-Fi!

Altair-Duino sitting in my Panavise on my desk, plugged into the computer so I could find out that the reason I couldn't talk to the new serial line is because I'm an idiot.

I powered things up on my workbench, connected to the ESP-01S on my phone, gave it the right config for my wireless network, but couldn’t get any data from it. Alright, moved the whole thing over to the computer desk so I could plug the USB into the computer and talk to it that way. After a couple other false starts with things, I finally got comms to it and told it to load the profile that I thought would have the right information on it, and it said the file wasn’t there. It was at that point that I realized the configuration profile didn’t exist in the memory of the Arduino, but instead on the SD card that I use on this. The SD card that is still in the card reader. Which is on the daughter card. Which connects to the header on the right side in this photo (back of the board). Which is sitting on the workbench because I didn’t hook it up while I’m testing things here. <insert forehead slap sound> So after I manually told the software to use the other serial port, I verified that it was talking properly, then powered things off again to finish with the install and closing of everything.

Showing the back of the Altair-Duino with the two new serial connections stretched from the Ardunio Due to the newly mounted header next to an ESP-01S module.

After the breadboard jumpers, I then had two female-female jumpers which worked as extension cables to bring the wiring over to the 6-pin header newly soldered to the board. Normally one would use jumpers on the left and right side to connect the center pin to one of the pin pairs to “steal” one of the other serial ports. By plugging the jumper wires to the center pins, I can connect right to the ESP-01S without soldering to it directly. I left the two jumpers hanging off the ends of the headers so they’re stored with the system but not in use. After this it was time to button things up, and really it all looks the same as the original post at that point since this is all internal. I did notice that the daughter card (specifically the VT100 emulator) seemed to push down on the ESP-01S a little, but there’s no shorts involved (the part pressing on it is the top of jumpers, which aren’t open on the back) and it doesn’t seem to be a huge issue. Definitely a tight fit though. Along with the ESP-01S, I also got the missing nylon bolts to finish mounting things properly (the front panel was otherwise only held on with half the screws it should be and two holes were left there) so everything is buttoned up nicely and looks phenomenal.

So now I’m even more happy with this item, because I can simply telnet to the IP address it gets assigned and automatically get a serial connection to the Altair. I’ve been playing with some other things on it too, but maybe I’ll write about them separately. So far I can say it’s been not only a huge source of enjoyment to build the kit, and even to look at it (let’s admit, it’s quite a pretty piece of equipment), but also to “toggle in” a program to load things – even if I don’t really have to with how the emulation works – and to start exploring some of the operating systems I’d only known about in passing. Plus… I’m almost ashamed to admit, I don’t think I’ve ever played Zork before. And I know I’ve never finished Adventure.

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  1. Steve Huston
    Steve Huston @srhuston.net

    Hm, ok there’s one thing this new plugin doesn’t do as well – the image from the post didn’t come through too. Images are a Good Thing! Alright, I’ll have to think about things maybe, or use the other plugin to post things and this one to “pull” in comments. This calls for More Science!

    March 2, 2025
by srhuston

Speaking of New Things…

Right now, it’s gonna take you over
A new sensation, a new sensation

–INXS, “New Sensation”

Along the lines of trying new things, I’m trying a new Bluesky plugin on the site for this post. It’s supposed to auto-share posts to there, but it’s also supposed to include replies and such from Bluesky back to here, sort of a way to comment on the website by commenting there. It’d be another option, and I think it could be nice, but I want to see how it works. So this post is both to let you know about a new thing, and to test it. Funny how that happens.

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  1. Steve Huston
    Steve Huston @srhuston.net

    Well I like how it showed up here at least.

    March 2, 2025
    1. Steve Huston
      Steve Huston @srhuston.net

      And I like how it showed up on the website. Ok, this might stay and replace the “post to Bluesky” feature of the other plugin I have.

      March 2, 2025
by srhuston

A Little More Action

A little more bite and a little less bark
A little less fight and a little more spark

–Elvis Presley, “A Little Less Conversation”

Gonna try something new; way back when I used to have comments turned on all the time, but turned them off when all I would do is get emails about spam posts on everything. Now that I’m trying to put stuff here more often, I made a couple changes that should hopefully prevent that kind of spam from ever landing and turned on comments by default. I also made it so that one doesn’t have to have an account here to comment, which should lower the bar for those who want to have a dialogue.

I also finished my next soldering project, mostly. There’s a few things left to do, and I have to organize the photos into an album and post it, so that’ll be coming soon. Maybe this weekend? We’ll see.

Edit: One other thing, I saw a site recently that had embedded comments from Bluesky, and I think I found a plugin to do that. Might play with it later, but it’s too close to sleepytime now.

Comments

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  1. Steve Huston
    Steve Huston @srhuston.net

    Now I just need comments that aren’t me 😛 (admittedly this one is for testing purposes, but still…)

    March 2, 2025