junkman @junkman@mastodon.sdf.org

Well I now have 1345 wikipedias and lots of news. 😀

After fixing a power issue the dreamcatcher seems very stable. Cheap USB phone chargers wont cut it. After fixing that its run few months now with no more reboots or hangs.

Saved an old Bearcat 210 from 1979 from the trashbin. New filter cap and replaced the little mercury battery with an AA holder for memory. Luckily most stuff here is still VHF hi and low band so it's still useful. Been running for a few days. Now to disassemble and clean.

My Othernet Dreamcatcher showed up. Its a SDR that picks up the project's satellite data and audio feed and builds up a local library.

Works good. So far I have 1 wikipedia 😆

https://othernet.is/

Looks like crappy weather this weekend. Good time to stay in and see if I can get my ACE working right. A few random keys don't work and the drives need a good going through.

Playing more with modems over SIP. I have 300/1200 working very well in to the SDF dialup line. So I decided to just set the modem to max speed and let the chips fall where they may.

It did not go well. 😆

My latency (Im on LTE) to my SIP service is
--- sip.anveo.com ping statistics ---
25 packets transmitted, 25 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 69.469/142.080/296.463/65.996 ms

fyi The direct dial in number for SDF is 206/324-0474.

300 baud.
Over SIP.
Over LTE.
Why not? 🤔

My plan was to use my mini staycation to clean and organize. Hasn't been going well because I keep coming across forgotten things I want to play with. One of those things is a Z80 "softcard". Popped a CP/M image and kermit on my SDfloppy II and it fired right up. I was soon reminded of the reason I never got much use out of it. It can't seem to deal with anything faster then 300baud on the serial port with out dropping bits. 🤔

Now my tandy m100 is ready for Y2K!

Portable computing! Now with the added convenience of dual display.

I missed the news about Floodgap releasing a Firefox beta plugin that restores direct Gopher support. No more having to use the proxy service! 👍
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/overbitenx/

If you collect old phones or computers with modems then I consider having one of these old Panasonic "key" PBX system's a must. 308, 616, 824 all work out of the box with no programing and even support rotary dial. They can be found cheap/free abandoned in many telco closets now that everyone is VOIP

Got the 2nd TNC working. Turns out the problem was the battery in both units. This one was so bad I think it was shorted and keeping the thing from booting. Now to figure out AX.25 on linux. Oh and the NiCad in my M100 seems to be dead now too. Guess it is battery week.

One TNC back from the dead. Just needs a battery. Now to find a cable with a DB9 so i can hook it up to something with 80 columns. My 2nd TNC echos characters but is showing no signs of brain activity. Hopefully I can figure that one out. 🤔

I never knew linux's AX25 package had something like inetd. I may need to dust off my TNC's to play with this.
Around 8min mark Tom explains how you could basically connect most unix programs to packet radio. Connecting an irc client to packet might be fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHGUuGvB0pg