Computing ⁽³⁶⁾

Up until now I have been running 3 Raspberry Pi 4 systems all held in a metal frame with fans which makes a nice neat setup. One Pi does the home automation, one runs pi-hole (really useful!), and one is a server and has an SSD attached. Not long ago while we were out of the country (of course) the website hosted by the server failed. I did not have remote ssh access set up nor a VPN for access. When we got back home the pi had lost the filesystem on the SSD. The disk was still mounted, but not accessible. Being a server all logging was on the SSD so no errors were caught. A reboot was the only way to cure it. I thought it was a one off until it happened again, this time while I was nearby. After that our broadband was upgraded to FTTP and with PlusNet giving a fixed IP and no blocks I moved my production websites and email server across to the Pi, saving the rental of the VPS I had been using up until then. The cost of the VPS covered the annual cost of the broadband so worked out…

"Zilog has called time on the Z80 CPU." (https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/29/opinion_z80/) Wow. Actually I had no idea (through never having checked) that it was still being produced. And a fine chip it was too. I never built a system from wires up using the Z80 though. My first system, designed, built from chips and wire-wrap was an 8080 system, hand programmed to control al x-ray diffractometer. This was decades ago now but I still remember it, although I have no photos unfortunately. The system had a timer chip for a 1-second count and was interface to a Nuclear Engineering (I think it was!) counter that used nixies. But I did at least use Z80s, just they came as boards. The first was a Transom Triton computer and by then I was programming in Turbo pascal - back then this was really neat as one could have procedures full of assembler code which made interfacing easy. Later I used Gemini boards and that also gave the ability to have a graphics card. By then my interfacing to the diffractometer included a stepper motor and shaft encoder to control the arc motor. In the end there were two sets of Gemini Z80 boards, one…

I now have a Raspberry Pi set up on one of the four monitors in the shack. The original layout was two screens at the top on Linux, then bottom left on Windows and bottom right - central to where I sit on the Mac as the main screen. But that layout had two major issues... I use a program called Barrier to basically act as a KVM switch for the three systems with the Mac as server. That way the Mac mouse and keyboard controls any of the systems, although it can be awkward sometimes where Windows expects keys which Apple doesn't have. But Barrier does not understand dual monitors and so moving the mouse up from the Mac got to the Linux box fine, but moving it down from the left hand screen would not get to Windows as the program does not see it being physically there. I could live with that, except for issue two... The main issue was with the Linux screens being at the top and thus making me sit back or crank my neck upwards, not a good position. So... I got to realising that although I use both screens on the Linux…

Some time ago I wanted a logging program that would do things my way. Although there is absolutely nothing wrong with any of the various offerings they generally try to be everything for everyone and none of them really sat well with me. So I wrote my own in PHP (learning Python is high on my list of things to do, along with Mandarin, Morse, cooking...) which uses the QRZ.com logbook as the backend. Ok then, really I wrote a series of various scripts in PHP that make it all work. The advantage is it does just what I need and nothing more and can easily be modified to add functionality. The downside is I never was a coder (well, ok, I have a certification in COBOL from the 1970's!) and it is not going anywhere other than my own server. So you can't have it... The way I tend to log stuff is via wsjt-x or other software that logs to a local file. I then have a script that takes the ADIF data and populates QRZ.com on a QSO-by-QSO basis. Somehow having to actually do something after each QSO feels like I am actually engaging in the process.

I've been rationalising hardware, in particular as the PoE HAT on the Pi running the GB7RVB packet mailbox was noticeably noisy and needs replacing. I had originally moved the packet mailbox off of my AMPRnet router Pi as I needed to install a VPN and the networking was becoming a bit too complex for my liking. In the end I had no use for the VPN, so GB7RVB has gone back, removing one Pi. Linbpq went across just fine - there is an apt for it (https://wiki.oarc.uk/packet:linbpq-apt-installation) so installation is easy. Just install and copy the config across and the files under /opt/oarc/bpq (there are neater ways but this sledgehammer method works). With the node running I could access via the web interface as expected, but then the axudp route disappeared. Then I realised that our broadband router had a NAT rule for the UDP port needed for axudp and that was still pushing it to the now switched off Pi. And I'm sure I've forgotten this same thing before! So now I have a note as a reminder, assuming I bother to check the note... Now having removed one Pi with a noisy fan the NTP server Pi is…