“How often at night when the heavens are bright
With the light from the glittering stars
Have I stood here amazed and asked as I gazed
If their glory exceeds that of ours.”

One time, I asked Jacob if I should wake him up at night to see the stars. He said an excited yes! So when it was dark outside, I woke him up, carried him outside, and held him while he looked up. He said a long, breathy “Wooooow!” Then he went back to bed, curled up with his butterfly, and fell asleep smiling. Every so often, we repeat this little routine.

There are many opportunities in life to just stand somewhere and be amazed. You don’t have to be in Kansas. Children know this. The rest of us just have to notice.

I heard a sentence that began that way on an interview with a protestor outside the Supreme Court yesterday. It is a deeply sad, and deeply wrong, statement.

If someone reads the Bible, and can come up with a word, any word, that completes that sentence, they’re doing it wrong. If someone thinks that there is anyone God hates, then I have this to say: No. Just… no.

I saw an article today, taking pages and pages to assess what the “Christian response to gay marriage” should be. I don’t need pages. It’s very simple. It’s this:

God is the God of love.

That is all. Where people are doing good, there is God. Where people care about each other, there is God. Where there are flowers blooming and trees shading and birds singing, there is God. Where people marvel in the beauty of the landscape or of another person, there is God. And where people love, there is God.

There is too much hate in the world already. Instead of adding more, let’s celebrate compassion, devotion, and peace. People that say that God is the God of hate look at the spring landscape and see only last year’s thistles.

One day soon, I hope to see everyone’s hearts set free. What a day of joy that will be! And I hope, too, that those that hate will find the peace of freed hearts, freed from hate and from fear.

Here’s one of the cleaner moments:

I had set up an old pipe and a hose, with the water coming slowly out of the pipe onto a little mound of dirt. They can then use their fingers to make channels in the dirt for the water to flow through. They’ve found that sticks can become bridges, making a hole in the earth makes a pond, and, oh yes, it’s quite muddy and a lot of fun.

Oliver at one point realized that he could splash the mud all around quite nicely.

And he wanted to make sure I took photos of his hands.

They could have played out there for hours, I’m sure. When it was time to clean up, they enjoyed seeing the mud come off their sandals, arms, hands, and feet.

It was a perfect use for the first really warm day of spring.

“Ooo, dad, I need a mudball too!” – Oliver

You’d have to have been there to see how excited Jacob was about his mudball. We had been out hiking down by the creek a day after a rain, and he, well, made a mudball and carried it around with him. I’m not used to finding mud all that exciting. To me, mud is something that my car can get stuck in, that my boots can drag into the house, that needs to be suppressed by a little gravel on top.

But to Jacob, he was holding a ball of excitement, of adventure, of discovery. And Oliver wanted in on the fun!

Jacob wasn’t thinking about consequences of bringing a mudball indoors, because he didn’t need to. He wasn’t visualizing the damage it could cause, the time of cleaning it up, or even the fact that a mudball doesn’t really stay a mudball permanently. He just wanted to carry his ball of excitement with him.

Being a parent means being a teacher, an example, and a leader. It is fine for Jacob to not think about the consequences of bringing a mudball into the house at age 6, but part of my duty as a parent is to make sure he thinks about consequences by the time he gets behind the wheel of a car. As we grow up, we are shown, taught, and prodded into thinking about consequences of our choices: getting good grades in school, thinking about the impression the clothes we wear to a job interview might leave, worrying about what people think about us when we talk in front of a group. We take on real responsibilities when we leave childhood, and the consequences of our actions become more significant.

But where’s the “off” switch? Shouldn’t there be a way for us to wonder about bringing the mudball indoors, too?

There was a time in our lives when we didn’t care one bit about whether we were wearing fashionable clothes, making a good impression, or doing things the “right” way. After being in the mindset of taking careful responsibility over life for so many years, it’s hard to re-discover that earlier time.

A colleague forwarded a little speech about Thanksgiving. It contained, “Those who live in thanksgiving daily have a way of opening their eyes and seeing the wonders and beauties of this world as though seeing them for the first time.”

This is something children know how to do, and we adults have often forgotten, because we are too busy worrying about dirty floors and stained curtains to see the potential for fun in mud.

I am convinced that, just as important as being responsible, is learning how to let go, to let our hearts feel peace and joy as if a child. We can’t open our eyes and see the wonders of this world if we’re too busy worrying about convincing someone else to vote for our preferred candidate, about saying things perfectly, about being right.

There’s beauty in that daily commute in a car or subway. Look around, and you might see kids with their noses pressed to the window, even if it’s mostly black tunnel outside. There’s wonder in that business flight, in the mud, in the doctor’s office waiting room.

When I see people using insults in a discussion thread on the Internet, I am saddened, because it means they have lost sight of the wonder of being able to communicate with and understand a person thousands of miles away, instantly, and are more worried about their position looking good, or are unable to see the beauty in a person that thinks differently.

I once had this conversation with Jacob in an airplane, probably surrounded by people impatiently waiting to turn on their electronic devices:

“Jacob, we are in the air!”

“Woooooooow!”

“Jacob, we’re flying!”

“Dad, I don’t know that I’ve ever been a butterfly before!”

I hope we can all find ways to be a butterfly more often.

We were invited to a Superbowl party, and were going to bring a party snack. The boys love to help cook, and I try to give them choices. I started naming off potential snacks, starting with healthy options. They listened attentively, until I mentioned cookies.

“COOKIES! ***COOKIES!*** Yes, cookies!”

This reaction was, I must say, not exactly a surprise.

Then I asked them what KIND of cookies. Jacob immediately knew what he wanted, so of course Oliver took a minute to come up with something else. No matter; we could make two kinds of cookies. Jacob, of course, picked a kind of cookie that needs cherries, while Oliver picked one that needs chocolate chips. Thus they both had opportunities to “have a small taste” of ingredients while we prepared the batter.

And so make cookies we did. Plus a loaf of bread. Anyhow, once we got to the party, Jacob and Oliver saw a huge tub of Legos and were at it in a flash. One of Jacob’s friends was pretending everything was a tractor, but it wasn’t long before Jacob started in on his evening’s project: building the largest bus he could build.

He was pleased when he got 4 lego people into it. Even more happy when he got 10 into it. And by the time he figured out how to get 35 into it, he was quite proud of himself indeed. Oliver, meanwhile, in classic little brother fashion, tried to corner the market on surplus lego people. He appears to have the hardline negotiation skill down already, and perhaps is appreciating the value of artificial scarcity in the lego market <grin>

Eventually the bus seemed to hit the limits of engineering and joint strength, and Jacob gave up for a little while. He had a cookie and some carrots, commented on the exciting game of Uno going on, (“Who is the loudest?” “All of them!”), brought me some carrots, and periodically commented that “The ball team is ahead of the SF team. Sure is. They have more points!” (This from the “BAL” and “SF” text on the screen.)

And then he went back to playing. And here’s where the pirates come in.

Jacob’s new bus had a lego flag that he decided was a pirate flag. So the bus was a pirate bus. He built a platform out the back for them to use to “steal things”. So his pirate bus went around the lego area, stealing this from one pile, stealing that from another, until it got almost as long as his first bus.

Pretty soon, along came a police boat to chase the pirates. But the police boat appeared to suffer a humorous series of logistical failures and never could quite disrupt the pirates. But never mind that, for little brother Oliver was getting bored with the lego mountain he was building and decided it would be more fun if he would disrupt the pirates. An opinion that Jacob quite strongly disagreed with.

When it was time to go, Jacob tried to extract a promise from the party hosts to not let anyone take apart the pirate bus until next time we would be there.

Then this morning, Jacob and I had a discussion about pirates.

“Dad, are pirates real?”

“Yes, Jacob, they are.”

“Do they steal things?”

“Yes, but they are far away. There are no pirates here.”

“Are there pirates in Kansas?”

“No. There are some pirates in Africa though.”

“Oh. What state is Africa in?”

“Africa is so far away that it isn’t even in a state. You’d have to take a boat or a plane to get there.”

“Or a train!”

“Nope, a train couldn’t get across the ocean. It’s too wide!”

“They’d build a bridge!”

“It’s too wide for a bridge. It’s more than a thousand miles!”

“WOW – a thousand miles! Great! OK dad, it’s time for me to get on that school bus!”

I asked Jacob the other day if he knew what holiday was coming up. He thought about it for a second, then declared it would be St. Patrick’s Day. He was excited because St. Patrick’s Day is green.

When he realized that it was really MLK Day, he was disappointed. “That day isn’t green.” So I said, “Jacob, how about we celebrate pretend St. Patrick’s Day on Monday?” His face lit up, he got a huge smile, and said, “Oh yes! Great idea, dad!” Oliver got all excited about it too.

I was already planning on us doing some cooking, and thankfully had green food coloring already. So I sort of discarded my plans so each meal could have something green in it.

When the boys woke up this morning, I wished each of them “Happy Pretend St. Patrick’s Day!” We all wore green. Jacob put his shirt on backwards so the side with more green would be facing front.

For breakfast, our green dish was green crepes with a succotash (based on baby lima beans and corn) filling. The boys were excited to discover that the crepes could be green on one side, and green and a little brown on the other. Jacob was unsure of the succotash idea, but after having a few bites, declared it “excellent”.

After breakfast, we made bread. They loved watching the green food coloring disperse in the water. We checked on how green the dough looked periodically. We watched how it was rising and whether it was staying green. And we checked in on it backing, as the crust turned from green to brown. We discussed green bread over and over. Important questions were asked and answers were attempted.

And then, of course, the moment of truth – removing the loaf from the pan.

The boys jabbered excitedly that there was some green peeking out. While we waited for it to cool, we went out to the creek. The creek is dry this year, so we got to walk in it. Jacob used his stick to make a line behind him. I asked him, “Is that a line so we can find our way back?” “Oh! Uhm. Yes!” And then he added arrows so we’d know which way to go.

Jacob stopped every 20 or so feet to collect pretend train tickets from Oliver and me. Oliver eventually grew tired of this, so Jacob started collecting Oliver’s ticket from me. They climbed on some trees, managed to find some mud, drew outlines of train cars in the dirt, and then followed Jacob’s line back down the creek bed. They pointed out any green things they saw.

Then we went back to the house, took off our warm coats, and cut into the bread.

Can you imagine the excitement?

I hadn’t realized “green” is a flavor, but it must have been somehow, because those boys absolutely loved this green bread. When we got out the jam, Jacob realized that it was red on the green bread, and that now his bread was Christmas-colored.

All sorts of green bread discoveries were made, but the best among them was that if you hold a slice of green bread up to the bright sun, the sun makes it glow green and it looks like a stained-glass window.

Sometimes a few drops of food coloring can add a ton of excitement to a day.

This afternoon, the boys and I made cookies. Jacob has been talking about setting out milk and cookies for Santa Claus for several days, and of course the fact that we had made cookies reminded him of this – as I figured it would. So after the boys got into their pajamas and all ready for bed, we set out milk and cookies for Santa.

The boys have always known that Santa is pretend, but love the stories and traditions anyhow. Never mind that Christmas was 3 days ago, and they’ve already opened their presents. It’s SANTA! It’s magic! It doesn’t matter!

I asked Jacob, “Would you like me to pretend to be Santa tonight?” A big grin, then “Oh yes, dad! Do it!”

So after I read them their bedtime story, sang them a song (Jacob chose a Latin hymn – that’s my boy!), and tucked them into bed, I pretended to be Santa. I went back downstairs. I drank the milk and ate the cookies. Then I went to my small future present stash, selected a few small items, and put them under the tree. I gave it a few minutes.

Then I crept up to the attic. I snuck along the wood floors quietly, until I was above the boys’ room.

Then I jumped. And I scraped a wood chair along the floor. And then I yelled out – “HO HO HO! Merry Christmas!” I had a brief conversation with Rudolph, then made some sliding noises. I was silent for a few seconds, then made some more noise and said, “Wow, Rudolph, Jacob and Oliver left some great milk and cookies! Let’s go deliver the rest of our presents!” And made some vague sleigh taking off from the roof of a house noises.

I crept back down the stairs. I put my ear to the outside of the closed door to the boys’ bedroom. I heard Jacob excitedly jabbering, “He said milk and cookies! He liked them! He really liked them! Ooo butterfly, he was here!” (Butterfly is a stuffed, er, butterfly that he sleeps with.)

I gave it a minute or two, then I went in. “Jacob, did you hear something?”

“Yes!”

“What was it?”

“Well, it was a loud thud! I sat straight up like this. [ he demonstrates ] Then I heard ‘ho ho ho’! And ‘milk and cookies’! And I was excited like this!” [ more demonstrations ]

“What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know! Dad, what did you do?”

I told him. It only increased his delight.

“Did it sound like Santa’s sleight landing?”

“(annoyed) No, dad. It sounded like a crash. (brightening) And then Santa coming down the chimney with presents! Oh, it is so exciting!”

(We don’t have a chimney)

It was still magical, even though he knew exactly what happened.

For his part, Oliver slept through it all. He will still discover the empty plate, empty cup, and slightly less empty area underneath the tree. And neither boy knows about the thank you note from Santa yet. I anticipate smiles in the morning!

And no song more than Jingle Bells. I have recordings of it by several artists in different styles, and he has his favorites and often wants to hear them – again and again.

The other night at supper, he said, “Dad, can you sing Jingle Bells in German?” Kind of a random question. I normally try to keep books and devices of all sorts away from the table, but my son had just asked me to sing. In German. I don’t believe that had ever happened before, so I wasn’t going to say no! I got my tablet, pulled up Google, and found some German lyrics. Not exactly a translation, but it fit the tune, so that’s what counts.

So I started singing, and when I got to the chorus, and sang Oh, Glockenklang, Glockenklang both boys bust up laughing. They thought Glockenklang was a hilarious word, and loved to hear it. Oliver requests I “sing Glockenklang” every so often now. He has this eager anticipation when he does it, as if he knows I’m going to be hilarious — so much so that he almost starts laughing before I even say a word.

Then yesterday at breakfast, Jacob requested more German songs. I finally got a couple of hymn books (one of which, Gesangbuch mit Noten, really is a German songbook). I sang some songs in German for the boys, while they enjoyed their blueberry crepes. Sadly Stille Nacht and O du fröhliche did not prove as hilarious as Glockenklang, but they got impatient as I looked through the idnex between each song, saying “Dad, just sing more German! Don’t look at those pages!” So I guess it was a hit.

I’m not sure where this sudden fascination with German music came from, but it appears to be leaving me hungry.

While driving around, Oliver requested I sing Glockenklang in the car. I said yes, despite not remembering even one German word to that song except for, well, Glockenklang. So I just filled in with some random German words I do know. Fortunately, they didn’t seem to have memorized the rest of it either.

The other day, we went to the annual Christmas concert at the local high school. It was perfect for the boys – various styles of music, an interesting old auditorium, nobody was going to care if they weren’t perfectly quiet, and the price was right, too.

The band played first, and both boys sat there, paying great attention, soaking it all in. They loved the cymbal crashes and Jacob seemed to dream of playing the chimes and bells. At one point, I whispered to Jacob that I could feel the timpani on the wood floor in the auditorium, and he tried it, and made his “Hmm, I just learned something interesting!” reaction.

As is tradition, the concert concluded with singing the Hallelujah Chorus – and anyone in the audience that wants to sing is invited on stage to join the choir.

I remember being in high school for that concert, and after practicing it in school, the great fun of being joined by many powerful voices from the community all around me on the risers. So this time, while my parents stayed with the boys, I was one of the many that went up to join the choir. It was no less thrilling all these years later. Ending with “Forever and ever, Hallelujah, Hallelujah. Hallelujah!”, and feeling it, right then, put a huge smile on my face.

This much isn’t unusual. I have periodically taken them out to eat for quite some time, and they enjoy it.

But there were a few unusual things about this particular day. I suppose the main one is that they had just been doing this.

Yes, painting your own face can be a lot of fun. And also serious business.

The boys and I were in Santa Fe, NM on a train trip. It had been a year since their last train trip, and that’s longer than they are typically used to. I’d taken Jacob on a train trip with just the two of us before, but this was the first trip with just the two boys and me.

And one of the places we visited was the excellent Santa Fe Children’s Museum. It may be the best children’s museum I’ve ever seen. Not the largest, or the flashiest, but that’s part of the reason I say “best”. They had chimes (and many other percussive “instruments” to produce different pitches, including mounted hubcaps and varying length wooden planks). They had a great magnets table with washers and nuts, so children can build their own bridges, stairs, etc. using magnetism. A giant bubble table, tunnels to crawl in outside, etc. A great place.

And, apparently, the thing they were really known for — I did not know this in advance — is the paint your own face station. Jacob and Oliver really got into it. Oliver informed me he was a lion and I heard “ROAR! ROAR!” periodically all afternoon. Jacob asked me to help paint a J, and the spirals, on his cheeks. After some careful thought, he informed me that he was “spiral man”.

Next to the paint your own face area was a clean your own face area. Most kids were being helped to clean their own face by their parents on their way out. Jacob and Oliver protested that plan, so I figured, if they want to enjoy painted faces all day, why not?

And this, of course, led into lunch with self-painted faces. Nobody at the restaurant commented, but the owner had a huge grin when he saw them. (It was a Mediterranean place, and I’m sure the owner would have commented had there not been a language barrier.) Incidentally, the boys became quite the fans of souvlaki.

Later, as we walked around Santa Fe Plaza and another museum, they drew smiles all over the place. Several kind people asked them, “Did you enjoy the children’s museum?” Yes, everyone in Santa Fe seemed to know precisely where kids with painted faces had been that day.

Santa Fe is an amazing and beautiful city. It was warm and friendly, and the architecture and layout was fun to see – and pedestrian-friendly. We walked past the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi several times, and went in once. For some reason I could never fully explain, I could often smell their incense even a block or two away. It added to the crisp wintry feel of the plaza.

The point of the trip wasn’t Santa Fe, though. It was Jacob and Oliver on Amtrak, which is the thing they were really most excited about – of course. They were excited as usual, and despite the fact that the train comes through this area only at around 3AM, were plenty excited to be on the train. And, in fact, didn’t fall asleep again until about 5 due to the excitement (though they did an excellent job of being quiet). Of course, 6AM was “morning” so they were wide awake by then.

Jacob had been planning what he’d eat on the train for days already, and had announced he would be having French toast for breakfast and pizza at lunch. He was a bit disappointed to see that French toast wasn’t on the menu this time, but pancakes saved the day.

While waiting for the dining car to open at 6:30, we went to the lounge car for awhile. I had brought along various things for them to do on the train, of course, and among them was a notebook and some markers. Jacob loved drawing suns and stars, and sometimes writing short notes. He gave notes to several friendly people that happened to be visiting with us on the train. Oliver enjoyed it too, but he was more intrigued by the cheap set of multi-colored post-it notes.

There were two happy, and somewhat tired, boys getting off that train in the middle of the night when we returned.

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.

Sometimes I think that Fred Rogers’ wisdom is so often under-appreciated. What he says is true, very true.

I know what it’s like to fear for my child’s life. And sometimes the shoe has been on the other foot, when I have been one of the helpers.

Many of you know these last few months have been the most difficult in my life. And despite having gone through the deaths of three relatives, nothing has quite compared to this.

I can not even begin to express my gratitude for all the care, compassion, and love that has come my way and towards the boys. People I barely knew before are now close friends. Random strangers have offered kindness and support. I have never before needed to be cared for like that, and in some ways perhaps it was hard to let myself be cared for. But I did, and all that caring and generosity has made an incredible difference in my life.

Most of us don’t see our pain on CNN or BBC, but that doesn’t mean it’s less real. And it doesn’t mean there’s nobody that cares. Open up to others, let them care for you. Things can and do get better.

The people in Newtown did nothing to deserve this. No matter what evidence is found, they will never get an adequate answer to “why?” Children have been frightened, families torn apart, lives ended, for no reason at all.

But they will survive the terrible pain. In time, they will find happiness again. And they will feel love and compassion from people around the world — something to sustain them in their grief. I am certain of this.

I recently read this quote, part of a story about a dying cancer patient:

“Don’t forget that it doesn’t take much to make someone’s day.”

Yes, the world is still a good place.

I have had some measure of comfort from hearing from others that have had pain in their lives. It is good to know I’m not alone, good to have people to talk and share with. And it is good to find some way to have hope in the midst of difficulty and uncertainty.

I sing with the Kansas Mennonite Men’s Chorus, and when listening to one of our recordings recently, was struck by these words in a whole new way. Let music never die in me is a powerful message.

I dreamed a dream, a silent dream,
of a land not far away.
Where no bird sang,
no steeples rang
and teardrops fell like rain.

I dreamed a dream.
No alleluia, not one hosanna,
No song of love, no lullaby.

And no choir sang to change the world.
No pipers played, no dancers twirled.
I dreamed a dream, a silent dream.
Silent.
Silent.

Awake! Awake!
Awake, my soul and sing!
The time for praise has come.
The silence of the night has passed;
a new day has begun.
Let music never die in me!
Forever let my spirit sing!
Wherever emptiness is found,
Let there be joy and glorious sound.

Let music never die in me!
Forever let my spirit sing!

Let all our voices join as one
to praise the giver of the song!

Awake! Awake!
Let music live!

– The Awakening, Joseph M. Martin (excerpts)

See a performance here.

Even when hope is dim, or the music is playing only softly, it’s not dead. I hear it when an 85-year-old person in church, comes up to me with tears in her eyes and gives me a big, silent hug. I feel the music when when I can share about things with people, when I sing, when the beautiful Kansas sunset peeks out, when I share a smile or laugh with someone, and when I see the delight and happiness of children.

Let music live!

He’s been loving it, until yesterday. At least part of his disgruntlement was because it was his first visit to computer class. Putting together a few conversations, we learned this:

Jacob: Something was different about Kindergarten today.

Us: Oh? What was it?

Jacob: I had computer class today.

Us: What did you do?

Jacob, super frustrated: Nothing. NOTHING, NOTHING, NOOOO THIIING. Nothing.

Us: You didn’t get to use a computer?

Jacob: All we did was log on and log off the whole time. Log on and log off. My username is Jacob and my password is Jacob. (annoyed and confused voice) Why are they the same??

I guess his teachers weren’t used to children that had been logging on to computers for two years before Kindergarten. And probably also weren’t expecting any of them to take some sort of offense at their password poicy. He probably couldn’t appreciate how reasonable it was to tech Kindergarteners how to log in to a computer on the first day of computer class…

Sometimes, it is nice to transmit voice instead of a digital signal. This is called voice keying. When operating a contest, for instance, a person might call CQ over and over, with just some brief gaps.

Most people that interface a radio with a computer use a sound card interface of some sort. The more modern of these have a simple USB cable that connects to the computer and acts as a USB sound card. So, at a certain level, all that you have to do is play sound out a specific device.

But it’s not quite so easy, because there is one other wrinkle: you have to engage the radio’s transmitter. This is obviously not something that is part of typical sound card APIs. There are all sorts of ways to do it, ranging from dedicated serial or parallel port circuits involving asserting voltage on certain pins, to voice-activated (VOX) circuits.

I have used two of these interfaces: the basic Signalink USB and the more powerful RigExpert TI-5. The Signalink USB integrates a VOX circuit and provides cabling to engage the transmitter when VOX is tripped. The TI-5, on the other hand, emulates three USB serial ports, and if you raise RTS on one of them, it will keep the transmitter engaged as long as RTS is high. This is a more accurate and precise approach.

VOX-based voice keying with the Signalink USB

But let’s first look at the Signalink USB case. The problem here is that its VOX circuit is really tuned for digital transmissions, which tend to be either really loud or completely silent. Human speech rises and falls in volume, and it tends to rapidly assert and drop PTT (Push-To-Talk, the name for the control that engages the radio’s transmitter) when used with VOX.

The solution I hit on was to add a constant, loud tone to the transmitted audio, but one which is outside the range of frequencies that the radio will transmit (which is usually no higher than 3kHz). This can be done using sox and aplay, the ALSA player. Here’s my script to call cq with Signalink USB:

#!/bin/bash
# NOTE: use alsamixer and set playback gain to 99
set -e

playcmd () {
        sox -V0 -m "$1" \
           "| sox -V0 -r 44100 $1 -t wav -c 1 -   synth sine 20000 gain -1" \
            -t wav - | \
           aplay -q  -D default:CARD=CODEC
}

DELAY=${1:-1.5}

echo -n "Started at: "
date

STARTTIME=`date +%s`
while true; do
        printf "\r"
        echo -n $(( (`date +%s`-$STARTTIME) / 60))
        printf "m/${DELAY}s: TRANSMIT"
        playcmd ~/audio/cq/cq.wav
        printf "\r"
        echo -n $(( (`date +%s`-$STARTTIME) / 60))
        printf "m/${DELAY}s: off         "
        sleep $DELAY
done

Run this, and it will continuously play your message, with a 1.5s gap in between during which the transmitter is not keyed.

The screen will look like this:

Started at: Fri Aug 24 21:17:47 CDT 2012
2m/1.5s: off

The 2m is how long it’s been going this time, and the 1.5s shows the configured gap.

The sox commands are really two nested ones. The -m causes sox to merge the .wav file in $1 with the 20kHz sine wave being generated, and the entire thing is piped to the ALSA player.

Tweaks for RigExpert TI-5

This is actually a much simpler case. We just replace playcmd as follows:

playcmd () {
        ~/bin/raiserts /dev/ttyUSB1 'aplay -q -D default:CARD=CODEC' < "$1"
}

Where raiserts is a program that simply keeps RTS asserted on the serial port while the given command executes. Here's its source, which I modified a bit from a program I found online:

/* modified from
 * https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/programming-9/manually-controlling-rts-cts-326590/
 * */
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 


static struct termios oldterminfo;


void closeserial(int fd)
{
    tcsetattr(fd, TCSANOW, &oldterminfo);
    if (close(fd) < 0)
        perror("closeserial()");
}


int openserial(char *devicename)
{
    int fd;
    struct termios attr;

    if ((fd = open(devicename, O_RDWR)) == -1) {
        perror("openserial(): open()");
        return 0;
    }
    if (tcgetattr(fd, &oldterminfo) == -1) {
        perror("openserial(): tcgetattr()");
        return 0;
    }
    attr = oldterminfo;
    attr.c_cflag |= CRTSCTS | CLOCAL;
    attr.c_oflag = 0;
    if (tcflush(fd, TCIOFLUSH) == -1) {
        perror("openserial(): tcflush()");
        return 0;
    }
    if (tcsetattr(fd, TCSANOW, &attr) == -1) {
        perror("initserial(): tcsetattr()");
        return 0;
    }
    return fd;
}


int setRTS(int fd, int level)
{
    int status;

    if (ioctl(fd, TIOCMGET, &status) == -1) {
        perror("setRTS(): TIOCMGET");
        return 0;
    }
    status &= ~TIOCM_DTR;   /* ALWAYS clear DTR */
    if (level)
        status |= TIOCM_RTS;
    else
        status &= ~TIOCM_RTS;
    if (ioctl(fd, TIOCMSET, &status) == -1) {
        perror("setRTS(): TIOCMSET");
        return 0;
    }
    return 1;
}


int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    int fd, retval;
    char *serialdev;

    if (argc < 3) {
        printf("Syntax: raiserts /dev/ttyname 'command to run while RTS held'\n");
        return 5;
    }
    serialdev = argv[1];
    fd = openserial(serialdev);
    if (!fd) {
        fprintf(stderr, "Error while initializing %s.\n", serialdev);
        return 1;
    }

    setRTS(fd, 1);
    retval = system(argv[2]);
    setRTS(fd, 0);

    closeserial(fd);
    return retval;
}

This compiles to an executable less than 10K in size. I love it when that happens.

So these examples support voice keying both with VOX circuits and with serial-controlled PTT. raiserts.c could be trivially modified to control other serial pins as well, should you have an interface which uses different ones.

Whether an epic (or super-epic, such as Wheel of Time) novel, or the Sherlock Holmes series, or nonfiction works, there is something magical about reading a book. We often see characters, real or fictional, that rise from obscurity to do great things for the world. We are transported in time and place to a time or place we will never be able to experience, perhaps because it is long past, or perhaps because it never was. But in any case, we can be inspired.

I am reminded of this quote:

“The people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that do.”

If someone told me that a street vendor in Tunisia would, in less than a year, cause the overthrow of 4 dictatorships and reform in a handful more, I would have, yes, thought that was crazy. And while Mohamed Bouazizi isn’t a household name in much of the world, he managed exactly that. But not just him. It took crazy unarmed people to occupy Tahrir Square, some to die, for progress to be made in Egypt.

This story is written all over history. People have done the impossible, have defied all odds, through sheer belief that they could. Civil rights have been granted due to the leaders we all know, but also due to the millions of marchers we don’t. Changing the world doesn’t have to mean that the world knows you. It just has to mean that you love the world, as Tolstoy pointed out:

Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

Whatever your stance on religion, this is a powerful quote. Sometimes particles of love might look crazy. But isn’t it then that they are the most alive? Isn’t it then that they are the greatest hindrance to death and despair?

When we renovated our old farmhouse, we had two chimneys removed. The bricks were saved in a large pile out back, and we haven’t really touched them in the last 5 years.

I got the idea at some point that it would be nice to have a fire ring on our yard. The boys love campfire-style cooking, and enjoy helping gather kindling and watching the fire grow. I had looked at fire rings in stores, but just couldn’t bring myself to pay $60 or $100 or even more for what was really a piece of round metal. I decided we would find a way to build our own fire ring.

So the idea of chimney bricks seemed perfect. Some of these bricks still have mortar on them, so the result is imperfect, but it is functional. More importantly, the boys helped. They picked out bricks one at a time, set them in the wheelbarrow (or even carried a few themselves, as Jacob insisted on doing sometimes.) Then we’d dump them out on the ground, and I’d make some attempt at making the thing round, while the boys would put them on the pile.

We did this over the course of several evenings, with me filling in on some of it after they lost interest. When we got it done, they of course loved cooking outside. I made sure that we placed it in a place that will be in the shade every summer evening so we’d be comfortable. I made no attempt to mortar it in; this way, it’s easy to move or resize. And it’s safer for the boys than a metal one, since the outer edge never even gets warm to the touch.

Anyhow, it finally got a little cooler last week, so we cooked out there for dinner two days in a row. One day, after eating, the boys came back out to help put out the fire with the hose. After that, Jacob and I went out there to eat dessert. He sat on the grass, and I sat down next to him. He scooted over a bit to be closer to me. Pretty soon, Oliver came running out too, and sat on my lap. The three of us just sat there on the grass, eating our desserts and enjoying the evening. It’s the kind of moment that makes a dad happy.

The other evening, they again helped me put out the fire with a hose. They’d been active that day, so after I finished hosing down the fire ring, I gave them each a small spray with the hose. After a brief flicker of indecision, they both decided this was hilarious. Jacob took off running, yelling “You’ll never catch me!” (And clearly hoping I would.) Oliver copied him, and so I proceeded to chase them around the yard with a hose for quite awhile. There was much laughter from them, and they wound up totally soaked and happy. Another good evening. You never know what will happen outdoors, but so often it is very good.

Genesis

I’ve long used Android devices, and last year had a company-issued Motorola Xoom, which was the first Google Experience tablet with Honeycomb. That tablet has specs roughly similar to iPads; its 10.1″ screen was the same, the 1280×800 screen was better than the iPad available at the time, and its 730g weight identical to the early iPads (though 10% higher than the current iPad). I lost access to it when I changed jobs, and had been without a tablet until recently.

Other devices I own are the Galaxy Nexus, sporting a 4.65″ screen; and what’s now called the Kindle Keyboard, with an eInk screen.

I had been somewhat interested in the Kindle Fire, but the closed nature and limited capability of the system kept me away.

The Nexus 7 reviews, however, were stunning, as was the price. $200 for a great tablet. I wound up buying the $250 16GB model. But not until after I spent a great deal of time thinking about size.

Physical Size

My main concern was that the Nexus 7 would be too small to be useful. I had never been particularly pleased with my input speed on the Xoom. I tried to touch type on it, but was just never fast enough to surpass “frustratingly slow.” I have long been a fast and accurate typist on keyboard; well over 100 words per minute, and it is frustrating when my fingers can’t maintain that speed.

I figured the situation would be even worse on the Nexus 7, given its smaller size.

I also found the Xoom to sometimes feel a little small with the 10″ screen, and was concerned about that as well.

And finally, 7″ doesn’t sound all that much larger than 4.65″.

However, having actually had the Nexus 7 for a little while now, I’m very pleased with the size, and may even prefer it. The 10″ tablets are just too big and heavy to comfortably hold in one hand, and I’ve realized that part of my Xoom frustration was the fact that I had to set it down and prop it up for anything beyond very brief use. At 340g, the Nexus 7 is less than half the weight of the Xoom or iPad, and it makes a huge difference. While still nowhere near where I’d be with a keyboard, two-thumb typing in portrait mode, or even something approaching touch typing in landscape mode, is possible on the Nexus 7.

The screen size hasn’t been a bother, at all. This may be due to the fact that it’s higher resolution (it’s 1280×800 like the Xoom, but those pixels are crammed into only 7″). I think it’s also partly due to the fact that the browser in Jelly Bean is significantly better than the one in Honeycomb, and perhaps that websites are better at tablet-friendliness, too.

Overall, the Nexus 7 feels a lot farther from the size of a laptop than did the Xoom, and as such is more prone to come with me in lots of situations, I think.

It works reasonably well with foldable Bluetooth keyboards, so when thinking about a laptop replacement or alternative, that might be the way I go. A Bluetooth mouse also works with it, though I found it didn’t provide near the utility that a BT keyboard does.

Display

The display is both amazing and disappointing. Browse some photos and some of them will show up in eye-popping clarity. Websites display fine. But the screen can also take on a washed-out appearance at times. I am notoriously picky in my displays, and this bothered me enough that I researched it. Analysis has shown that poor firmware calibration has lead to the compression of highlights, which mirrors what I was seeing. I am mostly used to it by now, but it’s a disappointment.

Most of the time, though, the screen is excellent. In comparison to my eInk Kindle, however, I don’t think any tablet will ever be as good for book reading. The eInk screen truly is easier on the eyes, and the reflection of overhead lights on the Nexus 7 display can be distracting at first.

I have had occasional issues with it not registering touches properly. This is always cleared up by touching the power button to put the unit to sleep, then waking it back up.

Other Hardware

There are three hardware buttons: power and volume up/down. Physically, the device fits my hand well, though I might wish it was a little lighter like my Kindle. Charging is accomplished via high-power 2A micro-USB, and there is, of course, a headphone port. There is no alert LED like my Galaxy Nexus has, and no vibration feature. The speaker is on the back, and the microphones along the left side – a position which, it appears, many Nexus 7 cases are blocking.

Battery Life

I am astonished at how good this device is battery-wise, especially compared to the battery disaster that is the Galaxy Nexus. Google claims the Nexus 7 can survive 8 hours of solid screen-on use, and I don’t doubt it. Mine’s never gotten low enough to get a solid measurement.

Wifi

The wifi works well, as far as it goes. The wifi doesn’t support 802.11n in 5GHz, which although somewhat common for devices like this, is a bit of a disappointment.

Software

The big story about the Nexus 7 is Jelly Bean. I had used Honeycomb on the Xoom, and Ice Cream Sandwich on my Galaxy Nexus, so I’m familiar with its predecessors. Let’s take a look.

Project Butter

Much has been made of Project Butter, Google’s attempt to optimize Android to improve its responsiveness and the smoothness of things like scrolling. I can say they have done quite well. This device is so smooth you don’t notice how smooth it is. It wasn’t until I had been using it for a bit that I really noticed. That’s a job well-done.

Chrome

The browser in Jelly Bean is now called Chrome. I am not sure if this is just marketing or not. It doesn’t really feel all that different from previous versions of the Android browser, and the changes have been along the lines of incremental changes Google has introduced before.

One of the very best new features happens when you touch a link that is close to other links on a page. Rather than getting a pretty much random page, Chrome pops up a partial-screen zoom box showing the part of the page near where your finger touched. With everything showing up huge, it is now easy to touch the precise link you want. Do so, and the box goes away, and your page loads. I am amazed at how much improvement this one change brings. Compared to ICS Browser, bookmarks can be brought up quicker, and the tab interface is nicer.

All is not perfect in the land of Chrome, however. It contains several regressions from the Ice Cream Sandwich browser.

I have two complaints about bookmarks. One is that previous versions of the browser would show thumbnails of sites in the bookmark viewer. This was a nice navigation aid. Chrome shows only favorites icons, if one is available, or a generic icon if not. Also, the bookmarks synced with other Android devices are called, confusingly enough, “Desktop Bookmarks” now, and require an extra tap to access.

I have had occasional trouble with Chrome not wanting to prompt for credentials for servers on my LAN that use HTTP auth.

Chrome has also removed the ICS browser’s ability to save a page, including all its elements, for offline viewing. Good for things like an airline checkin screen and such. I have no idea why Chrome removed this. I installed the Firefox Beta for Android, which also doesn’t have the offline save feature, but it does have a save to PDF feature.

Soft Keyboard

The on-screen soft keyboard in Jelly Bean is a significant regression from previous versions of Android. My biggest complaint is the lack of visual feedback for keypresses. On earlier versions of Android, when you push a key, you’ll see an image of it pop up on the screen, offset a little from the location of the key itself. In JB, all that happens is that the key itself changes colors. Not very helpful, because it is under your finger at the time. This small thing frustrates me to no end.

The keyboard in ICS introduced some nice features as well, mainly long-presses as shortcuts to other features. For instance, you can long-press a key on the top row of letters to get numerals without having to switch to the number mode. Similarly, long press the period and you get other common punctuation. The JB keyboard removed both of those features.

Thankfully, in the Market, there is an app called Ice Cream Sandwich Keyboard. It appears geared towards people running earlier versions of Android. Sadly, it is also a step up over what we have in JB.

Google Now and Voice Recognition

The other main headline feature in Jelly Bean is Google Now. The somewhat-competitor to Apple’s Siri, Google Now takes a bit of a different approach than Apple. It is said that Siri is better than Google Now at responding to queries, but Google Now is better at predicting what you want to know before you ever ask. I haven’t ever used Siri, but I would buy that explanation.

Google Now is available with a swipe up from the bottom of the screen, or with a single touch from any Home screen. Bring it up and it shows you current information about what it thinks you need to know. Examples include weather and forecast information, time to get to home or work from your current location, alerts that you need to leave soon to get to a certain place on time, flight schedules, sports scores, etc.

Google Now has been mostly a gimmick to me, but that may be because I fall outside its target demographic in significant ways. I live nowhere near a public transportation system, work at home for the most part, haven’t flown wince I’ve had the Nexus 7, don’t follow sports, and already know how long it takes to get places (and when it varies, it’s because of muddy roads or harvest — neither things that traffic services know about.)

The weather widget always seems to show the temperature from a couple of hours ago. It does show the weather in your current location. Well, mostly. I was in Newton, KS one day. I tapped on the icon for more detail. That simply took me to a Google search for “weather Newton”. Which showed me the weather for Newton, Massachusetts — 1600 miles away. Fail.

Speech recognition in JB is definitely improved. It is somewhat useful with Google Now. I like being able to simply say “set alarm for 30 minutes.” And it does it a lot quicker than I could in the interface. It’s supposed to be able to let me bring up my contacts in the same way, but it is much more likely to try turning such an attempt into a Google search than an actual display of a contact. It’s picky on the precise language used for setting an alarm too; say it slightly differently, and it’s another Google search.

JB also supports limited offline speech recognition. I say limited because it’s a bit strange. I have, for instance, a Remember the Milk widget on my home screen. It has a microphone icon to use to speak a new reminder. Tap it, and you can’t use it offline. It also has a button that brings up the on-screen keyboard. Do that, then touch the microphone on the keyboard, and you can use offline recognition. I have no idea how to explain this difference, since both are clearly using Google’s engine.

The speech recognition is indeed better, and might make it suitable for use instead of a keyboard for composing short texts and such. But it rarely produces even a sentence that I don’t have to correct in some way, even now.

Conclusion

Despite some of its shortcomings, I am very fond of the Nexus 7. It is an excellent device. And at $200-$250, it is an AMAZING device. I am truly impressed with it, and don’t regret my purchase at all.

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time.

A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

– Carl Sagan, The Persistence of Memory

One would think that, since I’ve been doing this for somewhere around a quarter century (oh I do feel old now), that I’d be ready to offer up some great advice. And offer some suggestions I have. But I’m not convinced they’re good ones.

I have two main tensions. The first is that I, like many in the communities I tend to hang out in such as Debian’s, have a personality that leads me to take a deep dive into details of anything that holds my interest. Whether it’s Linux, Haskell, or amateur radio, I want to do more than skim the surface if I’m having fun with it. Many people are not like that. They may have a lot of fun programming in Visual Basic, not really caring that other languages are out there. Or some people are not like this yet. I feel unqualified to provide good advice to people that are different from me in that way. To put it a different way: most people don’t want to wait 4 years to be useful, and want to start out right away and get better over time (and I was the same way too.)

The second is related. I learned programming at a time when, other than BASIC, interpreted languages were not really available to me. (Yes, they were available, but not to me.) I cut my teeth on BASIC, Pascal, and C. Although I rarely use C anymore, I can still drop into it at a moment’s notice and be perfectly comfortable. I feel it was a fundamentally valuable experience, and that it would be very hard to become a great programmer without ever having lived and breathed something like C, where memory and pointers must be managed manually. Having said that, it is probably possible to become a good coder without ever having touched C.

Here, then, is an edited version of some rambly advice I sent to someone recently, where learning OOP was particularly mentioned. I would welcome your comments and suggestions. I may point people that ask to this post in the future.

For simply learning how to write code, Dive Into Python has long been a decent resource, though it may assume more experience than some have. I haven’t read them myself, but I’ve also heard good things about the How to Think Like a Computer Scientist series from Green Tea Press. They’re all available as free PDF downloads, too!

Eric S. Raymond’s The Art of Unix Programming is another work I’ve heard good things about, despite having never read it myself. A quick glance at the table of contents makes me think that even if people don’t wind up working on Unix, the lessons and philosophy should be informative.

It seems that many Computer Science programs are using Java for the core of their instruction, or even almost exclusively. Whether that is good or bad, I’m not completely sure. It certainly gets people into OOP more deeply, but I’m a “right tool for the job” kind of person. Despite the hype, OO — like everything else — isn’t the right tool for every job.

It is fine for people to dive straight into OO and become good programmers/engineers. However, I think it would be difficult to become a great programmer/engineer without ever having a solid understanding of a more low-level language, such as C in particular. I did my CS work when it was mostly based in C, and am glad for it. If someone never has to manage memory or pointers, I suspect they will be at a disadvantage in the long run for not being able to understand or work with the system at a more fundamental level. If a person knows C, plus some concepts of OO and Functional Programming (FP), it should be easy to pick up just about any other language out there.

I used to think Python was a great first language, but during the 2.x series they added so much fluff and so many special cases that I’m less enthusiastic now, though I don’t know how much of that got cleaned up in 3.x. I am not too keen on Java as a first language, because too many things that should be simple aren’t. I have a fondness for Haskell, and its close relationship to mathematics could make it a great first language — or maybe a poor one, depending on your perspective.

One other thing – I think it’s important for good programmers to have experience with all three major models of programming (procedural, OO, functional.) Even if a person winds up working mostly in one universe, knowledge of and experience with the others is important and informative and, in my experience, leads to better algorithms and architecture all around.

• Procedural languages: Obviously C, but also Unix shell
• OO languages: Python, Java, plenty of other fine choices
• Functional: Lisp, Scheme, Haskell (also the only lazy and pure language on this list)

Having said all that, more important than a choice of book or language is experience. I have heard people suggest that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a superstar at something, whatever that “something” is, and I wouldn’t doubt it. Seth Godin discusses that a bit, with some criticism of the idea too.

So that leads to the most important piece of advice: dive in to whatever your interest is. Experiment, write code, put theory into practice in a way that holds interest and excitement. People that try to do things they don’t enjoy don’t seem to stick with them as long or execute as well, and thus will never become great.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7595-how-to-get-started-programming/feed 10 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7589-a-linux-based-rfid-thing-finder http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7589-a-linux-based-rfid-thing-finder#comments Fri, 20 Jul 2012 02:01:45 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7589 Sometimes I have things nicely organized. Power adapters for radios in one drawer, for cameras in the next. And sometimes… not so much. Sometimes I’m not sure if things are in the basement or the attic. It seems like technology should be able to help solve this problem, but as far as I can tell, no such solution exists yet.

So I’m planning to build one.

Here’s my general idea. Feedback, of course, is welcome.

Each item to be tracked can have an RFID tag of some sort attached to it. These tags can be read by an RFID reader at a distance of somewhere between 1ft and 1m in typical conditions. The reader could then act as a proximity alert to an object being searched for – a “you’re close” beep, for instance.

That helps, but is only part of the battle. It doesn’t help if you don’t even know which room to look in. So the second part of the plan is that the RFID reader is constantly talking to an object database. Besides the obvious association between RFID tag IDs and object descriptions, the database will also capture background reads of RFID tags. Logged with accurate timestamps, we can then conjecture that RFID reads that occurred within a few seconds of each other are probably physically nearby. If boxes have RFID tags on them, then I can probably get a reasonable idea, down to a box or two, of which box that elusive book is in. If I further put tags on certain immovable physical locations in the house, such as every few feet along shelving, then these will also be captured in the background and hopefully associated with objects nearby, giving a good physical idea of where things are.

What’s more, the simple act of looking for things using the RFID reader would help keep the proximity tables up-to-date, since it could of course log the RFID tags it sees on the way. The only discipline required to keep this info current is to periodically hover nearby storage areas when moving things around.

I like this concept a lot. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily simple.

Implementation requirements

• The cost of tagging an item must be less than $0.25 each. Ideally it would be $0.10 or less. We’re talking hundreds or thousands of items here, so even the $2.50 RFID tags for sale on hobbyist sites are way too expensive. RFID tags in industrial bulk quantities are needed, and cheaply.
• Read range must be at least 1ft, and ideally 3ft, and ideally even around as many obstacles as possible. Shorter than that and it can’t even take in a whole box without pulling things out.
• Cost kept as reasonable as possible.
• Must be simple and unobtrusive, requiring little manual effort or discipline to maintain current data. This is the reason for RFID instead of barcodes; barcodes require much more specific action (scan the bin, scan the item) rather then just turn on the scanner and wave it around a bit.

Software side

I’m envisioning the software being split into two components. One would run on an embedded system with the RFID reader. Its job is simple transmitting of scanned RFIDs to the server, receiving instructions from the server, and generating a tone if it’s in search mode and the item being searched is nearby.

On the server lies a database. The database would contain descriptions for the objects that are tagged (so that the tag ID can be looked up). It would also contain the timestamped scan logs.

I envision a simple CGI-based frontend to it that is mobile-friendly, so a laptop, phone, tablet, etc. could be the user interface for the thing – saving the cost of a display and input device by reusing what most people already have.

This is the part I feel most qualified to work on already.

Hardware

The first question is what kind of RFID tags to use. Optimizing for cost per tag, the 800/900MHz UHF tags (EPC gen 2) seem ideal. I have found them in costs approaching $0.10 per tag when bought in rolls of 500 or 1000 Avery RFID labels. That’s reasonable.

The RFID reader is the more complicated part. UHF RFID readers are a lot more costly than their HF or LF counterparts. So far, the cheapest solution I have found started with a post about an Arduino UHF reader. It used a SolidDigi UHF reader board with UART interface for $177. That same board is also available with a USB interface at the same cost.

There is also the need for an antenna. There is a small 5dBi one rated 0-50cm for $8, or a $100 8dBi version rated 1-6m designed for wall mounting. They sell these in kit form that include power adapter, USB cables, etc. as well. The kit with the small antenna runs $192, including reader board.

Next is the compute platform. A DreamPlug might work for this at $160, though both the cost and the power consumption (5VDC 3A) are high. A Raspberry Pi seems perfect, though for whatever reason seem to be backordered by months everywhere and don’t include wifi. The Pi is $35, and the USB wifi is another $30, plus a cheap SD card, so we’re around $80 of computing. The running total of the project, then, is at least $272. Add on provisions for batteries, some sort of case, etc. and we’re probably past the $300 mark. That’s a lot cheaper than the $1000 for handheld RFID readers.

The final item is tags. Bulk tags can be found in the $100 to $200 range, making the total cost of the project $400 to $500. Higher than I’d like, but providing some valuable experience building something.

Risks

There are a few major risks to the project. First among them is read distance. If it’s not long enough, the usefulness of the project will be low. Fortunately, $100 gets a more high-gain antenna and I’d only be out the $8 if the cheaper one doesn’t pan out. But that’s something of a cold comfort, as it’s another, well, $100.

Having a bunch of RFID hardware can be used for all sorts of other interesting things, though, so it could perhaps be reused or repurposed.

Another risk is that RFID collisions wouldn’t be handled as intelligently as I’d like, meaning that the read range required to be useful would activate so many tags that collision algorithms break down. I don’t know enough about RFID collision algorithms to know if this is a serious councern.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7589-a-linux-based-rfid-thing-finder/feed 11 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7576-decisions-on-listening-to-music http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7576-decisions-on-listening-to-music#comments Mon, 09 Jul 2012 02:30:57 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7576 A couple of days ago, I commented about my thoughts on finding a better way to listen to music, and asked for suggestions. I’ve checked out the avenues suggested, and here are my thoughts so far.

Streaming service: Spotify

Of the streaming service offerings, Spotify seems the most compelling. It has both Linux and Android clients. The Linux client is unofficial and a bit buggy, but serviceable. The service is fairly nice, and the serendipity of listening to “radio” of tracks like any track or artist I may pick is an incredible feature. It will mean a different mindset; rather than carefully choosing what I buy, I have a vast catalog at my fingertips. I’d have to give up some control, but might be better off for it.

Spotify can play local files, but sadly lacks support for FLAC that most of my collection is in. A little work with the shell, and I had a quick multi-core FLAC to MP3 conversion done. It can also identify local files and match them up with its catalog, but it does a somewhat poor job of it, despite the fact that my files are tagged by Musicbrainz. There are also a fair number of albums in my collection (from Magnatune and from local artists) that aren’t in Spotify’s catalog and probably never will be. I may wind up using git-annex or something like it to sync them between PCs.

Surprisingly, it doesn’t have any kind of web-based player available. It has a lot of features, but many of them are under-documented.

Subsonic / Supersonic

The idea of being able to stream music anywhere certainly has appeal, and the idea of streaming that music from my own machine — my own collection — is quite the appealing one. Subsonic seems to be the standard that people recommend for this. It has a web-based player that works well, as well as mobile clients for various platforms. The Android mobile client is particularly well-regarded and is probably the best one here, aside from Spotify. The playlists work well, as expected, and generally it has the appearance of a well-rounded system. There is a lot of flexibility in bitrates; maximum bitrates can be set per-user and per-client. It, of course, transcodes on the fly.

My chief gripe about Subsonic is that it has no true album/artist/genre browser. Its main browser is mostly a filesystem browser. I have used clients that show album/artist/genre panes or sortable lists, based on tags, for so long that my filesystem organization is rather different – centered around bitrate of rip, origin, etc. It is not very easy to navigate my collection in that way. The search feature can search artist and album, and this can partially make up for it. But there is simply no way to see a list of all artists in the collection.

The server is written in Java, and takes up 362MB at startup. That’s, I guess, decent for a Java server, but doesn’t make me pleased as I’d be running it on lower-end hardware.

Supersonic is a git-maintained actively synced subsonic fork which removes the license cost (the source is GPL3 anyhow so that wasn’t a big deal).

Ampache

Often mentioned in the same breath as Subsonic, this is yet another frequent suggestion for streaming your own collection. Its primary player is web-based, like Subsonic. It has full artist/genre browsers, and adds tag cloud and various other options as well – by default, it loaded the tag cloud with my genre tags, which was a nice touch. The search feature is a little less robust, as it simply searches anywhere and returns a list of all matching tracks, rather than listing matching albums and artists before going into the list of all tracks. But that is somewhat of a minor nit.

Ampache’s web-based player, liks Subsonic’s, uses Flash, but the implementation is really quite awkward. You can’t simply click a play button and have playback start. Rather, you must add things to the “playlist” (queue), a frame on the web interface. Then, you must click play in THAT frame, which launches a new window for the player and transfers its contents to it. You thus have two separate running playlists. And if you think you can just add to the playlist of the player window, think again; you can only replace it. It is simply not possible to add a track to the end of that list without losing your existing place. This makes the usefulness of the web-based player rather, well, low.

Playlist functionality in Ampache is rather odd. You can have playlists, but if you want to add a track to a saved playlist, first you have to clear you current playlist, then add the track to it, then save it to the existing playlist.

Frontends for Ampache exist in banshee and in amarok. Banshee’s is broken, and simply silently fails to do anything. Unless you look in the console, in which case you’ll see a .NET backtrace. Banshee has had these mysterious errors for me for years. The Amarok plugin is so basic that you can browse by artist but not by album, and is almost unusable. There is also a rhythmbox plugin in Debian, but it is apparently for an old version of Rhythmbox and no longer works.

The best frontend is a dedicated Ampache frontend called Viridian. It has a nice interface, provides features such as taskbar integration, and generally works pretty well. The only thing it’s bad at is playlists, and here it’s even worse than the web interface. It doesn’t support modifying the server-side playlists at all. And accessing one is an annoying “load playlist” operation, that replaces your current play queue (also called the “playlist”) with its contents by default.

Several Android clients exist for Ampache, though it seems only one has seen any updates since 2010.

mpd

This is an interesting program, as it is designed more to provide multiple points of control for a single player than it is to stream a single collection to multiple devices. Nevertheless, I tested its HTTP and icecast stream modules. (It can also stream with PulseAudio, but PulseAudio causes devious breakage on my workstation, so I refuse to bother.) This could be made to work reasonably well on my LAN using the gmpc client. There are several Android clients as well, though none of them integrate as well as Subsonic or Spotify. Most seem focused on controlling a remote player. The ones that do stream do so with some hiccups, and don’t integrate controls with the lock screen.

gmpc is a reasonable control program and, combined with mplayer, makes a decent player. It can browse the database every way I’d want to. It doesn’t let me right-click on tracks to add them to playlists, but I can use copy/paste to do so, or add them to the play queue and from there to a playlist. It’s annoying, but not completely unworkable.

But here’s the real concern. mpd has no provision whatsoever for any sort of encryption such as SSL. If I want to be listening to my music collection from on the road, I don’t really wish to open up a streaming music service for the entire Internet. Nor do I really want to mess with SSH tunnels and the like, which are cumbersome on Android (and can be in general). This is pretty much a fatal flaw to me.

Google Music

An interesting service, but ultimately one I don’t see the point for in my situation – where I already have my music on a PC that is always on. It would probably accommodate my entire collection free, but how many weeks would it take me to get it there? And how would it stay in sync? It simply doesn’t offer me any compelling advantage over streaming direct from my PC, so I don’t see much need to bother with it.

Others

I briefly considered Streeme (poor mobile support), Audiogalaxy (no Linux support), Jinzora (appears dead), and Sockso (no mobile support). I also briefly considered other streaming services such as Pandora, Slacker, rdio, etc., but based on reviews didn’t think that they were worth bothering with.

Conclusions

I’m left mainly considering Spotify and Subsonic. For right now, I’m going to try Spotify and see where that leads me, but may wind up getting back to Subsonic if I can’t find tracks I want with Spotify.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7576-decisions-on-listening-to-music/feed 6 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7572-how-to-listen-to-music http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7572-how-to-listen-to-music#comments Fri, 06 Jul 2012 14:07:59 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7572 This seems like a simple question: how do you listen to music?

But in a way, I think I’ve fallen behind the times.

I’ve enjoyed listening to digital music for years, since well before MP3 even existed (MIDI files could be comfortably downloaded over dialup; some of you may even remember MOD files).

Anyhow, a few years ago, I digitized my entire CD collection, ripping it to FLAC and encoding to high-bitrate MP3 for storage on my 160GB iPod. Since, I’ve purchased some music from DRM-free MP3 retailers, and even FLAC files from Magnatune, but at this point I basically say that I have enough music. I have only rarely bought anything new in the last couple of years. I have used Musicbrainz Picard to enforce consistent tagging across almost my entire collection.

I am usually in front of a Linux machine. I run mt-daapd on my fileserver, so I can stream music from it to any other machine in the house. However, this has a lot of drawbacks. It is generally impossible to create or modify persistent playlists with this protocol. I can’t modify metadata. I can’t assign ratings. Though perhaps I don’t need to.

There are a lot of online services I could think of: Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, Slacker. Plus, of course, the upload your music to the cloud services such as Google and Amazon. Have people tried these? I’m hesitant to use a service where I pay a monthly fee, unless I wind up owning the music in a DRM-free fashion. And I’m a little nervous about the privacy implications of uploading a vast amount of music to the cloud.

There are some items in my collection that I am certain are not available on any of those others, but for the most part I’m willing to take what is out there if it meets my tastes. My tastes, by the way, typically run to classical and opera but also can go towards middle eastern or certain new age music (though I’m very picky about that, since I don’t care for most new age stuff I hear.) But these are huge categories; sometimes I’d like to hear some load and noisy classical (say, Beethoven’s Ninth conclusion, some Wagner, Verdi arias, etc.) And other times, something more contemplative (a Mozert concerto) or even quiet (a nice sonata) meet my mood. I have playlists for these on my iPod Classic – a bit of a problem, since I don’t use that device much anymore except in the car, and it takes a LOT of time to categorize things into these playlists. (An opera or a symphony could have parts in various styles and various levels of energy, for instance.) I keep a small manually-managed subset on my Android phone, which works fine. A recommendation engine for things like this could be useful, if it works well.

My requirements, basically: I want something that will play the same music on my Linux machines. I want to be able to have playlists kept in sync across my machines. And I don’t want a monthly fee. Ideally, the software will work on Android as well, and provide similar features there. Anything that requires Windows is a non-starter. I’ve considered NFS mounts, but that’s a bit annoying when the laptop disconnects from the network or when it’s not at home.

What are your thoughts? Ideas?

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7572-how-to-listen-to-music/feed 12 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7562-i-introduced-my-5-year-old-and-2-year-old-to-startx-and-xmonad-theyre-delighted http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7562-i-introduced-my-5-year-old-and-2-year-old-to-startx-and-xmonad-theyre-delighted#comments Thu, 21 Jun 2012 02:14:14 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7562 Two years ago, Jacob (then 3) and I built his first computer together. I installed Debian on it, but never put a GUI on the thing. It’s command-line, and has provided lots of enjoyment off and on over the last couple of years. I’ve written extensively about what our boys like to do, and the delight they have at learning things on the command line.

The looks of shock I get from people when I explain, as if it’s perfectly natural, that my child has been able to log in by himself to a Linux shell since age 3, are amusing and astounding. Especially considering that it is really not that hard. Instead of learning how to run an Xbox, he’s learned how to run bash. I like that.

Lately, Jacob (now 5) hasn’t been spending much time with it. He isn’t really at a stage where he wants to push his limits too far, I think, but yet also gets bored with the familiar. So I thought it was time to introduce a GUI in a limited fashion, perhaps to let him download photos and video from his Vtech toy camera (that takes real low-res photos and videos which can be downloaded over a USB1 link). He’s familiar with the concept, at least somewhat, having seen GUIs on Terah’s computer (Gnome 2) and mine (xfce4 + xmonad).

So last night, Oliver (age 2) and I went down to the basement on a mouse-finding expedition. Sure enough, I had an old PS/2 mouse down there that would work fine. The boys both helped string it through the desk up on our play room, and were tremendously excited to see the red light underneath it when the computer came on. Barely able to contain the excitement, really. A bit like I remember being when I got my first mouse (at a bit of an older age, I suppose.)

I helped him them in as root for the very first time. (Jacob typed “root”, and I typed the password, and provided the explanation for why we were telling the computer we were “root”.) Jacob and Oliver alternated typing bits of some apt-get command lines. Then while we waited for software to download, I had to answer repeated questions of “how soon will the mouse work?” and “what does ‘install’ mean?”

Finally it was there, and I told Jacob to type startx. I intentionally did not install a display manager; more on that later. He pressed Enter, the screen went blank for about 5 seconds, and then X appeared. “Excited” can’t begin to describe how they acted. They took turns playing with the mouse. They loved how the trash can icon (I started with XFCE) showed trash IN the trash can.

But they are just learning the mouse, and there’s a lot about a typical GUI that is unfriendly to someone that isn’t yet proficient with a mouse. The close buttons are disappointingly small, things can be too easily dragged on and off the panel and menus. When I sat down to think about it, the typical GUI design does not present a very good “it always works the same” interface that would be good for a child.

And then it occurred to me: the perfect GUI for a child would be simply xmonad (a tiling window manager that can be controlled almost entirely by keyboard and has no need for mouse movements in most cases.) No desktop environment, no file manager in the root window. Just a window manager in the classic X way. Of course!

So after the boys were in bed, I installed xmonad. I gave Jacob’s account a simple .xsession that starts a terminal and xmonad.

Today, Jacob informed me that he wanted his computer to look “just like yours.” Playing right into my hands, that was! But when he excitedly typed startx, he said it wasn’t just like mine. Uh oh. Turns out he wanted the same wallpaper as my computer uses. Whew. We found it, I figured out that xli(1) loads it in the root window, and so I added a third line to .xsession. More delight unlocked!

Jacob mastered the basics of xmonad really quickly. Alt-Shift-C to close a window. Alt-Shift-Q to quit back to the “big black screen”. Alt-Shift-Enter to get a terminal window.

We launched thunar (the XFCE file manager) and plugged in his camera. He had a good deal of fun looking at photos and videos from it. But then I dropped the true highlight of the day for him: I offered to install Tuxpaint for him. That’s probably his favorite program of all time.

He watched impatiently as apt-get counted down 1m30s for tuxpaint and its libraries. Then we launched it, and he wanted to skip supper so he could keep playing Tuxpaint on “my VERY OWN COMPUTER!”

I’d been debating how to introduce GUIs for a very long time. It has not escaped my attention that children that used Commodores or TRS-80s or DOS knew a lot more about how their computers worked, on average, than those of the same age that use Windows or MacOS. I didn’t want our boys to skip an entire phase of learning how their technology works. I am pleased with this solution; they still run commands to launch things, yet get to play with more than text-based programs.

At bedtime, Jacob asked me, very seriously:

“Dad, how do I start tuxpaint again?”

“First you log in and type startx. Then you can use the mouse.”

Jacob nods, a contemplative look on his face..

“Then,” I continue, “you type tuxpaint in the terminal, and it comes right up.”

Jacob nodded very seriously a second time, as if committing this very important information to long-term memory. Then gave a single excited clap, yelled “Great!”, and dashed off.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7562-i-introduced-my-5-year-old-and-2-year-old-to-startx-and-xmonad-theyre-delighted/feed 131 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7555-windows-a-dying-hard-disk-solving-with-linux http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7555-windows-a-dying-hard-disk-solving-with-linux#comments Fri, 15 Jun 2012 03:48:25 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7555 Today, my workstation sent me this email:

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:

Device: /dev/sda [SAT], 1 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors

and then a little later, this one:

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:

Device: /dev/sda [SAT], 1 Offline uncorrectable sectors

From the hard disk’s SMART data, this is a clue that the drive is failing or will soon. Sigh. Incidentally, if smartmontools isn’t installed on your machine, whether it’s a laptop, desktop, or server, it should be.

Although most of you know I run Linux on the metal on my machines almost exclusively, I do maintain a small drive with a Windows installation that I boot into every few months for various reasons. This is that drive.

The drive is non-redundant (no RAID), and although it is backed up, the backup is made via backuppc from the NTFS filesystem mounted on Linux, and is a partial backup – backing up certain data, not the OS. There are, of course, bare metal Windows backup solutions, but I generally don’t want to back up Windows from within Windows on this machine. Restoring Windows isn’t quite as simple as an mkfs, an untar, and a grub-install, either.

So my first thought is: immediately save whatever of the drive I can. So I ran apt-get install gddrescue to install the GNU ddrescue tool. ddrescue is somewhat similar to dd, but deals much more intelligently with bad blocks on the drive. It will try to read them repeatedly, with decreasing block sizes, in an effort to get every last good byte off the disk that it can. If it ultimately fails to get certain bytes read, it will write placeholder data to the output file in place of the missing data, so that the output file maintains proper size and alignment. It also saves a log file that notes what it found (see info ddrescue for more on that.)

So I created an LVM volume for the purpose (not enough free space on /home, and didn’t want to have to shrink it somehow later), and ran:

ddrescue /dev/sda /mnt/sdasave.ddrescue /mnt/sdasave.logfile

Then I went to dinner.

When I got back, I discovered there were 1 or 2 bad sectors, about halfway through the disk, but everything else was fine. So now, the question became: did I lose any data? If so, what? I needed to know if I had to revert to a backup for anything or not.

To answer THAT question, first I had to figure out the offset of the bad spots on the disk. That’s not too hard; the logfile gives it to me:

# Rescue Logfile. Created by GNU ddrescue version 1.15
# Command line: ddrescue /dev/sda /mnt/sdasave.ddrescue sdasave.logfile
# current_pos  current_status
0x3BBB8BFC00     +
#      pos        size  status
0x00000000  0x3BBB8BF000  +
0x3BBB8BF000  0x00001000  -
0x3BBB8C0000  0x38B5346000  +

what we see is that the bad sector starts at byte 0x3BBB8BF000 (256549580800 decimal) and extends for 0×1000 bytes (4096 decimal). Both the drive and NTFS use 512-byte sectors. So dividing by 512, we get sector 501073400 – 501073407 (4096 bytes is 8 sectors).

As a check, I ran grep sector /var/log/kern.log and turned up a bunch of lines like this:

Jun 14 21:39:11 hephaestus kernel: [35346.929957] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 501073404

Which is within my calculated range.

But this is an absolute sector on the disk. We need the sector within the partition, so for that, we have to enlist fdisk to make that calculation.

fdisk shows, among other things:

Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048   976771071   488384512    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

So the Windows partition starts at disk sector 2048.

Let’s just confirm that. If I use dd if=/dev/sda1 bs=512 count=1 | hd | head, I see a line beginning with “.R.NTFS”. Exactly the same as with dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 skip=2048 | hd | head, so I read the partition table information correctly.

Subtract offset of 2048 from the earlier values, and I get relative sectors 501071352-501071359.

That’s enough to get some solid info from the filesystem via ntfscluster, part of Debian’s ntfs-3g package. I pass -s to it, and ignoring some irrelevant stuff, get my answer:

ntfscluster -s 501071352-501071359 /dev/sda1
Inode 190604 /System Volume Information/{b4816feb-b609-11e1-a908-50e549b934f7}{3808876b-c176-4e48-b7ae-04046e6cc752}/$DATA

I even reran it with a much larger sector range, just to be absolutely sure I had wiggle room in case calculations had an off-by-one error or something somewhere.

This is really great news, because the file in question is pretty much useless – I believe it’s a system restore point, which I won’t be needing anyhow.

So at this point, all that remains is to reinstall this on a different drive. For that, I could just use my ddrescue image. I thought I would take a second image, just to be very extra careful, and use that; I used:

partclone.ntfs --rescue -c -s /dev/sda1 -o sda1.partclone

although ntfsclone would work just as well. This captures only the partition; I’ll need the partition table as well, and perhaps also the space between the partition table and the first partition. I could capture it separately with dd, but it’s already in the ddrescue image, so there’s no need. (GRUB is installed on this drive, but there is no Linux filesystem on it, so it may well exceed the size of the MBR).

Note that for Linux ext[234] filesystems, debugfs can provide the same (and more) info as I got from ntfscluster.

I happen to have a drive of the right size sitting here, which I was about to install in a different machine. So a wipe and a swap and a restore later, and I should be good to go.

This scenario is commonplace enough that I thought I’d post how I dealt with it, in case anyone else ever has hard drive issues.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7555-windows-a-dying-hard-disk-solving-with-linux/feed 0 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7550-how-to-debugging-linux-failure-to-resume-from-suspend http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7550-how-to-debugging-linux-failure-to-resume-from-suspend#comments Thu, 14 Jun 2012 20:34:37 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7550 I’m running a computer with a Gigabyte Z68A-D3H-B3 motherboard, and have never been able to get it to properly resume from suspend to RAM in Linux. It has worked fine on the rare occasion I’ve tried it in Windows 7.

My somewhat limited usual for debugging aren’t particularly helpful. The system appears to suspend perfectly fine. It just doesn’t resume. To be more precise, when I push the button to resume, the power comes up (fans whir, HDD spins up, etc.) but nothing happens. The USB keyboard and mouse don’t respond, Caps Lock doesn’t toggle any LEDs, it doesn’t respond on the wired LAN, and the display stays off.

Although it’s a desktop, I’d really like to save power on this thing by suspending it when it’s not in use. There’s no sense in wasting power I don’t need to be consuming.

I’ve tried what I used to try on laptops. I tried running in single-user mode, without X, or even the kernel modules for video acceleration loaded. I tried unloading whatever hardware modules I thought I could without completely destabilizing the system. I updated the BIOS to the latest release. I tried various combinations of video tweaks. I tried using s2ram from uswsusp instead of pm-suspend. Nothing made any difference. They all behaved exactly the same.

Googling showed a lot of resources for people that had trouble getting their machines to go to sleep. And also for people whose machines would wake up but just wouldn’t re-activate the display. But precious little for people with my particular symptoms.

What’s a good place to start looking to fix something like this?

Some details…

CPU is Core i5-2400. Kernel is wheezy’s 3.2.0-2-amd64, though this problem has persisted as long as I’ve had this machine, which was running squeeze at install time. Video is NVidia GeForce GTX 560 (GF114). Hard drives are SATA, Ethernet is integrated RTL8111/8168B. Userland is up-to-date amd64 wheezy.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7550-how-to-debugging-linux-failure-to-resume-from-suspend/feed 15 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7535-suspicious-blog-activity-any-advice http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7535-suspicious-blog-activity-any-advice#comments Tue, 15 May 2012 20:42:27 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7535 I’ve been noticing a number of odd things happening surrounding my blog lately, and I thought it’s about time to figure out what’s going on and how to stop it.

The first problem is that people are illegally copying my posts, probably using RSS scraping, and putting them up on their own ad-infested sites. It is trivial to find them using Google for any somewhat unique word or phrase in one of my posts. Lately one of them, linux-support.com, actually sends me pingbacks announcing the fact that they’ve scraped me! Most of these sites seem to be nothing but content farms for selling ad impressions, and almost none of them have any identifiable names for the owners.

(There is an exception: I have specifically set up sites like Planet Debian and Goodreads to copy my blog posts.)

I’m obviously an advocate of open content, but I do not feel it right that others should be profiting by putting photos and stories about Free Software, or photos of my family, on their ad farms. While I release a great deal of content under GPL or Creative Commons licenses, I have never done so with my blog – an intentional decision.

What should I do about this? Is it worth fighting a battle over, or is it about as useless as trying to block every spam follower on my twitter account?

So that’s the first weird thing. The second weird thing just started within the last few weeks. I have been getting a surprising amount (a few a week) of email addressed to me. It does not bear the appearance of being 100% automated spam, though it is possible that it is. It’s taken a few forms:

• Someone wanting to buy an ad on my blog
• Someone wanting to send me a story hyping their product (and intending me to pretend that I wrote the story)
• Someone wanting me to write a story about their website and link to it

The profit motive in all of these is high, and in at least the second and third, so is the sleaze factor.

I’ve gotten two emails lately of this form:

Hi John,

I am curious if you are the administrator for this site: changelog.complete.org/archives/174-house-outlaws-fast-forwarding-senate-pres-next

I am a researcher / writer involved with a new project whose mission it is to provide accurate and useful information for those interested in the practice of law, whether as a lawyer or paralegal. I recently produced an article detailing the complex relationship between law and technology and the legal implications on personal privacy and free speech. I would love to share this resource with those who might find it useful and am curious of you are the correct person to contact about such a request?

Thank you!

All my best,

The details vary – the URLs appear to be random (the one cited above was little more than a link to an article), the topics the website claims to discuss range from law to schizophrenia (that one actually came with a link to the site, which again seemed to be a content farm). I am slightly tempted to reply to one of these and ask where the heck people are getting my name. It seems as if somebody has put me into a mailing list they sell containing sleazebag bloggers.

Frankly, I am puzzled at this attention. I guess I haven’t checked, but I can’t imagine that my blog has anything even remotely resembling a high PageRank or anything else. It’s not high-traffic, not Slashdot, etc. Either people are desperate, naive, failing to be selective, or maybe working some scam on me that I don’t know yet.

In any case, I’m interested if others have seen this, or any advice you might have.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7535-suspicious-blog-activity-any-advice/feed 17 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7522-geeky-plan-solar-power-supply-in-the-car http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7522-geeky-plan-solar-power-supply-in-the-car#comments Fri, 04 May 2012 07:48:13 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7522 From the “might be geeky” dept…

For an upcoming car trip, we have to take my wife’s car (long story). I will be taking two large lead-acid batteries in the trunk hooked up to a solar panel in the rear window area and, of course, some electronics in the front seat. Why, you ask?

While she drives, I will be working via tethered 3G (conveniently reducing the number of vacation days the trip requires). This is Kansas, so signals are weak sometimes. I have an external antenna that hooks up to a signal booster. So I’ll be running a laptop, cellphone in “draw lots of power mode”, and a cellphone booster – at minimum. Measurements suggest that this combination could easily put me in range of the typical 10A limit of dash electronics. (And doesn’t even include the “nice to haves” of GPS, my handheld radio, and the amplifier for it.)

My car has a direct high-current link from the battery to the trunk to support the 100W amateur radio mounted there. It is pretty easy to tap into it and add a cable that runs to the passenger seat to run all this stuff.

Terah’s car… doesn’t.

So, I thought, what’s the easy solution? Well, my solar power system, of course! If I charge up a couple of the large batteries beforehand (just pop them and a few panels in the sun for a day), then put the batteries in the trunk, it will probably power my electronics for a whole day (enough for the trip we have planned), and I have already cabled them up to support the kind of current draw I’ll have. I’ll have to recharge the batteries at the destination, of course, so I’ll bring along a panel (no need to bring more than one since there will be plenty of time to charge).

Once I’m planning to take a panel along, I figured I might as well put it under the rear window so it can actually help charge the batteries as we go. The current drain will, of course, be larger than the 1A or so it can put out, but hey, who else drives down the interstate with an active solar panel in their car?

I can actually split the load between the batteries and the vehicle system too, so I do not need a continuous 10A draw on the batteries.

The sad part about this is I will probably never surpass a temporary battery system with a solar panel in terms of geeky travel.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7522-geeky-plan-solar-power-supply-in-the-car/feed 6 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7501-review-amateur-radio-handhelds-hts-aprs-and-battery-tuning-tips http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7501-review-amateur-radio-handhelds-hts-aprs-and-battery-tuning-tips#comments Mon, 30 Apr 2012 21:13:07 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7501 There are a lot of opinions about handhelds for amateur radio users (these handhelds are often known as HTs). I’ve used three of them, two with APRS capability, and thought it’s about time I write about them. First, I’ll talk about the units in particular, then I’ll get to some broader Yaesu vs. Kenwood generalizations and conclusions.

Yaesu VX-7R – a rugged first HT without APRS

Cost: $350 as of 4/30/2012

This was the first HT I got as a ham, at the suggestion of Mike AE0MW. It truly does make a great first handheld for a ham. Radio-wise, one unique feature is a receive that’s wideband enough to cover both broadcast FM and broadcast AM, the various ham bands, and plenty of others besides. The battery life quoted in the manual is 6 hours on 2m and 5.5 hours on 440 (using standard 6s TX / 6s RX / 48s squelched metric), and in my experience it seems it must be even better in some cases.

The real piece of news about this unit, though, is just how rugged it is. It says “submersible” across the front and I absolutely believe it. I have personal experience with its ruggedness. I once was at an event and put the radio on my car roof while helping one of my children into the car. I then started driving home and forgot it there. When we got home, I realized what had happened, and also realized what that mysterious CLUNK along the busy county road was. So I drove 45 minutes back to where I heard the clunk, and found the VX-7R still lying in the roadway, where it had been for 1.5 hours on the 55 MPH road. The thing was really beat up. It had obviously been hit by numerous vehicles. The antenna was ripped off, taking the SMA mount with it. But wouldn’t you know it, the darn thing still powered up. I took it to a local amateur radio shop, and about $80 later it was repaired. Incredible. The only real problem was the antenna connector.

I took this radio with me on my bicycle many days, mounted on my handlebars. It got bounced around, but still worked great. Some days I listened to FM radio from it while riding my bike, monitoring a local repeater while I rode. Other days, I spent most of my ride (about an hour each way) chatting with people on the repeaters – I have a mobile antenna mounted on the bike, fed to the VX-7R, and a headset. It all worked fine – never a problem at all.

The ruggedness has its downside. All of the connectors on the radio, except for DC in, are screw-down — even the speaker/mic connector. This obviously helps keep water out, but means that it can take a lot longer than normal to do a simple thing like plug in a speaker/mic. It doesn’t need any tools, but can get a little annoying.

The radio physically is small (unless you install the belt clip, which has an odd peg-based mechanism that protrudes unnecessarily far and is surprisingly non-rugged). It can easily fit into a pocket.

The other downsides of the VX-7R mostly surround its interface. I’m not one of the Yaesu haters that seem to be so common. I find the interface usable if you read the manual; it seems a lot of people that complain about it don’t. But it is quirky.

The SET mode is one long menu in sort of a ring. You scroll with the knob, and when you get to the end, it repeats to the beginning. There are one or two shortcut keys to a specific setting, but overall either you use the thing so much you know exactly where you’re going, or you’re twisting the knob for awhile until the option you want rolls around. (I know of nobody that uses it so much they know exactly where they’re going.) They do have options grouped into categories, but it doesn’t help much because there’s no quick way to skip between categories.

The dual transceivers work less elegantly than on the TH-D72A or VX-8GR. Instead of being two equal transceivers A and B, they are “main” and “sub”. The sub transceiver is not broadband receive like the main receiver is. But there are also other limitations that have no apparent logic. For instance, you can program memory groups into the device – putting, say, all the local repeaters into a certain group, or all the public safety frequencies (to use as a scanner). You can go to the “special” set menu, select group, then activate SCAN, and it will scan only the memories in that group. But you can’t select the special group mode on the sub transceiver – for no apparent reason.

One other complaint is that the AC charger introduces so much noise to a transmission that you cannot really use the VX-7R to transmit while the charger is connected.

Yaesu sells a programming cable that plugs into the speaker/mic port on one end, and a DB-9 serial port on the other, and includes programming software. For an incredibly high price. For far less, I found a similar cable on eBay that has a USB port on the other end (with a built-in USB/serial converter), and used VX-7R Commander — though now that Chirp is available for Linux, I’ll probably switch to it.

I would probably continue to recommend this transceiver for a new ham. The ruggedness, plus the broadband RX, are features that should make it appealing. It is an excellent emergency preparedness/response radio due to those properties; having TX and RX on ham bands, plus RX on broadcast and public safety could be quite the asset.

However, for someone that has any interest in APRS, one of the other two radios I mention is probably a better choice. At only $10 more, the VX-8GR sacrifices ruggedness and broadband receive for APRS functionality and could make a compelling alternative to the VX-7R at the same price point. The very low-power transmit at 50MHz and 220MHz on the VX-7R strikes me as a gimmick feature at best that has very little actual use.

Shipped battery: FNB-80LI, 7.4V, 1400 mAh, lithium-ion

Kenwood TH-D72A / D72E – The Cadillac HT, with APRS and GPS

Cost: $464 as of April 30, 2012

It’s hard to use any word but “incredible” to describe this HT, though it does have its own rough edges.

Starting with the basics, it has dual transceivers with full duplex (meaning you can be transmitting on one band while receiving on another). Its stored memory system and memory bank scanning system are both a lot easier and faster to use than Yaesu’s, and work the same on both transceivers A and B, though perhaps offer slightly less flexibility than Yaesu’s (on the VX-7R, a single memory can be a member of more than one group). The quoted operating time is 6 hours, which is probably accurate with APRS and GPS off, matching (or nearly matching) the VX-7R.

The TH-D72A has the usual mic and speaker ports. Unlike Yaesu, Kenwood has used the same jack for years, so it is not necessary to purchase new accessories with each upgrade. The unit also has both serial (Kenwood connector) and standard mini USB ports, and even ships with a USB cable. The USB port is designed to interface to a PC, and the radio presents itself as a serial-over-USB device. Kenwood also includes MCP-4A, the programming software for the unit, free. This is one example of several things that Kenwood includes for free but are costly add-ons with Yaesu.

Kenwood’s configuration menu system is hierarchical. You can scroll through the four top-level menus (RADIO, GPS, APRS, and SKY), then navigate through sub menus. The result is that it’s both faster and easier to find what you want than on the Yaesu menus. Plus, as you navigate, the radio shows you the shortcut key to get to a particular option (each level of menu is numbered starting) — so, for instance, Menu-1-1-0 takes me directly to the configuration for RX battery saver interval far faster than I could get there on the VX-7R or VX-8GR. Only the APRS menu gets a bit crowded with this setup.

The D72A supports Kenwood’s Sky Command II – an intriguing way of making it essentially a remote for a Kenwood HF rig such as the TS-2000. It works by engaging a crossband repeater for the audio, and setting up a AX.25 packet link for the control. It works, but as the response time to frequency adjustments is measured in seconds, is klunky for tuning around a HF band. A nifty, though perhaps not supremely useful, feature with some hackable potential that I haven’t explored yet.

The TH-D72A is one of only two shipping general-purpose amateur radios that have a built-in GPS — the other is the Yaesu VX-8GR, which I’ll review below. The GPS works well, and can get a fix indoors if desired. It has a system of saving waypoints, which you can then navigate back to later (using distance/bearing indicators). It also has a track log. While the track log can’t be viewed on the unit, it can be downloaded with the included MCP-4A software and saved in a variety of formats including Google’s KML for later importing into Google Maps or Google Earth. I enjoy this feature on trips to see where I went later on. There is also a GPS-only mode, which disables all of the other radio circuitry on the radio for very low power consumption. The GPS navigation screens all support heading-up or north-up indicators.

But where this radio really shines is APRS. The D72 has all the basics you’d expect – sending and receiving beacons, sending and receiving messages and bulletins, etc. It has built-in support for being a digipeater in many different ways, including new-N UI-Trace. Coupled with an MFJ VHF amplifier, this could make a nice temporary (or even permanent) digi. The message interface permits sending, receiving, and shortcuts for replying to messages.

Beacon transmission can be completely manual, at set intervals, or using SmartBeaconing. Outbound beacons also support proportional pathing (meaning adjusting via-path to not have wide coverage with every transmission). Also, if not using SmartBeaconing, a decay algorithm can be used to send beacons less frequently when the station’s location isn’t changing. An alternative tells the system to transmit a beacon every time PTT is released, subject to rate limiting by interval. So lots of choices there.

For incoming beacons, there are various filters by callsign pattern, packet type, etc. that control whether they will be processed at all, and what kind of alert (visual or audible) to present. Beacons are also placed in a received beacon list, sorted with the most recent at the top (duplicates from the same station are always removed, so only the most recent is presented.) A long press of the LIST button shows time received and type of device next to the callsign. Selecting a specific beacon shows status text, comment, device type, bearing/distance (with graphical north-up or heading-up display), telemetry (weather information and the like), and a little bit of info about the via-path. Pretty nice to see weather reports from local weather stations on there. You can sort the list by received time, station call, or distance from your position — but it doesn’t stay sorted by anything other than received time, and takes several seconds to re-sort. Seems like a bit of an oversight there.

The D72A supports QSY information in beacons. This can automatically insert the frequency of the other band on the transceiver into your transmitted beacons for you, or give you a quick way to tune to the frequency mentioned on others’ beacons. Either way, a nice touch.

The D72 also supports query packets, such as packets asking your station to transmit its position right now.

The TH-D72A can directly interface with several types of weather stations via serial link to read weather sensor information and transmit it into APRS packets directly, with no need for a PC to be in the picture at all. But if you do hook up a PC to it, there are quite a few more possibilities.

You can hook it up to PC APRS software (or a hardware device such as the AVMAP) to see locations of other APRS stations on a map. It can emit APRS packets, plus even GPS sentences, down the USB port to the PC. Moreover, in PACKET mode, it acts as a full TNC, with a fairly robust TNC command set. In short, it can do more than APRS; it can also do regular AX.25 such as DX clusters, BBS, nodes, etc. As far as I know, this is the only HT that can interface with a PC in this manner, and only Kenwood’s mobile D710 has the same kind of feature set at that.

Kenwood includes a lot of documentation with the TH-D72A. The 51-page printed manual is a summary or introductory guide. The included CD-ROM supplies another 75 pages of detailed reference material, and the 92-page “in-depth APRS manual” has a level of detail that true geeks like me appreciate. I’ve referred to Kenwood’s documentation more than once while figuring out things about the VX-8GR (which woefully under-documents things like SmartBeaconing). That said, it appears that at least some of the documentation has been copied from the earlier TH-D7A. Page 4 of the printed book is a good example. It talks about the memory effect of the battery, and warns against unplugging and replugging the charger because the charge cycle will be reset and the battery will be over-charged (I find it hard to believe that a Li-Ion charge controller would be that stupid, and furthermore direct observation suggests that it isn’t.) Parts of the in-depth APRS guide appear to have been written for the D710, but that’s a really minor nit.

Unlike Yaesu, Kenwood issues periodic firmware updates to the D72A, which you can apply over USB. They have fixed bugs and added features to the unit over time.

Now onto the things that aren’t so good about the D72A. I’ll start with the battery system, since we were already discussing it. Despite shipping with a much larger battery than the VX-8GR (1800 mAh vs. 1100 mAh), it only manages roughly equal battery life with APRS and GPS engaged. (It will probably do better as a simple voice unit, however.) This has been confirmed by numerous reports on the Internet. I will discuss this topic more below.

There is very little else to fault the D72A on, feature-wise. I have a minor nit in that it is impossible to cause the keylock feature to also lock PTT. It would be nice to be able to see raw APRS packets on beacons and messages. Other than that, I can’t think of a feature it really lacks.

Compared to the VX-7R and VX-8GR, the TH-D72A is significantly larger physically, in every dimension. It is not uncomfortably large, and still fits in my hand fine. But its size is enough different that it feels like the design is dated and could have been more compact if Kenwood would have bothered. It’s a nit, sure, but a nontrivial one.

With the single exception of the sturdy metal belt clip, the D72 doesn’t feel nearly as rugged as the VX-7R, and not even as rugged as the VX-8GR. The keys have a squishy feel to them, the PTT button works fine but has a cheap plastic design (as opposed to the rubberized versions on Yaesu’s HTs). The manual doesn’t mention it, but one Kenwood brochure mentions and IP54 weatherproofing. That means it is protected against limited ingress of dust and against water sprayed from all directions – limited ingress permitted. Contrast that to the VX-7R, which is rated for 30 minutes of submersion at 3ft and has a magnesium case. It seems to be specced similarly to the VX-8GR, though the VX-8GR certainly feels a lot more solid. I have no proof, as I’m not about to sacrifice my HTs for science, but I doubt that the TH-D72A would have survived over an hour on a busy road as well as the VX-7R did, and probably not even as well as the VX-8GR would. The case is plastic — a stout plastic, but still plastic.

Like the VX-8GR, and unlike the VX-7R, the D72A does not have broadband receive. It can receive some bands adjacent to the ham bands it supports, which includes a lot of bands of interest to people with scanners, but still can’t receive broadcast FM signals like the VX-7R.

Shipped battery: PB-45L, 1800 mAh, lithium-ion

Yaesu VX-8GR: Cheaper APRS & GPS

Cost: $360 as of 4/30/2012

One could probably call this Yaesu’s closest competitor to the D72A. At about $100 cheaper, it doesn’t have a featureset that matches Kenwood’s, but it does have a few innovations that the D72A lacks.

Starting with the basics, it lacks the VX-7R’s broadband receive, with the receive roughly matching the TH-D72A’s. The 8GR is a dual-transceiver HT, and it works this effectively (moreso than the VX-7R). Yaesu has a bad habit of changing connectors on radios with regularity, and charging an arm and a leg for accessories to boot. Even within the VX-8 line, the 8GR uses different accessories than the 8DR, and of course has different plugs than the 7R (though it appears that the DC power plug is the same, and with some luck you might be able to use a VX-7R speaker/mic on the 8GR, though not the reverse).

The menu system on the 8GR is still similar to the 7R, though Yaesu has done several things to improve it. For one, scrolling through the menu now shows several lines of context on the screen at once, making it faster to scan. Also, there are more ways to jump into the menu at a certain location than before – and even a small bit of clumsily-implemented hierarchy (there are several settings on the SmartBeaconing page, for instance).

The menu key now toggles between various displays: the default frequency/status display, a GPS display, an APRS staion list, and an APRS message list. Just about everything operationally takes more keypresses than the D72A. On the D72A, it’s one or two keys (a physical button or F+button) to do almost everything: toggle GPS state, change TNC/APRS state (turn on or off), etc. All of that is in the scrolling menus on the 8GR. The quickest way there, which is documented in the manual, is to press MENU until a certain screen comes up, then press and hold MENU to bring up the settings (defaulting to a certain APRS-related category), then scroll and change settings. It’s a pain to turn APRS on and off, because you have to do this process for both the GPS and the APRS modem. Inexplicably, there is a hotkey to change the APRS beacon method (manual, auto, or SmartBeaconing) but not to turn APRS itself on or off. (The D72A has a hotkey to toggle the beaconing, though not to change its method; though in truth, if you do it frequently, the menu shortcuts will get you there rapidly.)

Physically, the VX-8GR is closer to the size of the 7R than the size of the D72A, and notably is significantly smaller than the D72A (at least with the standard battery). As noted in the D72A review, the VX-8GR feels more rugged than the D72A, though whether that is actually true or not is hard to pin down. It is definitely less rugged than the VX-7R. The keys require more pressure than the D72A, and in this they are similar to the 7R, but feel satisfyingly solid.

Unlike the other radios here, the 8GR does not have a dedicated volume knob, having only one dial on the top. To adjust volume, you hold the volume button on the left while twisting the knob. In practice, this is probably not usually very annoying, but if the radio is on your belt or otherwise not in your hand, this would be a frustration. (I think it would be particularly annoying if using it with a speaker/mic). Setting 99 will let you change the key so you don’t have to hold it in, which could probably go a long way to making the situation more tolerable.

One unique feature of the VX-8GR, as far as I know completely unique to it, is a vibrating alert. This would most frequently be used with APRS to provide a nearly-silent alert of incoming messages and the like.

The screen of the 8G, while similar in size to both the D72A and the 7R, appears to be higher-resolution (or if not, they make better use of it). More information is packed onto the screen at once, and although the D72A does have a small font, it uses it so rarely that lots of scrolling is needed. The 8GR uses a smaller font than the D72A to show content of messages and the like, which makes a much faster experience since there is a lot less scrolling. Neither radio has a setting to change this behavior, so if your eyesight isn’t good, you may prefer the D72A anyhow.

The VX-8GR supports a heading-up or a north-up view of the received GPS data, but strangely it does not support this when navigating to a received beacon (north-up is the only option). Unlike the TH-D72A, you can engage keylock on the 8GR while someone’s beacon is on the display. Also unlike the TH-D72A, you can lock out the PTT key on the 8GR. However, the keylock feature is just a quick press of the power button, which makes me a bit nervous. And worse, if you tell it to lock the PTT key, then it also won’t transmit any automatic APRS beacons!

There are a lot of things the D72A supports in the APRS area that the 8GR doesn’t. Here’s a summary of features missing in the 8GR compared to the D72A: voice alert (can’t even do it manually since tone/CTCSS are locked out in APRS mode), quick replying to messages, TNC mode (meaning you can’t use it with PC-based APRS programs), full AX.25 packet mode, full PC linking, weather station inputs, built-in digipeater mode, heading-up display, GPS track logs, QSY in beacons, quick tuning to others’ QSY info, responding to position queries, proportional pathing, automatic decay, beaconing on PTT release, sorting of beacon list, hotkey access to many features, and I’m sure the list goes on. On the flipside, the only thing feature-wise that you get on the 8GR’s APRS implementation that the D72A lacks is ability to inspect raw APRS packets.

The VX-8GR has the lowest-capacity battery of the three radios covered in this post, and this is an oft-cited problem for users of the unit. Yeasu does seem to do a much better job of power management than Kenwood, though, so in full APRS and GPS mode, the battery life is roughly the same, amazingly enough. It is unlikely that the talk time on the 8GR would match either the 7R or the D72A, however.

Kenwood and Yaesu both have a battery saver feature which cuts power to the RX circuit except for brief checks for signals. Yaesu completely disables this while the APRS modem is on (and STILL matches Kenwood’s battery life, despite the smaller battery!) Kenwood doesn’t, though recommends changing the signal-check interval from 0.2s to 0.03s in order to avoid truncating APRS packets. Yaesu offers an 1800 mAh extended-life battery which should significantly exceed Kenwood’s battery life. Aftermarket vendors have 2000 mAh batteries as well.

Either way, expect APRS to be a drain on batteries. More on that below.

Although Yaesu includes 168 pages of documentation with the 8GR, don’t expect it to match the quality and detail of Kenwood’s 218 pages. There are a lot of gimmicky/useless features on the 8GR (WIRES, for one) that get extensive treatment, and there is a fair bit of repetition. I particularly single out the SmartBeaconing documentation on the 8GR as being, at best, woefully incomplete — and probably also inaccurate to boot. Read the D72A manuals to figure out how that feature works on your 8GR.

I bought the VX-8GR intending it to be something akin to a more versatile TinyTrak. On that score, it mostly succeeds. It may be my go-to rig for use at bicycle rides, marathons, emergencies, etc., while the D72A will probably be the one that goes with me on trips.

Shipped battery: FNB-101LI, 7.4V, 1100 mAh, lithium-ion

Not covered: VX-8DR – poor value for the dollar

Cost: $434 ($550 with GPS and GPS connector)

Yaesu’s top-of-the-line HT is sometimes considered to be the VX-8DR. It maintains the broadband capability of the 7R, is probably almost as rugged as the 7R, and has APRS built in, like the 8GR. It even has an option to add a Bluetooth board.

What is doesn’t have built-in is a GPS. You can add one on for $77 for the FGPS-2 plus $39 for the CT-136 connector which connects the GPS to the unit. But then you have a unit a lot less rugged than even the D72A (that’s a small connector for the GPS), a lot less small, with the same APRS featureset as the 8GR (meaning a lot less than the D72A), which costs about $100 more than the D72A. Frankly I think this makes for a poor APRS package, and would probably only be reasonable for someone that wants other 8DR features and has a desire for some very occasionaly APRS work.

Battery Life and APRS

One of my first surprises with APRS HTs was the poor battery life I saw. Doing my research seemed to suggest that, contrary to popular opinion, the transmitted beacons were not the culiprit, but the receive circuits were to blame. Because it is not acceptable to cut off the first 200ms of an AX.25 packet like it is with a repeater, the RX circuit is either engaged much more frequently (Kenwood) or continuously (Yaesu), putting a lot more drain on the battery. (This has also been confirmed by multiple others that have done testing) The GPS receiver also adds drain, and on the D72A, so does the TNC, which is always active when APRS is.

If you don’t care about received beacons, you can dramatically raise the battery life on the D72A by setting the power saver to 1 second or greater — as high as 14 hours by one report. On either unit, raising the squelch should have some effect (though not as much; but in any case, weak packets won’t decode anyhow, so there’s no sense in letting them in.)

On the 8GR, getting the extended life 1800 mAh (or aftermarket version) could produce battery life in nearly that same region, without compromising on the RX side of things.

Conclusions

If you want a HT capable of APRS, seriously think of the TH-D72A before anything else. It is $100 more expensive than the 8GR, but has more than $100 worth of extra features (and included things, like PC link cable and software, that are extra on the 8GR), so it has a better value.

If you’re particularly budget-conscious or want the most ruggedness you can find, the 7R and 8GR are solid contenders if you can sacrifice the extra APRS features.

Update May 1: Clarified what the lack of TNC mode on the VX-8GR means, and also how the VX-8GR PTT keylock also locks out APRS transmissions.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7501-review-amateur-radio-handhelds-hts-aprs-and-battery-tuning-tips/feed 4 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7488-26-hours-at-the-creek http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7488-26-hours-at-the-creek#comments Sun, 08 Apr 2012 02:27:40 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7488 I’m back from one of the best experiences a father can have – a whole day with two happy boys.

I took Jacob (5) and Oliver (2) camping with me out by our creek. This was the first time we’d camped there, and also the first time I’d taken the boys camping without Terah along. So there were some unknowns, but it worked out great.

When we got out there, I started to get the tents set up. The boys were interested, but pretty soon invented some games. A large nearby tree with plenty of low branches on its trunk became their locomotive, and certain sticks made the “train” go forward or backward, whistle, or ding its bell. This was good for quite some entertainment. Another nearby tree, near the bank of the creek, had some erosion near it. Combined with its roots, this made some natural steps. Jacob named some the “enter steps” and others the “exit steps”, and I sure heard about it if I walked the wrong way on the exit steps.

We then gathered up sticks and the things we needed to build a campfire. We cooked up brats and zucchini. Although it was later than usual for supper, they loved it just the same.



After that, we made smores for dessert – another thing they loved. Then, one of the big highlights: sleeping in tents and sleeping bags. I had showed them the sleeping bags earlier, and they were excited to try them out.

Morning was beautiful – when the sun came out, it was shining right on the heavy dew on the ground, making the grass shine brightly.



It’s not every day that they get to start their morning slowly waking up by a warm fire. They were content to sit for quite awhile while I got things going for breakfast.



It was chilly outside, so I helped them change clothes by the fire where. I then cooked them some scrambled eggs – which, despite the lack of salt and pepper, seemed so much better than normal to the boys – and then we went exploring. I took them to some areas with erosion, which Jacob called “the big holes in the ground.” It’s really quite beautiful in spring, which this cellphone photo completely fails to capture.



The boys loved climbing up and down these areas, some of which were quite tall. They discovered different kinds of rock on the way up and down, and with my help avoided discovering too much of the mud at the bottom.

We hiked back to our camping spot through grass almost as tall as Oliver — much to his delight — and then after warming up by the fire for a bit, went off in the other direction. There is a grove of trees by the creek over there, which — surprise — became another train. Here are the boys explaining how it works.

They helped pack things back up, too. Actually, it took some convincing to get Jacob to not pull up all the stakes for the tent before I was ready for them.

Things didn’t go perfectly, but then, they never do, and that was OK with everyone. Camping is an adventure, and it wouldn’t be an adventure if you knew every detail beforehand.

It is rare in life to be able to think that I have enough time to do anything the boys might want to do. Spend half an hour pretending a tree is a train — sure, no problem.

Today Oliver asked to go camping again, and was a bit disappointed when I didn’t agree to go camping again right this minute, today. Jacob said, “we had an EXCELLENT time” and gave me hugs thinking about it.

I have a lot of happy memories about the creek. We camped at the same spot where I went fishing or camped as a child. There have been family gatherings and even a birthday party out there. The boys and I have enjoyed a hike or a wagon ride to the area, but as I learned, nothing could possibly match the excitement of camping there.

It is wonderful to add another happy memory of a time at the creek. And it’s even better to see another generation of Goerzens discover that there’s a lot of fun to be had down by the creek.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7488-26-hours-at-the-creek/feed 7 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7479-german-suprisingly-hilarious-for-a-2-year-old http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7479-german-suprisingly-hilarious-for-a-2-year-old#comments Sat, 24 Mar 2012 04:54:56 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7479 The other night, I was tucking the boys into bed. I occasionally use a few German words with them (I don’t know all that many myself, but hey). They’d been rather bored with it, so I had dropped it for a few months.

I said to Oliver, “Gute Nacht, Oliver. That means good night in German.” Oliver laughed. I said it a few more times. He laughed some more. Jacob peeked down from his top bunk to see what the fun was, and pretty soon was getting into it also.

Apparently I’m quite the comedian, because when I said Auf Wiedersehen, Oliver burst out laughing uncontrollably. Finally he’d say, “Say it again! AGAIN!!” And I would, and he’d laugh and laugh some more.

And then, I happened to say tschüss. Jacob loved that one. He said it over and over, much to Oliver’s delight. Finally I closed the door, and heard the laughter still going on behind me, as Jacob would yell out a mangled German word, and Oliver would fill the room with laughter.

I was a little surprised, but figured it’d end there. Not so much.

The next night, I tucked them into bed like usual. I left their room, and about 10 seconds later, I heard frantic yelling from the boys’ room. I went back in, and poor Oliver was so upset he couldn’t even say what he wanted. I finally figured out he was pleading, “DAD! Say gute Nacht again!” So we went through some German words again, and I left the boys much relieved. Phew.

The next night, I almost repeated my horrid mistake of no German at bedtime, but Jacob stopped me before I left their room. “Dad! You forgot to say tschüss!” So I did, with the boys prompting me on what words they wanted to hear.

Then Jacob started asking me how to say these things in other languages. He was rather disappointed, and I think also didn’t really believe me, when I only knew a few of those phrases in Spanish and French. Though he was surprised that I could come up with them in Greek. Καλησπέρα (Kali̱spéra / good evening) was a hit.

By this point, another day or two later, Jacob says tschüss when I leave. Oliver wishes me “gute Nacht” at breakfast time. We’ll have to work on that one.

So, if you ever walk in the door at our house some morning, don’t be surprised if our 2-year-old wishes you good night, our 5-year-old says goodbye, and they both start laughing.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7479-german-suprisingly-hilarious-for-a-2-year-old/feed 2 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7464-dear-fedex-i-live-here http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7464-dear-fedex-i-live-here#comments Fri, 09 Mar 2012 04:16:40 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7464 FedEx has had some issues in my area. There for awhile, they kept returning packages as undeliverable, saying the address was bad. It wasn’t. Just because their GPS can’t find it or their driver doesn’t know it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. A map, a real map, would have done it. I had this kind of conversation with them once.

Me: So you’re returning my package to the sender.

FedEx: Yes sir, the address was wrong.

Me: No, it wasn’t.

[ we confirm we're talking about the same address. ]

FedEx: Our driver says it doesn’t exist.

Me: I’ve lived here for [x] years. I do know my address.

FedEx: Maybe it’s just new.

Me: Someone has lived at this spot since the 1890s.

FedEx: Hmm. I don’t know then.

Me: How about I give you directions?

FedEx: Well, OK, I guess I could send directions. But they probably won’t see them for three days.

Me: Where will my package be by then?

FedEx: Hard to say.

Me: Do you people have cell phones maybe?

FedEx: No.

Me: Well, OK then…

Lately we have been noticing that the driver throws the package from the truck without stopping. We find them all over the yard. Unless it’s big, in which case he puts it on the porch, puts a completely useless sticker on the door saying “We delivered your package to… right here!”, and doesn’t ring the doorbell. And panics due to the muddy road.

The FedEx driver once told Terah, “I almost got stuck on that muddy road! What’s the good one?”

Terah: Well, which one did you take?

[ he describes ]

Terah: [ serious ] That IS the good road.

FedEx: [ turning pale ] Oh my. I don’t know if I can make it back to the highway.

Terah: Well, I suppose I could get the boys in the car and drive you into town…

FedEx: [ embarrassed and more pale ] Uhm… that’s OK… uhm… I think…

A *month* later, we got another FedEx package. The driver called me at work, saying, “I just don’t know how I’m going to get down those roads. Can I deliver the package to you here?” (10 miles away). I said yes, and managed to suppress a significant snicker at his obvious relief.

FedEx drivers seem to come and go. The UPS driver, on the other hand, knows the names of our boys, our cat, and puts anything small behind the storm door so it won’t blow away if we’re not home. And he gets a great big laugh when I tell him that the FedEx drivers are afraid of our roads. “Haha, he thinks THAT’S mud? Obviously he never drives in Butler County.”

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7464-dear-fedex-i-live-here/feed 7 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7452-unreported-disk-data-corruption-kernel-bug http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7452-unreported-disk-data-corruption-kernel-bug#comments Sun, 04 Mar 2012 04:37:32 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7452 Well this is new, and I’m utterly baffled. Here’s a file that’s not in use by anything.


$ md5sum xppro.vdi
589cbb5501dcddda047344a3550aaa95 xppro.vdi
$ md5sum xppro.vdi
a69806ec60d39e06473edbb0abd71637 xppro.vdi


Every time I run md5sum on it, I get a different answer. Same story with sha256sum. If I grab just the first 100MB, it gives the same answer each time. dmesg doesn’t show any sort of errors whatsoever during the time I’m running the tools. The file is 13GB, and was copied from one laptop to another (the new one being a Thinkpad T420s). The old laptop gives the same answer every time. The new one doesn’t.

I’ve put the file on different ext4 filesystems on the same machine (one using LUKS encryption, the other not, both under LVM) – same result. This will have also guaranteed different placement on the underlying hard disk.

I verified that nothing is modifying the file by using lsof and inotify. The system is a freshly-installed Debian wheezy running kernel 3.2.0-1-amd64. Any ideas how I go about troubleshooting/fixing this? So far I don’t know if it’s hardware or software, though my gut says software; SMART isn’t showing issues here, and the kernel didn’t log hardware issues, either.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7452-unreported-disk-data-corruption-kernel-bug/feed 9 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7438-timelessness-of-an-old-pickup http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7438-timelessness-of-an-old-pickup#comments Sun, 26 Feb 2012 04:13:14 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7438 Our society is one that is pretty well defined by timeliness. TV programs start at a precise time, down to the second. Schools have elaborate timekeeping systems. Even church services are carefully timed. We know how fast we’re going, and our GPS or phones tell us when we’ll get there. And we’re pretty confident that we will, in fact, get there.

Somehow this doesn’t apply to our pickup.



This pickup, in case you’re wondering, is a thing of… stories, shall we say. After a particularly frustrating experience with it one week (oh yes, the battle extended several days), I likened it to the Greek gods. And Terah had a good laughing fit when I began a sentence with “The reason there’s a towel connecting the brake pedal to the steering wheel…”

But I guess the thrifty side of me won out, and somewhere along the line, I relented. My brother fixed up the carburetor. I got it a new battery. The flat tire is repaired. The starter broke, and I got it replaced. And I even got an oil change. Fancy, I know.

So today, when I needed to take some backbreaking junk off the yard, I was hoping the pickup would work. I hadn’t driven it in months, and any manner of catastrophe could have struck it in that time. So I was mildly relieved when it started on the 6th try. That is, quite seriously, quite the improvement, and shows how skilled a mechanic my brother is.

The speedometer, of course, isn’t working. The odometer stupidly reads “21531″ or something like that (it was only a 5-digit odometer, broke long ago, so who knows how many miles it really has.) And I like to keep things like grease and heavy ancient air conditioners (one of the things I was hauling) away from my watch, so I wasn’t wearing it.

The result: I have no idea what time it is, how fast I’m going, when I’ll get there, IF I’ll get there, or all those things.

I set out, and made it a good half mile before it died as I was rounding a corner at the bottom of the hill. Always a great place for a finicky old stick-shift vehicle to die, right? Anyhow, a few random adjustments to the choke later, and the thing sputtered then roared (and I do mean roared) back to life. A little lurching up the hill and I was back on my way. Now, I was stuck there in the middle of the road, but it was a country road, so I’d have probably had a good hour to get it fixed before worrying about blocking anybody’s way.

My first stop: my great uncle’s place. He has a “scrap metal for charity” project going on. He is looking for old motors, air conditioners, dehumidifiers, etc. He takes them apart, separates out the metals, sells them, and donates the result to MCC, a world relief agency. I knew I had an old dehumidifier in the basement, and thought I remembered seeing an old window air conditioner in the elevator. That thing is probably the single heaviest object I have ever moved without help. I have a bandaid to prove it. It was way too heavy to carry, so I kind of rolled it, side to side, from the side of the elevator on to the pickup. If you were watching, you’d have heard me making struggling noises, followed by “BANG rattle rattle rattle… pause… struggling noises…. BANG rattle rattle rattle” as I “rolled” it along the ground, and waited for the internal bits to settle after each quarter turn. So anyway, eventually I got it to the pickup, and then had the sickening realization: I have no way to get this thing up there. Oops.

I eventually placed it on top of an old tire rim, balanced it there as I knelt down, and somehow — still not quite sure how — managed to lift the entire thing a few feet until I could get some leverage to shove it onto the pickup. I later commented to my dad that it was a Chrysler brand air conditioner, somewhat to my surprise, and he said that it was probably my great-grandpa’s. That was a surprise.

Anyhow, back to the pickup. I drove down the few miles to my great grandpa’s place, not really knowing how fast I was going. I smelled the familiar smells of the old pickup: exhaust fumes, oil on hot surfaces it shouldn’t be on, a touch of hot antifreeze. You never have any doubt about whether the engine is running.

It was sort of nice to not know, or particularly care, how fast I was going, or what time it was. Sometimes I’d idly wonder, but you know, it didn’t really matter and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it anyhow.

I got to uncle’s place, unloaded the junk — sorta dropped the air conditioner off the back of the pickup with a terrific BANG, then rolled it all the way to his trailer — and got back in. On to town. I hadn’t put gas in the pickup in a few years, and I suspected it was getting low. (The gas gauge, you guessed it, doesn’t work right either.) Plus we had some large recyclables built up and it was time to get rid of them. And for that, I had to drive on the highway a ways. The speed limit there is 65MPH. I have no idea how fast I was going, but it wasn’t 65. Maybe it was 45. I got passed a lot, but nobody looked particularly surprised that a pickup that looks like mine wasn’t going 65.

Partway there, I smelled a different smoke smell. Not an oil smoke, but more of a grassy or wood smoke. Hmm, I thought. That’s odd. Hope it’s not coming from the pickup. I didn’t really see smoke anywhere else, so I just drove on until I couldn’t smell it anymore.

I unloaded the recyclables, then went to the gas station. As the pump readout neared $50, I decided: 1) the gas tank really was pretty empty, and 2) I just can’t put more gas in it anymore. That would be more than the truck’s worth. So I drove home.

The drive home was into the wind. My face got pretty cold – I always drive with the windows open to prevent carbon monoxide poisoning (remember the fumes?) I got home and prepared to pack up the pickup – close the windows, replace the bungee cord holding the brake pedal up, etc. I then thought I’d have a look under the hood to see if there was anything, well, on fire. Nope, but there was a packrat nest that fell down as soon as the wind hit it. Source of grassy-smelling smoke identified.

It’s amazing what difference simple lack of knowledge makes sometimes. Not knowing what time it is or how fast I’m going means I don’t have to worry about those things. I wonder how society has changed simply because accurate and cheap watches are available. I kind of like driving the old truck. It’s a bit of an adventure, a bit of a challenge, a bit of randomness, and a bit of an escape from the normal and predictable. Not a bad deal for a $75 vehicle.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7438-timelessness-of-an-old-pickup/feed 6 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7414-xmpp-for-children http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7414-xmpp-for-children#comments Sun, 12 Feb 2012 05:02:43 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7414 When Jacob was just born, I wondered how I might introduce them to computing. I thought over various things, but that wasn’t really the most pressing thing right then.

I don’t suppose that I could have predicted installing an XMPP IM server (Prosody) for the boys. And I certainly couldn’t have predicted creating accounts named: jacob, oliver, butterfly, bear. Because, as Jacob pointed out to me, if (Jacob’s favorite toy) butterfly is typing with his wings, then he shouldn’t be logged in as Jacob. I admire my 5-year-old’s security consciousness…

Anyhow, as I mentioned yesterday, Jacob and Oliver enjoy “their” computer, which I recently put on the LAN. The firewall does not pass any of its traffic to the Internet, though, with very limited exceptions.

Jacob can read, and is starting to enjoy typing as well. So I thought he would enjoy sending IMs to me. As his computer has no GUI, I needed a text-mode client. Something with an IRC-like interface that could be scripted to open up a window with me directly sounded perfect. Initially I tried irssi’s XMPP plugin, but it proved to be too buggy (wanting to always latch on to a particular resource on the remote end, not having very predictable window behavior, etc.) So I switched to mcabber. With a couple of quick configuration bits to get him automatically logged in, remove superflous windows, and connect him directly to a chat with me, it was set. And well-loved. He sent me a mix of real words and random things he created by replacing letters in “Jacob” or by holding down keys.

In the mcabberrc, besides the obvious setting of username and password, there is:


set log_win_height = 1
set hook-post-connect = source ~/.mcabber/post-connect.rc


The hook is simply:


roster search Dad
roster hide


After awhile, Jacob wanted to switch computers. He wanted to use my laptop, and me use his computer. He refused to switch back. I asked him why. “Because on your computer, my name is red.” I should have known. I set it to bright white on his computer, but I think tomorrow we may need to upgrade him to the color monitor I’ve been saving for just such an occasion… It will be a whole new set of discoveries, I’m sure.

Update: I also tried out freetalk, which looked like it would meet my goals nicely. The problem was it didn’t have a dedicated “everything typed goes to this person” mode. It did have a mode where it put the person’s JID on the command line by default, but excessive use of backspace key by a 5-year-old could wipe that out and leave it in a state where he’d be confused.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7414-xmpp-for-children/feed 8 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7401-shell-scripts-for-preschoolers http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7401-shell-scripts-for-preschoolers#comments Sat, 11 Feb 2012 04:19:13 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7401 It probably comes as no surprise to anybody that Jacob has had a computer since he was 3. Jacob and I built it from spare parts, together.

It may come as something of a surprise that it has no graphical interface, and Jacob uses the command line and loves it — and did even before he could really read.

A few months ago, I wrote about the fun Jacob had with speakers and a microphone, and posted a copy of the cheat sheet he has with his computer. Lately, Jacob has really enjoyed playing with the speech synthesizer — both trying to make it say real words and nonsense words. Sometimes he does that for an hour.

I was asked for a copy of the scripts I wrote. They are really simple. I gave them names that would be easy for a preschooler to remember and spell, even if they conflicted with existing Unix/Linux commands. I put them in /usr/local/bin, which occurs first on the PATH, so it doesn’t matter if they conflict.

First, for speech systhesis, /usr/local/bin/talk:


#!/bin/bash
echo "Press Ctrl-C to stop."
espeak -v en-us -s 150


espeak comes from the espeak package. It seemed to give the most consistenly useful response.

Now, on to the sound-related programs. Here’s /usr/local/bin/ssl, the “sound steam locomotive”. It starts playing a train sound if one isn’t already playing:


#!/bin/bash
pgrep mpg321 > /dev/null || mpg321 -q /usr/local/trainsounds/main.mp3 &
sl "$@"


And then there’s /usr/local/bin/record:


#!/bin/bash
cd $HOME/recordings
echo "Now recording. Press Ctrl-C to stop."
DATE=`date +%Y-%m-%dT%H-%M-%S`
FILENAME="$DATE-$$.wav"
chmod a-w *.wav
exec arecord -c 1 -f S16_LE -c 1 -r 44100 "$FILENAME"


This simply records in a timestamped file. Then, its companion, /usr/local/bin/play. Sorry about the indentation; for whatever reason, it is being destroyed by the blog, but you get the idea.


#!/bin/bash
case "$1" in
train)
mpg321 /usr/local/trainsounds/main.mp3
;;
song)
/usr/bin/play /usr/local/trainsounds/traindreams.flac
;;
*)
cd $HOME/recordings
exec aplay `ls -tr| tail -n 1`
;;
esac


So, Jacob can run just “play”, which will play back his most recent recording. As something of a bonus, the history of recordings is saved for us to listen to later. If he types “play train”, there is the sound of a train passing. And, finally, “play song” plays Always a Train in My Dreams by Steve Gillette (I heard it on the radio once and bought the CD).

Some of these commands kick off sound playing in the background, so here is /usr/local/bin/bequiet:


#!/bin/bash
killall mpg321 &> /dev/null
killall play &> /dev/null
killall aplay &> /dev/null
killall cw &> /dev/null


]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7401-shell-scripts-for-preschoolers/feed 5 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7388-rain-a-funeral-and-excitement http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7388-rain-a-funeral-and-excitement#comments Sun, 05 Feb 2012 03:11:55 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7388 Rain

Friday was something of a rare day for February in Kansas. Starting at about 2AM, the wind picked up, blowing so hard that our windows rattled. That part isn’t so rare. Then the cold rain started, dropping almost 2.5″ throughout the day.

As I worked, I had the blinds on the windows open, but they didn’t let in very much light. Still, the wind had calmed down, so the intermittent rain outside was peaceful. Jacob went out to play for a little while, so every so often I saw a warmly-dressed and excited-looking 5-year-old run past my window. A little while after he came in, I told Jacob, “I saw you playing outside.” His response: “Oh good! I got wet!” Which, despite the fact that it was about 50 degrees, seemed to excite him.

After the blustery start, the calm, slow, and peaceful rain was a pleasant thing to see throughout the day.

Funeral

My great aunt Alice Goerzen passed away last Sunday. So today, for the third time in a little over a year, I was at the funeral of a Goerzen relative and neighbor. Alice’s husband, Milt, passed away in late 2010, and it was while I was at his funeral that Jacob got run over by a tractor. That memory certainly came back to me today.

But I think I should set the stage and explain what funerals are like in this small, rural Kansas community.

At the church, while people file in, family and close friends — generally defined as loosely as desired — meet in some other room before the funeral. Memories may be shared, or songs sung, or maybe just a brief meditation or prayer.

Then the man from the funeral home — there’s only one in town — will step in. Ivan Miller owned the business for decades, and although he’s now retired, his replacement seems pretty similar. Kindly, respectful, and pretty much unchanging. This group then files into the church sanctuary to sit up front, while the rest of the congregation is standing and music is played.

We typically sing some hymns, hear memories from the family, a message from a pastor, and then do downstairs for faspa: an light meal with coffee, zwieback, “funeral cheese”, and some relishes and dessert. You can, by the way, go to the local grocery store and find a product labeled “funeral cheese”. It’s a sharp cheddar, sliced thick and cut into pie piece-shaped wedges.

After everyone has picked up their food, microphones are passed around, and anybody that wants to can share memories and stories. These are often hilarious, or touching, and can be more random than anyone could expect.

Today we heard a lot about how Aunt Alice loved her flowers and garden. We even saw a video of her giving a tour of her garden, with Milt’s mower in the background occasionally accidentally causing a distraction (or maybe it wasn’t so accidental; he’d never miss an opportunity to cause some mischief…)

I tend to think of attending funerals around here as a good time. Sadness is inevitable, but there are so many amazing stories that it is hard to leave feeling sad.

Excitement

This afternoon, Jacob found me in the office and as he often does, said, “Dad, I want to do something with you.” Usually I ask him what he’d like to do, but his first instinct is usually to ask for watching train videos on Youtube. So sometimes I make other suggestions. Today we played “hide and seek with radios,” in which the person that is counting is supposed to radio to the other person when they are done. Today was the first time that Jacob came up with the trick of talking into the radio while I was hiding so he could hear where I was. I was sort of proud of him, and he failed to completely hide his smile when I told him I had to turn off my radio or else he’d find me too fast.

Then later, we played with Jacob’s computer, a Linux-based command-line-only machine. I have set up a few shell scripts and aliases for him. Since it doesn’t play videos, he doesn’t use it as much as he does mine, but it is really fun to watch how his interaction with it changes as he gets older.

He can now read amazingly well for a 5-year-old, and is starting to learn how to spell. He loves word games, writing, and typing. I thought I would install an ASCII art program for him. I told Jacob I had some ideas for a new game, and he was irresistibly intrigued. I offered him a choice between figlet and toilet. And, as is probably no surprise to anyone with a 5-year-old, he chose toilet based on its name, Jacob and Oliver both loved typing things and seeing them displayed bigger. I showed Jacob how I could make a freight train by typing ,<@-[]-(*)-@> (that’s the comma-shaped snowplow, engine, boxcar [], tank car (*), and caboose @>). Then toilet drew them big, and though abstract, caused great excitement.

I hooked up one of the speech synthesizers in Debian to a simple shell script named “talk”, which is a huge hit with the boys. They enjoy typing in nonsense and hearing the funny result, or in typing in real words and hearing how the computer says them right (or doesn’t). All told, we had a good hour’s worth of excitement up there.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7388-rain-a-funeral-and-excitement/feed 2 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7376-social-overload http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7376-social-overload#comments Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:32:22 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7376 I’m finding social media is becoming a bit annoying. I enjoy using it to keep in touch with all sorts of people, but my problem is the proliferation of services that don’t integrate well with each other. Right now, I have:
• A blog, which I have had for years. I used to post things like short links, daily thoughts, etc – almost every day. It seems that there is some social pressure to not do that on blogs anymore, so I don’t too much. My blog gets mostly edited, more carefully thought-out, longer-form posts now. I’m not entirely happy with that direction though, since it means I don’t post much on the blog because it takes a lot of time to compose things nicely for it.
• A twitter account, which I sometimes use to post links and such. However, I have noticed a significant decline in the number of actual conversations I have on Twitter since Google+ came out, and I wonder how relevant Twitter will remain to people in the future.
• I also have an identi.ca account, though I almost never have any interactions there anymore.
• A Facebook account, which is mostly used to keep in touch with people I know offline in one way or another. Many of them use Facebook exclusively, sometimes even more than email.
• A Google+ account. I post similar content there as I do on twitter, though probably more of it because it doesn’t have a character limit. I really enjoy the community on Google+ – there are few people I’ve met in person in my circles, but many people I know from various online activities. And many just plain brilliant, engaging, or interesting people. As an example: I follow Edd Dumbill, the (former?) chair of OSCon, on Google+. He started talking about his Fitbit getting broken, which led me to ask him some questions about it – which he, and others, answered – and me ordering one myself. I just don’t have that kind of interaction anywhere else.
• A Diaspora account that I created but honestly haven’t had time to use.

So my problems are:

1. Posting things multiple places. I currently can post on identi.ca, which automatically posts to twitter, which automatically posts to Facebook. But then I’d still have to post to Google+, assuming it’s something that I’d like to share with both my Facebook friends and my Google+ circles – it usually is.
2. The situation is even worse for re-tweeting/re-sharing other people’s posts. That is barely possible between platforms and usually involves cutting and pasting. Though this is somewhat more rare.
3. It’s probably possible to make my blog posts automatically generate a tweet, but not to automatically generate a G+ post.

All the hassle of posting things multiple places leads me to just not bother at all some of the time, which is annoying too. There are some tools that would take G+ content and put it on Twitter, but without a character counter on G+, I don’t think this would be useful.

Anyone else having similar issues? How are you coping?

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7376-social-overload/feed 16 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7353-snapshots-of-life http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7353-snapshots-of-life#comments Tue, 06 Dec 2011 04:34:57 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7353 It’s been busy lately, and I haven’t had the time to blog. With the change in job, various travel, and settling into a new routine, I’ve not done as much writing of late. But life marches on, and before memories grow too fleeting, I think I should share a few.

We recently changed the arrangements for the boys. Instead of them each having their own room in which they sleep and sometimes play, we purchased a bunk bed. Oliver graduated from his crib to the lower bunk, and Jacob has the higher bunk. This has, predictably, created a few opportunities for behavior issues. Overall, it’s going well, and they appreciate their new, more open, “play room.”

Both boys sleep with their stuffed animals. Jacob calls his “my friends”. He still likes his butterfly, which he has had since he was an infant. He sometimes talks about how much he loves his friends, and how they like to get hugs, and how they are happy.

Jacob continues to enjoy reading. He has a toy low-res camera and he even recorded a video of himself reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear.

Oliver’s vocabulary is coming alive and is fun to watch. Jacob has taken to trying to teach Oliver how to say things. One day, Jacob saw a number like 451 on the side of a train, producing a conversation like this: “Oliver, can you say four hundred and fifty-one?” “Four dred iffy on!” “You got it!!!” “YAY!”

Today as I was walking past Oliver’s train track on the floor, he grabbed me by the hand, had me sit down, and kept holding on to make sure I’d stay right where he wanted me as he pointed and talked all about his trains. Aww.

One cold and windy Saturday morning, the boys were getting restless. What to do, we thought? I decided to bring out one of the manual typewriters from my collection. Oliver loved watching it do things as he pressed buttons. Jacob enjoyed spelling “mom”. New problem: boys fighting over how long each one’s turn at the typewriter is. This has gone on for a month now.

Ahh, winter.



A few weeks ago, Jacob informed us that he built an antenna out of blocks. He was REALLY proud of it, and even, incredibly, insisted I take his picture with it!

I’m pleased to have a 5-year-old that calls this structure an antenna instead of a skyscraper or tower or some such thing ;-)



We took a train trip to Portland, OR, recently. That’s about 2.5 days on the train each way. It went pretty well — we had quite a bit of excitement though it got a little long for the boys at times. One evening, Jacob excitedly noted that the sky was “almost really dark blue, just like my song!” Wow. That was a song he made up in New York in summer 2010.

Jacob enjoyed collecting leaves as we walked around in Portland. He would then stash his pile of leaves outside the door of whatever building we’d enter, then hope to find them still there when we got back out. It usually worked out OK for him.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7353-snapshots-of-life/feed 1 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7342-a-parenting-dilemma http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7342-a-parenting-dilemma#comments Tue, 15 Nov 2011 16:44:31 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7342 A few snippets so far from our train trip from Kansas to Portland. Terah, Jacob, Oliver, and I are on the trip, which is about 2.5 days on the train.

The Parenting Dilemma



So, if you are eating dinner, and your 5-year-old falls asleep with his head on the table, and you know he had been excitedly waiting for raspberry sorbet for dessert, and know there will be tears when he later realizes he missed it, what do you do? Let him sleep, or wake him up (with possible tears right then in the dining car?)

As it turned out, I tried to quietly ask him if he wanted dessert. He woke up with a start, banged his head on the table, and then, yes, there were tears. I asked him if he wanted dessert or if he wanted to keep sleeping, and he gave a pathetic, sniffling, “dessert.”

But by the time dessert arrived, he had fallen asleep again. I finally woke him up again, asked if he wanted to eat, and he just ignored me. I asked twice more and then he all of a sudden realized what he was being asked, sat bolt upright, and dug in.

Graffiti

Jacob noticed graffiti in Los Angeles. He called it “silly words” and kept commenting about it as we passed it.

Bears

Oliver always sleeps with a stuffed bear, which is his favorite comfort animal. But Oliver is 2, and when he says “bear”, it sounds more like “beer”. Plus, the boys still seem to be operating on Central Time. So at 4:15AM yesterday, Oliver awakened us saying:

“Beer! Beer! Beer! Where’s beer? Where’s beer? Need beer! Beeeeeer!”

Butterflies

Jacob always sleeps with a stuffed butterfly, which he likes just like Oliver likes his bear. Jacob had this conversation with me this morning:

Jacob: My butterfly knows all the people in the world. And all the animals, too!

Me: Does butterfly even know Nash? (our cat)

Jacob: Yeah, and he knows Sam and Edna too! (the cats across the road)

Me: Wow. I think butterfly knows a lot more people and animals than I do.

Jacob: *brief pause, then* Oh, silly dad! *collapses laughing*

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7342-a-parenting-dilemma/feed 1 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7330-greece-part-5-friends-and-radios http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7330-greece-part-5-friends-and-radios#comments Sat, 12 Nov 2011 19:18:59 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7330 See also parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

This is the biggest highlight of our trip to Greece for me. I enjoy having the chance to meet people, visit for awhile, and make new friends — and that certainly happened in Greece.

In one of the shops we happened to step into, I noticed a radio behind the counter. That’s not unusual itself; radios often catch my eye these days. But this radio was tuned to 21.070, an amateur radio frequency. So I asked the shop owner if he happened to be a ham. And indeed he was. He was Lakis (SV5KKU), and Terah and I had a great time visiting with him. Terah took some photos of us, and then we made our purchases and headed out.

I had brought my HT (handheld radio, weighs a few ounces and is powered by batteries) with me, and Lakis told me about the repeaters in the area. I had known about some of that since I had emailed Panos of the amatuer radio club in Rhodes before leaving home (I found his name via Google).

A couple of days later, on Tuesday, we found ourselves back in Lindos. It was mid-afternoon, so the shops were quiet. After a late lunch, I thought it would be nice to drop in on Lakis one more time, since we were scheduled to fly back the following morning. I’m not sure how long we stayed — it must have been at least an hour — and enjoyed the fresh orange juice he prepared.

After we got back to our hotel Tuesday, I learned that our flights on Wednesday were canceled due to a nationwide air traffic controller strike in Greece. After 3 hours on the phone with Delta (more on that experience later), we got rescheduled to fly back Friday.

On Wednesday morning, I remembered that the Rhodes amateur radio club meets every Wednesday evening, and now I would be able to go! I knew how to contact Lakis by email and on the radio, and he kindly offered to pick me up and take me there.

So that evening, I got a tour of his impressive mountaintop installation, and then it was on to the club – the Radio Amateur Association of the Dodecanese (SZ5RDS). There I met Panos, whom I had emailed earlier (and I think surprised him a bit). It was a friendly group, and they translated into English for me every so often so I knew what was being discussed.

When I was about to leave, they gave me this:



The translation, partly from my memory and partly with the help of Google Translate, is:

Radio Amateur Association of the Dodecanese, SZ5RDS

Our friend and radio colleague KR0L JOHN GOERZEN, who visited the island, has our recognition as an HONORARY CLUB MEMBER.

PRESIDENT KAVALAKIS PANAGIOTIS SV5AZK (Panos)

SECRETARY PAPADIMITRIOU CHRISTOS SV5DDT

RHODES – Oct. 5, 2011

(I hope that any Greeks reading this will send me corrections.)

I truly appreciated that gesture – and meeting all the people in the club.

On the way back to the hotel, Lakis and I stopped by a restaurant, which I believe had the best souvlaki I’ve ever tasted — thanks! We brought some back for Terah. She had chosen to stay at the hotel that evening and had a small hotel meal earlier, but enjoyed the souvlaki and pita. Terah had explained to the maître d’ that I wasn’t along that evening because I had gone to an amateur radio club meeting. Judging by the surprised reaction, this was probably the first time they had heard that particular comment!

Experiences like this make travel fun and worthwhile. Thank you very much, Lakis and everyone in the club — I hope to have a chance to visit again.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7330-greece-part-5-friends-and-radios/feed 3 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7304-greece-part-4-food-and-shopping http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7304-greece-part-4-food-and-shopping#comments Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:57:54 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7304 See also parts 1, 2, and 3.

I am a person that enjoys food that’s different from what’s at home, and Rhodes didn’t disappoint. Terah and I used to live close to an excellent Greek restaurant in Indianapolis, so we were already familiar in some way with the food. But there isn’t any Greek restaurant at all in the Wichita area, so we missed it.

Our favorite restaurant on Rhodes was Kalypso of Lindos. Everything there was just excellent, starting with the saganaki, one of my favorite Greek appetizers. I had yogurt with honey there for dessert both times we visited, a surprisingly tasty desert. Like many restaurants in Lindos, Kalypso had the option of eating on the rooftop, or at ground level. We ate on the roof, which had a nice view of the Lindos Acropolis.

Being outdoors, there were sometimes cats around. This kitten enjoyed playing games with my shoestrings for awhile.



Kalypso is at a 17th century captain’s house. Here’s a view of it from the rooftop:



We, of course, had the chance to eat at quite a few different places during our visit, and I’d go on way too long if I mentioned them all. Terah particularly enjoyed the gelaterie.gr ice cream shop in the square in Rhodes. We liked our lunch at Maria’s Taverna in Lindos and enjoyed chatting with the staff there.

I recently talked about shopping in Mexico, and perhaps learned a thing or two from that. I won’t say we never buy them, but in general we don’t buy souvenirs like t-shirts, plastic things made in China, etc. We prefer to buy local. Those items tend to be higher quality, more interesting, and we like to support the local economy. We also don’t have lots of room for things, so we try to choose carefully.

So it was something of a surprise to Terah, and perhaps even to me, when I suggested we go shopping one day. Terah typically enjoys shopping a lot more than I do. Anyhow, off we went to Lindos.

One of the first things that had caught our eye in Lindos was the shop selling glass. But it wasn’t just any glass; it appeared to be made with some sort of layered process, and has a distinctly three-dimensional feel to it. As you move around, it looks like the background shifts. We wound up with this item, which was made in Athens:



By the time we visited Lindos specifically for shopping, we had a good feel for when the busy times of day were, so we could avoid them. It gave us the opportunity to visit with people — and when they weren’t busy, many shopkeepers liked to chat. I enjoy hearing people’s stories and we heard several.

One ceramics shop – the Musa Shop -caught Terah’s eye. They had such incredible and beautiful pieces outside that we just had to go in. We wound up with two pieces from there, both in shades of blue:





Both remind me of the Aegean Sea and the deep blue sky of Rhodes.

And then, as we were walking along, I pointed inside a shop and said to Terah, “Hey, those look different.” We went in, and eventually wound up buying these:



The appearance, and even feel, of them is unlike anything I’d seen. Quite interesting.

And seeing those particular items in the Lakis Place shop led to making some new friends — I’ll write about it in the next post.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7304-greece-part-4-food-and-shopping/feed 2 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7284-greece-part-3-water http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7284-greece-part-3-water#comments Tue, 18 Oct 2011 17:03:30 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7284 See also parts 1 and 2.



That’s a photo of Vlicha Beach, near our hotel. But before I talk about the Greek beaches, I need to explain something about living in Kansas.

Kansas is in the middle of the United States. The nearest ocean is the Gulf of Mexico, which is 700 miles (1100km) away. That’s roughly the same as the distance between Berlin and Minsk, or New York and Chicago. And I believe it’s farther away from a saltwater body than all (or almost all) of Europe. So we’re not just going to the beach every weekend or something.

Vlicha Beach was all those incredible things you ever hear about beaches. The water was so clear that I could easily see my feat while wading in it. That, and the fish swimming around them. It was peaceful, relaxing, and picturesque. Between the deep blue of the sea and the same in the sky, I suppose it is no wonder that blue is often associated with Greece.



We weren’t exactly the only ones there.



Though I think we were the only ones there with Kindles, which seemed to be much more popular in the USA than in Europe. We got several interested people carrying paper books asking what they were.

Towards dusk, the mist would become more pronounced and the mountains off in the distance started to fade:



The evening before we were set to fly home, we spent some time sitting on our balcony watching dusk set in. One last gaze out over the beautiful Aegean, the misty mountains, and the boats in the distance.



]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7284-greece-part-3-water/feed 1 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7261-greece-part-2-history-and-sauntering-up-to-guys-with-machine-guns http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7261-greece-part-2-history-and-sauntering-up-to-guys-with-machine-guns#comments Fri, 14 Oct 2011 17:23:41 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7261 Terah and I went to the Greek island Rhodes recently. This is the second in a series about it.

I am one to enjoy history. There is something deeply, well, connecting, about standing in an old place. There is a timeless quality to it – a feeling of being connected to so many people of the past, and yet still being connected to change, visible in things such as weathering of stones. To gaze at pottery that’s 300 years old, walk past 700-year-old walls, or pass through what remains of the grand portico of an ancient temple to Athena stirs a feeling I can barely explain, of timelessness.

Although Rhodes doesn’t have the “famous” Greek sites such as the Parthenon or Delphi, I can’t help but wonder why the Rhodes sites aren’t better known. They were incredible and it is hard to condense all that we saw into a short blog post.

I have to start with the medieval Rhodes Old Town. We got off the bus a few blocks from it one bright morning, and our first task was to find a gate across the moat. Oh yes, A GATE ACROSS THE MOAT.



It’s a dry moat, and that bridge off in the distance is the gate we were headed to. Outside of the outer wall is a nice quiet walking area. The moat and walls completely surround Old Town and, for the most part, date back about 500 years. The round stones you see on that picture, we were told, were likely surplus from catapults and other projectile weapons. Cross one line of walls and you come to another, with original canons still present. The Knights Hospitaller of St. John, which held Rhodes for a few centuries until the Ottomans captured it, sure knew how to build to impress.

The gate we happened to use was Amboise, the Grand Master’s Gate. Right there is the stunningly rebuilt landmark Palace of the Grand Master. It is absolutely impossible for any photograph to begin to do this building justice. Between its imported Greek and Roman floors, to the grand nature of everything in it, and the archaeological museum in one corner, it was a fitting start to a visit to Old Town. Here’s one of the main staircases.



Just near the Palace is quiet courtyard with an old door. Pass through that door and suddenly you’re in the midst of the busy Old Town.



And among the landmarks in Old Town, the most prominent is Ippoton, the Avenue of the Knights. Along this avenue are the buildings built by the various nationalities of knights, many of which are historical sites in their own. Taken together, it is quite clear why Rhodes is said to be one of the world’s best-preserved medieval cities.



Down at the other end of Ippoton is the Knights’ Hospital, which is now part of the archaeological museum.



Step off the Avenue a few blocks and you get to some quieter narrow streets – just as old, in many cases.



On Sunday morning, we were able to visit Mount Filerimos. In contrast to the busy Rhodes, Filerimos had an air of quiet and still to it. It was the site of a monastery, two historic churches, and a landmark Italian cross on the mountaintop.

We arrived, and begin our visit with a walk up the quiet stone path.



When we got to the top, we walked past this peaceful church. As we walked past the outside, we heard the beautiful music of chant from indoors. We got to step in and listen to mass for a few minutes.



In typical fashion, directly in front of the church are two much older sites: one, the ruins of a temple to Athena, and the other a 4th-century Christian bapistery.

Rhodes is a popular tourist destination, and of course we saw plenty of popular sites (such as the grandmaster’s palace). Filerimos had a few tourists too, but not as many.

I frequently like to operate on the plan of going wherever all the tourists aren’t. And so, on Filerimos, that meant seeing what was behind the monastery. It started with this peaceful tree-lined path.



And the deserted, but intentionally open, gate led to the remains of a Byzantine fortress, which had been a staging area for both the Knights and the Ottomans before their campaigns to capture Rhodes. It also provided incredible views of the surrounding countryside.

The first historic site we had visited on our trip was the Acropolis of Lindos, parts of which are 2300 years old. Here’s a view of the mountain from the rooftop of the Kalypso, our favorite restaurant in Lindos.



The columns of the temple to Athena Lindia are visible, and of course so are the walls.

The road up to the acropolis is accessible only on foot or by donkey. It is apparently the only road that has ever been used to get to the acropolis. Here is the partially-restored grand portico to the temple.



There’s an old Christian church (4th century, if memory serves) at the Acropolis too.



The Acropolis makes some pretty good use of natural defenses too. Here’s a view from one level of it. There’s a manmade wall up there at the very top. And, of course, the beautiful Aegean always in the background.



There are lots of cats on Rhodes. Here is a kitten napping at the top of the Lindos Acropolis:



Lindos itself is a beautiful town. Here’s one of the quieter streets:



Notice the pebble steps leading into the houses – those intricate pieces of artwork are all over.

This post won’t be complete without the story of our visit to the Acropolis of Rhodes. We walked there from Old Town. At the Acropolis, there are the remains of a temple to Apollo, an ancient theater, and an ancient stadium where qualifying matches for the Olympics were held.

As we got closer to the area, we were repeatedly passed by people dressed in uniforms of various types. And as we got there, we joined a stream of people entering the area. The ancient stadium had apparently thousands of people in it, country names were being read off over the loudspeakers, policemen wielding machine guns were standing by, and we had absolutely no idea what was going on.

At this point, you can appreciate the difference between Terah and me. Terah thought that we have no idea what is happening, she was tired from the walk, and so thought we should just leave. I thought that we have no idea what is happening, which is a great reason to stay. So Terah opted to sit and read a bit under some trees while I explored.

Here’s a view of the stadium as it was emptying out, seen from the theater:



I explored the temple and theater, and eventually we were ready to head back. We knew there was a bus back to the New Market (from where we could get a bus back to our hotel), but didn’t know where the bus stop was. The obvious place to ask were the policemen, which I thought I would do. Terah thought she would just stay sitting under the trees, on the grounds that the policemen nearest us were all carrying machine guns and perhaps wouldn’t like to be disturbed. This led to my cryptic tweet:

“Only ONE of us is the kind of person that goes up to guys with machine guns to ask what’s happening.” – Me to Terah today

They told me that it was the preparations for the opening ceremony for a global shooting contest, and also gave me directions to the bus stop.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7261-greece-part-2-history-and-sauntering-up-to-guys-with-machine-guns/feed 3 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7253-an-incredible-story-from-soviet-times http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7253-an-incredible-story-from-soviet-times#comments Thu, 13 Oct 2011 22:16:44 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7253 This was written by Tom Dailey, and I’ve lightly edited it:

In 1965, I was stationed at the Fleet Anti-Submarine Warfare Center in San Diego. I was a Radioman 2nd. Class in the USN, at the time.

One evening, at our radio club station (W6DCM – different license holder, now), I called CQ and got UAØKKC (it’s no longer around), with Ivan at the mic. After a time of the usual signal reports and such, we asked what each did in their lives – I said that I was US Navy radio operator.

He answered that HE ALSO was a Navy radio operator in the Soviet navy. Then we discovered that his station was at the SUBMARINE base at Vladivostok, and I of course was his DIRECT opponent.

Yes… we really DID laugh at that, and I shall never forget what he said (that I heartily agreed with):

“Thomas, isn’t it shame that we’re supposed to hate each other?”

“Yes, Ivan, it is – someday we’ll share a vodka, da?”

“Da”, he replied.

We’re often told we should hate people. Messages I have heard on the media over the last 10 years have said we ought to hate illegal immigrants, CEOs, radical Muslims, the French, Iranians, Mexicans, presidents, UN diplomats, climate scientists, oil company employees, Chinese people, conservatives, liberals, religious people, atheists, and oh yes, still Russians.

But I get to choose who to hate, and in fact, I choose NO HATE. Not only does it keep my stress level way lower, but it also lets me enjoy life more, and makes the world a better place.

We can all talk to people in other countries and with other backgrounds and viewpoints so easily thanks to the Internet. Sadly we rarely have very deep online conversations to the point of getting to know people. For whatever reason, ham radio lends itself to that better.

Even better: visit other places. I wonder how many people that say they hate some group of people have visited them and made an effort to make a connection? It is, after all, really hard to hate someone that is kind to you. Perhaps they’re afraid to let go of their hate.

Think also about this: for whom is it convenient if you hate people? There is usually a reason that hatred is stoked, and it doesn’t usually lead to good things for individual people.

Tom W0EAJ added:

I actually tried to locate him and the station, but both appear to have vanished. Ivan (his name was pronounced Eee-von) could have, it occured to me later, gotten into trouble for saying such things. I think both of us realized AT THE TIME, what an astounding counterpoint each of us was to the other.

Proof that if it were left up to the simple little guys like us, and not to the politicians, we might actually pull off living in peace.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7253-an-incredible-story-from-soviet-times/feed 2 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7243-greece-part-1-wow http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7243-greece-part-1-wow#comments Tue, 11 Oct 2011 03:52:28 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7243 Terah and I are just back from Rhodes Island, Greece. “Wow” is the summary of that place.

Some highlights include walking up to a 14th-century church and hearing beautiful chant through the windows, crossing a bridge across the moat to a grand gate into Rhodes built by the Knights of St. John, spotting an amateur radio in a shop and making lots of new friends, standing atop the Acropolis of Lindos and feeling the connection to the ancient, and of course swimming in the clear sea – so clear that I could see fish swimming by my feet as I stood in the water.

I’ll write about all of this yet, of course, but for now I want to thank Jon Dowland for leaving a comment on my blog post suggesting Rhodes and even the particular hotel we stayed in. Jon was right, it was great.

And for now, here’s a photo I took from our hotel room balcony, almost immediately after we arrived. A sign of great things to come, perhaps:



]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7243-greece-part-1-wow/feed 5 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7213-five http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7213-five#comments Mon, 26 Sep 2011 21:27:21 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7213

“Dad, will you and mom stay up all night decorating the house for me?”

That was Jacob’s question to me at bedtime the evening before his fifth birthday. Jacob had already had his birthday party a few weeks ago. When scheduling means that parties happen that far away from the boys’ real birthdays, they get a smaller celebration with just Terah and me where we open their presents from us. A low-key thing, so we weren’t planning to decorate the house. I said, “Well, I don’t think we’ll be doing all that since you already had your birthday party.” And the look of eager anticipation on his face turned to a very sad and disappointed look, and made me feel really bad. Uhoh.

So while Jacob was sleeping, I mentioned it to Terah. We decided we should improvise something simple, so she found some old streamers and we taped them up, running them through several rooms in the house and across his door. It took a few minutes using supplies we already had, but the joy the next morning was priceless.

“Oh dad, you said you wouldn’t stay up all night, BUT YOU DID! Oh I am SO HAPPY! YAY YAY YAY!” And he ran through the house to discover what else was set up. Then he ran to find Oliver and gave him a tour of everything.

Then we sat down to open his presents. Here he is, holding a present from Terah and me:



That’s a copy of The Lorax. My friend Jonathan had brought a copy along during our road trip in Mexico, and Jacob was really excited about it. And didn’t really want to give it up, because “You can only get The Lorax in Mexico.” He (and Oliver) really enjoyed all his presents — he also got a train book from us (which he said, “Oh, yay, it’s the book they have at preschool!”), and a game and some other presents from the distant relatives.

But the highlight was something of an impulse buy. I was at the RadioShack in Derby — a place I’ve written about before, It is what a RadioShack should (and used to) be. It has a large amateur radio section, sells all sorts of coax by the foot, and provides astonishingly good post-sale service. Well, I was there with a radio question, and Mark (the owner) — who is an excellent salesman in a positive way — pointed me to a display of snap kits. I noticed their Electronics 101 Snap-Kit (a rebranded Snap Circuits Jr. SC-100). A ham in Pennsylvania had suggested them to me once, and as Jacob’s birthday was coming up, I gave it some thought. The kit said ages 8 and up. I asked Mark what he thought about a boy just turning 5. He said, “Well, probably not normally. But knowing you, if you’re there to work on them with him, I think he’d enjoy it. But I wouldn’t have him work on it by himself.” I agreed and we bought it.

I pondered how to explain the concept of this thing to Jacob. Eventually I decided I would call it a “toy-building kit.” He understood that.

Jacob and I spent hours together working with it. He would flip through the book, either picking circuits that looked interesting or telling me what kind of circuit he wanted to build. Then I would tell him what to put where, and he’d snap them together and play with them. He only played with each finished product a few minutes before he was ready to try another. Once I got him very excited with my offer to show him how to hook up two switches in parallel for the fan he built (and later introduced the parallel vs. series concept by hooking them up in series instead.) Here we are working on it together.



Jacob repeatedly called Terah over to look at the things he built. He was very excited that he assembled it himself. Eventually, Oliver (age 2) came over wanting to help. So he sat on my lap, and handed parts to Jacob, then Jacob put them on the grid. Oliver really enjoyed being involved in this way, even though I had to keep him from doing things like ripping the capacitor off its mount.

We tend to be modest in terms of the number of things we give the boys and their cost, reasoning that we, like many, already have too many toys in our house, and that greater cost doesn’t necessarily equate with a better experience for the boys. I particularly look for things with lasting value and unique experiences for them, and I think we succeeded this year.

But I realized quickly that the greatest value of this kit wasn’t electronics. It was having a great way for me to spend a lot of time doing things with the boys which all of us enjoyed. Those hours building things together were as much a present for me as for Jacob, I’m quite sure.

Jacob’s “real” party was a few weeks ago at the Great Plains Transportation Museum in Wichita. They let people rent a historic caboose to use for a birthday party for children. So we did that for Jacob this year.

That was a huge hit for the boys. Jacob got to help his grandpa make some pie (instead of cake) for the party. He enjoyed eating it, of course.



He enjoyed opening his presents high up on the observation chair in the caboose. And the boys got to play on all the other equipment in the museum. Jacob enjoyed playing tour guide for family since most of them hadn’t been there. He also enjoyed watching freight trains pass on the other side of the fence from the museum — preferably while sitting in one of the museum’s engines.



Oliver certainly didn’t get left out. Train-watching is serious business, after all.



Jacob has long talked about going to the “train museum” and the “airplane museum” (Kansas Aviation Museum) on the same day, so one of his birthday surprises was that we went to the airplane museum after his party. His favorite item there is a retired FedEx 727. Here he is walking down the rear of the plane.



And, of course, they played captain and co-pilot in several different planes.



]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7213-five/feed 2 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7199-mexico-part-6-conclusion-and-tips http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7199-mexico-part-6-conclusion-and-tips#comments Tue, 20 Sep 2011 17:59:55 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7199 The sixth in a series; see also parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

It’s been about two weeks now since we got back home. Every few days, our boys still talk about Mexico. Jacob talks about what he will want to do “when we go back” and how he’d like to see Jonathan over there again. Jacob, Oliver, and I look at photos from our trip a few times a week. This is all a sure sign that our boys loved the trip. And I keep trying to find Mexican food that tastes as good as the real thing (and, so far, failing). Another sign of a good trip!

I think it is possible to have fun, relax, and enjoy new experiences all at the same time. We did that in Mexico. We had a lazy afternoon or two with the boys taking naps or playing with other children at the house we stayed at. And we stayed in a beautiful hotel without air conditioning, explored old downtown areas and ancient ruins, and bought things from crowded markets and people selling things from a table along a road.

To anyone thinking about visiting: Go. Enjoy it, bring back memories, and live a little more serendipitously than usual. That’s what I hope to do when we visit Greece before too long.

Finally, here’s a photo of the painting I bought from a roadside vendor for $17. Make sure to view it full screen. I think it says more about Mexico than 6 blog posts do.



]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7199-mexico-part-6-conclusion-and-tips/feed 1 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7186-mexico-part-5-food-karaok http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7186-mexico-part-5-food-karaok#comments Fri, 16 Sep 2011 04:11:16 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7186 The fifth in a series; see also parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

One piece of advice we got in Mexico went like this: the nicer a place looks, the worse the food and prices will be. Roadside taco stands will be great, and nice-looking restaurants not so much. That seemed to be accurate. We only tried one real nice-looking restaurant and it was very good (though pricy), but it may have been sort of an exception.

But perhaps the most interesting bit about eating in Mexico wasn’t the food. It’s the adventure.

We ate one day at Guadalajara’s San Juan de Dios market. In that huge labyrinth somewhere was a set of restaurants. They’d tend to have a small cooking area, usually just open, and a few tables. We chose one.

And at this point, I have to take brief detour and explain something. There are a lot of people in Mexico that do things for tips, and quite often without being asked. Some other examples might be washing a car’s windshield at a stoplight.

So anyhow, we had ordered our food, and before long, a guy wanders down the aisle and plonks down a boombox. And turns it on. And then he pulled out a microphone, which we quite soon realized was connected to the boombox. (I guess making it more of a karaoke box.) Anyhow, he started singing a song — decently — and seemed to be enjoying it. About 45 seconds into it, a competing boombox man plonked down a competing boombox 25 feet away, turned it on, and — yes, you guessed it — pulled out a microphone and started singing a different song. Worse than the first person but louder.

Eventually the boombox people left and our lunchtime conversation could resume. But pretty soon a drum guy showed up. He had a bunch of drums on a strap so he could just walk around and play them. He apparently decided that an excellent place to play them would be directly behind my head. I did not entirely agree with his decision, but hey, it beat the competing karaoke guys.

Eventually the drum guy left, and somehow between the time I looked down to get out money to pay our bill and the time I had it counted out, a clown had shown up and made several balloon animals for our boys. I tipped him, we paid, and then headed on.

You might think from this story that this would be an annoying series of events. And honestly, if it had happened in a big mall in the USA, it would probably have been both annoying and creepy. But really I enjoyed it. The fact that dueling karaoke happened, despite sounding really awful, was pretty funny and really seeing this whole parade of people was interesting too. It made American restaurants seem a little boring. You always know what’s going to happen here (and if something surprising does happen, the place probably gets a bad review on Yelp.) Interesting things sometimes happen at mealtimes in Mexico and I like it that way.

I had a torta ahogada (drowned sandwich) at that restaurant. And at this point, another brief aside.

I’m the kind of person that can go to an average American restaurant, see items on the menu helpfully indicated as spicy, order one, and genuinely wonder if other people would find them spicy, because I either don’t notice spiciness at all, or maybe notice a tiny bit if I concentrate really hard. Others, meanwhile, might take a bite and lunge for the water. Having said that, I know people that lived in Thailand for awhile and I have nowhere near their tolerance for spiciness.

So, having been in Mexico a whole 24 hours or so, I decided not to follow Jonathan’s wise lead in ordering a torta with the spicy sauce on the side. I figured I hadn’t had anything spicy yet, so maybe this was would be nice and mild for me. Via Jonathan’s translation, I ordered it with the spicy sauce. I believe the phrase I heard him use was “con chile“. The waitress looked at me, gave me an amused “the American is ordering it con chile? Hahaha….” sort of smile, and went off.

Pretty soon our food arrived. (The food always seems to arrive pretty soon in Mexico, by the way.) Oliver was having a bit of a culture shock that day, and mostly refusing to eat (once hunger got the best of him later, he really enjoyed Mexican food.) But the rest of us dug in, including me.

I enjoyed my torta. It was spicy, but not too bad. I took some big bites (it was, after all, a thick sandwich) and was really enjoying it. For about a minute. Slowest-acting spiciness I’ve had in awhile.

Then it hit me. Spiciness, and lots of it. I took a big gulp of my horchata (a creamy sweet rice drink that I found at many restaurants). That helped. A little. I really liked the torta and ate it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the waitress noticed how extremely quickly a drank my horchata…

Another interesting experience was in Guanajuato. It was raining as we walked towards the Guanajuato market. Their market was large and similar in concept to the Guadalajara one, though a lot smaller. The restaurants were all in a row, in a side of the building that was open to the outside. Most were on the ground level but it looked like a restaurant or two were upstairs.

As we approached, all of a sudden people were yelling at us. First it was a guy on the second story, then pretty soon people at the restaurants on the first floor did so as well. They were yelling rapidly in Spanish, waving their menus around in the air. I’m imagining they were naming foods they sold or reasons to eat there, but I don’t know enough Spanish to know. As we walked down the long row of restaurants, the ones we left behind would quiet down in disgust and other hopeful restaurant owners would take up the yelling and waving cause. I imagine if we did some time-lapse videography and walked up and down that row, we could produce an effect not unlike the sound of a dot-matrix printer going back and forth on the page.

Anyhow, we selected one of the quieter restaurants pretty much random. The others then quieted down until another person chanced to walk past — at which point it would get loud again. The lunch there was good but I think I mainly will remember it for the selection process!

On our way into Guanajuato, we stopped at a wonderful roadside taco place. In typical fashion, they had a large vertical pork thing (I don’t know the proper word for it) from which they would carve off meat on the spot anytime someone ordered something with pastor. We found a table. And we ordered a few tacos and such. They were usually a few pesos each (working out to less than a dollar), small round things on a soft tortilla, with meat, cilantro, and onion on top. And typically delicious. They had very little in common with an American “taco”.

We’d often order a few, and if we wanted more, just order more. They were made quickly enough for that. Tacos were very similar from one restaurant to the next. My favorite flavors were pastor (pork), chorizo (sausage), and bistec (beef steak).

A restaurant in Guadalajara — sadly I’ve forgotten its name, since we kept calling it “the potato place” — had what I might call a Mexican version of the loaded baked potato, with a meat, queso (cheese), a delicious sauce with a flavor unlike anything I’d had before, and some garnish. But really my favorite thing from that restaurant was their amazing juices. I am not much of a juice drinker normally, but in Mexico I went for them whenever they were offered. What passes as fruit juice in the USA has about as much resemblance to a real Mexican fruit juice as Taco Bell has to a real Mexican taco stand. (Very little, in case that wasn’t crystal clear.)

That particular restaurant offered three types of juices, which were, if I’m remembering right, aguas, frescas, and jugos. I has a jugo verde (green juice) on the first visit there. It was good, but the one I can still remember was called, I think, the fresa fresca (fresh strawberry juice). And it was incredible. I’m not sure how to describe it, other than real.

One observation before I end. It seemed a common thread at some Mexican roadside taco stands to not have soap in their restrooms. Instead there would be a plastic cup holding — I kid you not — powder-form Tide laundry detergent. It was amusing anyhow. My hands left those places extremely soft and smelling like laundry.

One of the last restaurants we visited on our trip was in Ajijic, near the Chapala lake. It was actually right on the lake and served seafood. This was the only restaurant with prices as high as I’d be used to in the United States. I ordered a stew served in a stone bowl. It came out sizzling, and since the very thick stone bowl retains heat well, it kept sizzling the entire time I was eating. It was excellent as usual.

Coming up in part 6: some thoughts on returning to the United States, our decision to visit, communication, and tips for anyone else considering a first visit to Mexico.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7186-mexico-part-5-food-karaok/feed 4 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7175-mexico-part-4-street-scenes-and-architecture http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7175-mexico-part-4-street-scenes-and-architecture#comments Wed, 14 Sep 2011 01:29:58 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7175 The fourth in a series; see also parts 1, 2, and 3.

This post is going to be more a photolog than a narrative, and I apologize in advance for it being a bit disjointed.

I’ve already touched on these themes a bit in the other post, but now it’s time to focus on them. Immediately after leaving the airport, it’s quite clear that things are a little different. Trees are square. People ride around in the backs of pickups — sometimes on top of piles of debris. Left turns are made in front of other lanes of traffic going the same way. But those are just the things obvious from the road. It’s a lot of fun to enjoy the differences. First, the ubiquitous square trees.



They look pretty, and are found all over. I also found carefully-manicured trees in cone shapes, more cylindrical shapes, etc. It seems that tree care is taken seriously in Mexico. It was also not uncommon to see the bottom few feet of a tree painted white. A park in Guanajuato had a whole bunch of trees carefully trimmed.



And from up on the mountain, it still looked impressive (the green area behind the dome).



Driving in Mexico was interesting for a lot of reasons. The highways there aren’t quite as limited access as the freeways in the USA. It was quite common to see bicyclists, walkers, a mule, or some cattle ambling along the side of the road. Roadside taco stands don’t require taking an exit. You just pull off the road because it’s right there.

Some sights were a bit surprising. Cattle in a pickup, with rope, for instance.



Or cattle crossing the highway on the overpass.



Street vendors were everywhere. Stop at a red light and someone might spring from the side of the road and suddenly start washing your windshield (expecting a tip); try to sell you flowers, juice, or bug zappers; or even throw business card-sized advertisements for adult websites into any open windows they can find. One night we saw an incredible fire juggler. I would have tipped him well but he was too far away to do so before the light turned green.

Mexico’s history stretches back into prehistoric times, and we saw the Teuchitlan ruins at Guachimontones one day. It was truly a remarkable feeling to be able to walk down the middle of the ancient ball court, or to climb up one pyramid and see the other from it.



It’s not exactly architecture, but Jacob and Oliver sure enjoyed visiting the hot springs at Bosque de la Primavera. Jacob still remembers that “where the steam is, the water is 200 degrees, and we CAN’T TOUCH IT THERE!”

Back in Guadalajara, here’s a photo from the inside of the grand old cathedral.



Compared to the cathedrals we saw in Europe, this was of a similar general size and design, and perhaps only slightly newer. But one big difference: worshipers outnumbered tourists at every Mexican cathedral I saw, whether in the center of Guadalajara or at a rainy intersection in Guanajuato or a plaza in Tlaquepaque. It made them feel more alive, and perhaps more sacred as well.

One surprise was seeing people sitting on the steps of the cathedral in downtown Guadalajara selling trinkets such as beads. I think the only other place I had seen something like that was in New Orleans.

All of Guadalajara’s Centro was beautiful. Much of it survives from colonial days; I think a person could spend days exploring its museums and buildings. Way too many of my 900 photos were taken in Centro to post on the blog, but just for flavor, here’s one of the less than historic scenes.



Yes, that is a bus shaped like a tequila bottle.

Fountains were beautiful and common across Mexico. A few of them were easily reachable by boys, and ours sure loved those.



There was a lot of public art, including this interesting chair/skeleton/I’m not sure what it is:



And, just for good measure while walking around Centro, they tossed in an apparent Redundant Array of Inexpensive Typewriters.



I don’t know what they were doing, but there were about a dozen guys sitting out in the sun typing on their manual typewriters on their identical tables.

And who can leave Guadalajara without seeing one of North America’s most impressive traffic circles. I’ve got to hand it to the Mexicans for making something that is normally really boring into an interesting work of art.



Over in Guanajuato, a lot of driving takes place in the city’s vast underground tunnel system. Here’s a scene emerging from one of them.



Guanajuato was already getting decorated for Mexican independence day festivities (Sept. 15-16) while we were there.



Here’s a typical Guanajuato street scene.



Many of the streets were closed to traffic — and perhaps not wide enough to handle vehicles anyway. Those streets had a wonderful peaceful and slow feel to them.

I feel that I’ve barely done the trip justice with this post. The feelings of walking down a beautiful Guanajuato street, or stepping into a Spanish cathedral, or even seeing a bunch of guys with typewriters, just can’t be replicated. It’s brimming with history and character, and shouldn’t be missed.

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7175-mexico-part-4-street-scenes-and-architecture/feed 6 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7166-mexico-part-3-shopping http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7166-mexico-part-3-shopping#comments Mon, 12 Sep 2011 22:37:44 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7166 The third in my serious about my family’s recent visit to Mexico — see also part 1 and part 2.

Shopping in Mexico was probably the thing I was least prepared for. I probably had the biggest wins of the trip shopping, and also the biggest fails (though they weren’t all that significant).

It seems to me that shopping is all about serendipity. You almost have to be good at impulse buying. I normally try hard to resist impulse purchases, preferring to research and compare carefully before making a decision. That attitude didn’t serve me well in Mexico, and when I was able to overcome it, I got some great purchases.

Around here, some of the best places to shop are the ones that have been in business for decades. Anderson Office Supply in Newton, KS, for instance, has been around for over 100 years, and has — in stock, even — everything from a ribbon for my slightly obscure 1940s typewriter to local history books. Moler’s Camera in Wichita often meets or beats the online stores prices, and has better service.

But in Mexico the best places seemed to be packed into a large crowded shopping area, or a dusty stand along a road, or a guy selling stuff on a plaza somewhere.

Here is Guadalajara’s market (San Juan de Dios):



It’s an incredible open-air market. We spent quite some time there, even ate lunch, and yet I’m sure we saw only a small fraction of what they had. It was a cramped place, with small booths and tiny aisles, but all sorts of interesting things. Although I did appreciate walking quickly past the raw pork and fish corner. Terah bought some genuine extract of vanilla there, at a good price.

Some of the street vendors were selling what I think were butterfly toys — they had some sort of launcher that would launch them in the air, and they’d flutter and float down to the ground. We saw them mainly in Guadalajara Centro on our first day, and I (unwisely, it turns out) thought, “Hmm, a plastic toy — our boys would love it, but I don’t want to buy it on our first day. Besides, I’m sure we’ll see them all over or online.” Wrong on both counts. So there’s one of my fails.

My greatest win came on the road back from Guachimontones (an ancient pyramid site). Every so often along that country road, there would be a vendor with a table selling something or other. I saw some paintings out my window, thought “neat”, but — and here you can see how terrible an impulse buyer I am — didn’t actually put together that we should turn around and look at them until 10 minutes later after a bathroom stop for Jacob. We went back, and I picked out a beautiful painting on canvas of those pyramids at sunset. And the charge: 200 pesos (about $17 USD). Incredible and incredibly cheap, and there is a great place on my wall for it. The vendor was also the artist. I am kicking myself for only buying one. (No photo yet as it was too big to practically transport by plane.)

Another memorable purchase was this one:



This was another roadside find. We were driving through Ajijic, and I noted a rug vendor along the side of the road. I had walked past a rug vendor in the Guadalajara market, so I was keeping my eye out. I made a note to stop there on our way back out of Ajijic. So we did. This is a rug made in the Zapotec tradition, all hand-made, with natural dyes and wool. It was 550 pesos (about $46 USD), which I considered to also be a pretty good deal for what it was. I have no idea how many hours went into creating it, but I’m sure it was many.

My luck in shops wasn’t so good. We visited Tlaquepaque, which had lots of shops selling beautiful things. But the prices there were higher than I’d pay for similar things back home. Tonala’s shops were too inconveniently located to be practical with what were then tired boys, so we didn’t go in there.

I’m not used to shopping without planning, and perhaps am not very good at it. On the other hand, I really enjoyed making those two purchases, and only regret not buying another 200-peso painting! Maybe next time I’m in Mexico, I’ll even buy something on the first day there. Terah will be so proud..

]]> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7166-mexico-part-3-shopping/feed 1 http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7158-mexico-part-2-lodging-family http://changelog.complete.org/archives/7158-mexico-part-2-lodging-family#comments Mon, 12 Sep 2011 03:11:25 +0000 John Goerzen http://changelog.complete.org/?p=7158 As I wrote in part 1, my family and I were in Mexico recently.

Today I’ll write about the places we stayed. We spent most of the time in a room we rented in a private home in Guadalajara. My friend Jonathan had found it for us, and it was not too far from his home.

The owner was a grandmother, and across the courtyard was more family, including a granddaughter close in age to our boys. They enjoyed playing together.

It was really a perfect arrangement for us. There’s no better way to be a part of local life when traveling than to stay in someone’s house.

Here’s our bedroom:



Notice the glass slats in the window — it’s a nifty, though not airtight, alternative to our regular windows. More on that later. More of the inside:



We had a bit of a language barrier while in Mexico, though never anything significant. My Spanish vocabulary started with almost nothing and I reached maybe a few dozen words by the time we left. Terah knew some Spanish from high school and college, and my friend was fluent. Our hostess also knew a little English. But we all communicated well enough. Terah or Jonathan would help translate when needed.

As I’d seen before, the children would say things to each other, but never seemed to be bothered that their playmates didn’t understand what was being said. They just had a great time anyhow.

On Sunday afternoon, when we came back from our activities, there was a buzz of activity. Children everywhere outside, running and playing. Adults too, chatting. We didn’t know exactly what was happening, but sent Jacob and Oliver out to play anyhow (which they were eager to do). The yard was enclosed by a wall, so children could pretty much run around without lots of supervision.



Eventually they were invited to have some birthday cake (ah ha!) — it was one of the children’s birthday. Jacob and Oliver actually were served the first two pieces of cake (as the “amigos”). Everyone seemed so friendly, warm, and welcoming.

Each morning started with breakfast at the house, followed by a scene like this:



That’s Jacob and Oliver, looking to see if Jonathan had arrived for the day yet.

I often noticed in Mexico that I was unsure if I was inside or outside. Here in Kansas, we can have a string of summer days that each exceed 110F (44C) — or a few weeks in winter that never get above 15F (-9C), even in daytime. And then we have some pleasant days like right now, too — or rain blowing sideways at 60MPH. In general, we spend a lot of effort keeping the outside, well, out.

It is quite clear that this isn’t a problem in the Guadalajara area. Some restaurants could have been described as buildings with large, open windows so you feel a lot of breeze while inside. Or perhaps as a simple shade roof with a few supports on the edges, so you’re never really “inside” at all (sort of like going under a small shade tent outdoors). To the extent that windows could close, many of them couldn’t be made airtight. It was clear that in that area, people spend more energy finding ways to invite the outdoors in rather than to keep it out, thanks to the year-round moderate climate.

Perhaps the best example of this surprised me one evening. We were arriving in Guanajuato, an old silver mining town in the mountains, and were going to spend the night at Hotel Socavón, which had been recommended to us by a local friend of Jonathan’s. From the street, the hotel looked tiny. But walk in, and you get in this old-looking (and feeling) entry tunnel:



That’s the front desk, apparently cut out of it there on the right.

We asked to see some of the rooms before buying — apparently a normal request around there. The innkeeper agreed, and gave us keys and directions to find them on the third floor. It included going up 2 flights of stairs, passing through a courtyard, and going up another flight.

It was after dark, and the hotel was dimly lit — something I was fine with. I thought we were stepping out into a beautiful atrium with some potted plants in the center of the building — something fairly common in some nicer hotels. Until I felt rain on my head. Then I realized that the courtyard, which began two floors up from the street, was open to the sky. Beautiful!

Here was the view from out room door:



And down the “hall”:



After getting home, a Google happened to turn up some reviews of this hotel. I was so annoyed at what some people wrote! One person gave them only 3 stars because they didn’t have air conditioning, had poor water pressure, and “lots of steps”. Someone else complained of the dark entry tunnel — something I couldn’t help but smiling about the moment I entered.

My review, which should hopefully get posted soon, is certainly different. I gave them 5 stars, because if I wanted a Super 8 with generic fluorescent lighting and the same layout as thousands of other hotels, I would have gone to Nebraska instead of Mexico. Most homes and local hotels in the region don’t have air conditioning because they don’t need it, and that’s just how water pressure is in Mexico (due to needing to pump it from municipal supplies to private storage tanks overhead). And who doesn’t appreciate entering a hotel through a brick tunnel? Ah, sigh…

This should give you some idea of the kind of travel we like: part of the point of traveling is enjoying the differences from home, and I think it is a huge mistake to be annoyed at everything that is different. Enjoy the differences!

Finally, here’s a photo of the staircase in the home we stayed in, which I thought was fascinating:



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