It’s been a while and I’ve been pretty active — just not on this blog.

For the last seven months or so, I’ve been releasing a cassette magazine called bitpunk.fm. It includes, music, poetry, technical articles and sounds. It is also a podcast feed in case you don’t have a cassette player. I’ve also been writing quite a bit of poetry over on substack.

Lastly, I’ve launched a internet radio station as well: radio.bitpunk.fm. On Friday’s at 1600UTC if you tune in live, you’ll have a live poetry show that I’ve been running for about 3 months now. It even has call-ins for poetry at 1-877-BIT-LOFI.

This most likely will be the last post I make on this blog. I invite you follow along with me by subscribing to the podcast, requesting a cassette, subscribing to my substack or just tuning in to the radio. I’m thankful you subscribed to me once before.

Links:

• bitpunk.fm — the cassette magazine.
• bitpunkfm.substack.com — poetry.
• bitpunk.fm — the podcast.
• Poetry on Tape — weekly poetry podcast.
• radio.bitpunk.fm — 24×7 internet radio station.
• Radio Bitpunk.fm — the radio station wrapped up in a live podcast.
• Bitpunk.fm unwound — technical podcast about Podcasting 2.0
• Bitpunk.fm Live — subscribe with a modern podcast app to get live notifications.
• How to get a cassette tape.

The existing format

Let’s consider the problem of getting 10 people to talk to each other on the radio and then we’ll understand why the net has a certain way of doing things. The first problem the net solves is a classic communication protocol question: when – when and where do I send my traffic? The nets happen generally at fixed dates and times and the frequencies/repeaters are “well known.” Just like HTTP etc… occur on “well known” ports. You can send HTTP traffic on port 123 for example, but you might not make your NTP servers happy.

Ok, so now we have 10 people at the right time and frequency, who talks first? If all 10 people keyed up at the same time everyone signals would be mangled, this is because on one frequency it is a shared communication medium. Early computer networks had this problem as well and I’m sure you’ve noticed now there is an Ethernet cable for every device that goes into a switch. This effectively eliminates the possibility of collision.

On the air, we could do something where every participant is assigned their own frequency. As hams, we certainly have plenty of spectrum to go around. A single net control operator could then “packetize” (summarize) the traffic and then announce it on a common frequency. On HF this is done for example if a station can’t transmit to the net control, his traffic could be relayed from another station. Local repeaters don’t do this because there is generally one repeater so it’s inherently shared.

Which leads me the biggest issue with the current protocol – most of the net is just checking hams into the net. Which, there are various ways to make this run smoother, but at the expensive of time. For example, sometimes it’s split up A-K or something but now we must _serially_ take everyone’s callsign. So, for the Net Control Station (NCS), this person is very busy! He must hear all the callsigns, if two people “double” he must ask each person, etc… Meanwhile, every other ham is just sitting there, tied to their radio, either waiting to check in, or just listening to two people struggling to check in.

Proposal

My proposal is a simple improvement on this: check into the net _via the internet_. If you don’t like the internet in your ham radio I hear you, but the community seems very interested in these hotspots where the RF traffic travels about one meter to a wifi connected device, so I think there is some interest in the internet among hams.

The protocol / script can be changed to something like the following:

Welcome to the Internet is good for you Net. This is a directed Net. If you are able to, please go to www.<website>.xyz and check into this net. It saves time and is more accurate.

I will now read the callsigns of those who checked in online: etc…

Hams online could listen to the audio stream perhaps via HLS or other streaming technology and interact with the net via chat. Net control can relay this via RF and acknowledge comments.

Basically, net control could act more like a YouTube streamer – handling RF/chat messages while talking over RF AND streaming to some site.

The top shelf was read first:

Then the middle shelf (you should see where this is going):

Finally:

Out of all of these, I’ve restricted myself to keeping just one shelf. These are the books that I am keeping as guests:

I should probably get in the habit of writing a summary of each book when I’m finished, but then there’d be less time for reading, you know? Anyway, I wanted to read 52 books and I finished mostly by Thanksgiving. No promises for 2018.

Top three on the shelf are (in no particular order):

1. Disrupted, Dan Lyons
2. Eccentric Orbits, John Bloom
3. A Burglar’s Guide to the City, Geoff Manaugh

Top fiction this year was:

1. Version Control, Dexter Palmer
2. Mister Monkey, Francine Prose (not pictured)

This was the incantation that worked for me. I added the file /etc/udev/rules.d/42-openocd.rules with the following contents:

ATTRS{idVendor}=="03eb", ATTRS{idProduct}=="2141", ACTION=="add", MODE="0666", GROUP="plugdev"
KERNEL=="hidraw*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="03eb", ATTRS{idProduct}=="2111", MODE="666", GROUP="plugdev"

Then, reload your rules with:

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules

Unplug and plug back in the debugger and you should be able to enjoy non-root debugging.

Anyway, I usually run emacs as daemon and I had the idea that emacs could run as a systemd service! Immediately I fell into the trap that Umberto Eco describes:

there are two laws no human being can escape: the first idea that comes into a person’s mind will be the most obvious one; and, having had an obvious idea, nobody ever thinks that others may have had the same idea before.

So yes, there plenty of systmed emacs service files out there, but this one is mine.

[Unit]
Description=Emacs daemon
After=syslog.target network.target

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/bin/emacs --daemon
ExecStop=/usr/bin/emacsclient --eval "(progn (setq kill-emacs-hook 'nil) (kill-emacs))"
Restart=always
Environment=SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/run/user/1000/keyring/ssh GPG_AGENT_INFO=/run/user/1000/keyring/gpg:0:1
TimeoutStartSec=0

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

The main difference from my config is that I’ve added the GPG_AGENT_INFO data so that emacs can uses GPG agent. I run keychain so my ssh-agent and gpg-agent are launched at login. There are probably nicer ways to pass the environment variables. This only works if you user ID is 1000, which it most likely will be if you are the first user. Just check the output of id -u and change the 1000 to whatever it says and it will probably work.

Lastly, I run this service as a user so I put the file in ~/.config/systemd/user/emacs.service and then did:

systemctl --user enable emacs.service   
systemctl --user start emacs.service

I use emacsclient to connect to the server, which I’ve aliased to just e, so I’ll type e -nc to open a new instance for example.

A person who pulls something apart; a person who divides or separates something.

Pronunciation:

Brit. /dɪˈsəːptə/ , U.S. /dᵻˈsərptər/
Etymology: Probably partly < post-classical Latin discerptor person who separates something (1748 in the passage translated in quot. 1854; already in 14th cent. in sense ’adversary’), and partly directly < classical Latin discerpt-, past participial stem of discerpere discerp v. + -or suffix.(Show Less)

Now rare.

Source OED.

As Cohen’s work reminds us, printed books are mostly private pleasures, lonely ones even. Unlike so much media today, they don’t target, watch, or measure us; they don’t flatter us with personalized stories based on accumulated data profiles (not yet, at least). But even as this essentially analog quality has convinced us that novels are doomed to be political dead zones, it has become one of their newfound attractions. “If you’re reading this on a screen, fuck off,” goes Book of Numbers’ opening line.

By the way, if you don’t have the EFF’s Privacy Badger extension installed, go install it. Privacy badger does care.

Let’s say you like to read the NYTimes but you may find that the 10 article limit per month to be a bit restrictive. After all, you go to your local library and read the gray lady there but sometimes well, you also re-read them online. But instead of reading the article you receive a bunch of indistinguishable-from-malware popups about reading more than 10 articles per month. How to get rid of them?

Well, you can just go clear your cookies in Chrome/Chromium. But chrome stores cookies in a SQLite database so you could make a script to go into the database, and remove offending entries. If you were to go and do that, say on Linux, you might end up with a SQL file like this:

delete from cookies where host_key LIKE '%nytimes%';

If that file was called nomnomnom.sql, you could have a script called nomnomnom.sql that did

#!/bin/bash 
CHROME_COOKIES=~/.config/chromium/Default/Cookies
sqlite3 $CHROME_COOKIES < ~/bin/nomnomnom.sql

Then you could add this to your crontab to say, get rid of the nytimes cookies everyday. As an example.