Another Word for Nerd

A Friday wrapup:

- I gave an hour of training on our LDAP setup to the other sysadmins and team leads at work today. It was well-received, and I’ll probably do a followup in a week or two after I get some more utilities written for them to use.

- Brought home the right serial cable and got the E450 tested and ready. Its new owner will (hopefully) be picking it up on the 25th.

- The Icom 2100H 2-meter ham radio works great too; I finally got it setup for a local repeater and got “Nice sounding radio!” from a couple of other hams. Not bad for a mag-mount portable antenna sitting on top of my desk. I need a big heavy piece of something magnetic to mount it on though. I wonder if I got rid of those 2.5lb plate weights when we moved, because one of those (made from powdered iron) would be perfect.

- I finally started building the Southern Cross single-board computer. I’m taking it easy and slow - it’s an $80 kit that I don’t want to mess up because I’m in a hurry. After this, my next project will be building a Replica-1 clone of the Apple I. I’m going to use one of these as the display, and a keyboard similar to this. Then, once its tested and working, a small ATX power supply and some sort of custom wood case, plus some elbow grease, will result in a PORTABLE APPLE I CLONE.

I cleaned out a lot of my spare cables and such when I moved from Austin to Houston.

Unfortunately, it seems I cleaned a little too well. I just finished unpacking an E450 from a pallet in the garage (in preparation for selling it; I don’t have room to keep it and it uses too much electricity). I got everything together (laptop, etc) in order to hook up a serial console so I can run diagnostics and do an initial OS load - and realized that no, I can’t plug a DB25F into a DB25F.

An hour later, after looking through every box of cables and gadgets that I have, I’ve come to to the realization that I don’t have a single DB25 or DB9 gender changer or adapter in the entire house. Apparently I took them all to work when trying to setup a serial console for a machine there a couple of months ago.

Oh well, the diags and OS load will have to wait till tomorrow. I *know* I’ve got the cable I need hanging off the back of my PC on my desk at the office, because I used it to install an Ultra 2 recently.

Yes, I’m too lazy to drive the 2.4 miles to work and get the cable at 10pm.

Building this kit. It works! My Morse code book also arrived, and I picked up an antenna for the Icom IC-2100H 2-meter transceiver that will be arriving soon.

I have a new dedicated workbench setup for my electronics and ham radio projects, so I can get all of my soldering equipment away from the computer equipment.

I just booted Mac OS X for Intel on a Dell Optiplex GX270.

Everything works fine except for networking; I need to pick up a gigabit Ethernet card for that.. but this is just surreal.

On the 30th, I changed my amateur radio license information (the address, since I moved) online with the FCC. On the 31st, the change hit their database, and three days later (on Friday) I received my updated licenses (station license and wallet card) in the mail. That’s what I call fast!

This weekend I picked up a MFJ Enterprises Morse Code Tutor and a cheap telegraph key. I need to talk She Who Does The Bills and Manages The Books into letting me spend $20 on a copy of “Morse Code: Breaking the Barrier” to go along with it. I’ve got a goal of passing the 5wpm Element 1 test towards my General-class license by my birthday on November 5th.

I think I can call myself an accomplished solder-er (”solderist”?) now. A little over a month ago, I’d never touched a soldering iron before. A month later, I’m building shortwave radio kits (last night was Radio Netherlands; tonight I caught some Radio Australia…)

August 3rd:

September 3rd:

Amazing what better equipment and lots of practice will do, isn’t it?

I finally got around to, and finished, putting the header pins on the Atmel AVR Butterfly microcontroller evaluation kit. I added an external power supply (two AA batteries instead of the wimpy cell it came with) and connections for a PC serial interface cable.