Computing ⁽³⁶⁾

You know the thing... installing stuff on Windows where it counts down, and sometimes up again, then gets to 100% and seems to wait for ages. Our washing machine seems to run on Microsoft time too. Well, so too it seems does our old MacBook. This is a 2015 or so 13" MacBook Pro and is no longer used so sits on a shelf. I had it set up as me for testing but wanted to clean it all out so it can be sold. That's where things went a tad wrong. For some reason it took ages to even log in - very unusual as these generally boot in seconds. Then, after the reset it would not boot at all. Long story cut... I set it going doing a restore over the Internet. It began saying it would take 2 hours. Ok. This changed to 12 hours and seemed to come down ok, 11, then 10 each taking about an hour. Then it got down to 9 hours and dropped to 12 minutes! After an hour at 12 minutes left it went to 21 minutes and showed the Apple logo. After another hour it apparently had less than a…

Recently our ageing HP 1022 printer has been misleading paper. There is a solenoid on the righthand side which controls the feed and the associated spring gets weak. I have stretched it three times so far, each time curing the issue for a while. A new spring is needed and, of course although I have a number of these they are all safely stored in the workshop never to be found! Coupled to the desire to print in colour and on reasonably thick paper - I'm thinking short ranges of 'special' QSL cards here - after a bit of research I chose a Xerox printer. Reasonable cost and - although as is typical with these things new toner costs more than the printer - aftermarket toner is affordable. The printer duly arrived and I set up the networking and it tried a test print. This failed to eject all the way and the printer announced it had a paper jam. Ok... try again. Nope. If I eased the sheet out as it was printing all was fine, but it never managed by itself. I did the usual things. Swearing at the printer failed to cure the issue as I had…

So... having an Allstar node I wanted to configure it for Echolink. It seemed this was just a matter of editing the pre-prepared configuration file echolink.xxx and renaming it to echolink.conf. Edits in place, this I did. Oh yes, and I set our broadband router up to forward the relevant ports to the hub. On restarting asterisk it gave numerous errors of the form 'Error in parsing header on servers.echolink.org'. Hmmm. Ok, scratching around the web I found that Echolink has a firewall test service at https://secure.echolink.org/pingTest.jsp. It failed. Ugh. Then it dawned on me (meaning I read the documentation a little better!). I had set a callsign with '-L' at the end which appeared to be the way to go. But this needed separate validation! Once that was done it all sprang into life. Simple, and also obvious when I realised. Old age? http://km6uso.net/index.php/2021/02/27/adding-echolink-to-your-allstar-hub/ is an excellent guide - there are others of course but this one pointed out clearly the need to register the -L or -R callsign.

Slowly coming together. Yesterday I decided to attack the front panel with a drill and mount the rotary encoder, switches and the little Arduino board which I programmed earlier. This is for tuning the Langstone. For some reason my drill press insists on making triangular holes - if I wanted a triangular hole I'd never manage of course. So I've resorted to making a smaller hole and using a round file. Anyway, everything went into place, although the Arduino board has no mounting holes so I've tie-wrapped a piece of plastic under it as an insulator and used a decent (hopefully!) sticky pad to secure the board inside the front panel. So far, so good. Here it is receiving the Allstar microHub... I need to sort the microphone out. The USB audio dongles seem to be constructed for stereo input so I wired the same to the front panel. Plugging the headset in gives no audio, presumably its all shorting out. I can make it work by 'adjusting' the plug (pulling it out until it works!) so I need to re-wire or make a little adapter. There are a couple of fans in the case and so far it seems…

I finally got round to putting my Allstarlink node together after looking at it sitting almost completed for a week. Poor thing. Anyway, it's now functioning but I want to add the LEDs. Software-wise it turned out a bit of a faff. I had already signed up and got a node number and set a password etc. My first attempt was via the Raspberry Pi image downloaded from the Allstar wiki. That seemed to go in just fine with a fairly easy setup and well scripted information on the wiki. All seemed ok except for when I wanted to install Allmon... the instructions for which began with the need to install git. That failed and so I did the usual update / upgrade cycle - which I really ought to have done right away as the image is quite old. After that, nothing worked. The USB interface was not working and so there was no radio functions. Power cycling did nothing. So I installed the hamvoip image. One nice thing about the Pi and similar thing is you change SD cards and this changes the o/s and everything. Hamvoip went in fine with a fairly automatic installation and after a…