Used AI to assist Bill from Soldersmoke

I'm a big fan of Bill Meara's Soldersmoke podcast and blog.  It's always a pleasure to hear from Bill and last week he contacted me asking for help with the website where he keeps an archive of the past editions of the podcast. 

Bill has been editing the HTML of the page manually using a web editor that had hit a page size limit of 1MB and would no longer let him add new podcasts so it had fallen behind. Here's how the page looked:

At first glance I thought this was an easy little job, get in via FTP and paste in the new episodes. When I looked more closely at the HTML, and ran a validator on it, my heart sank. It's a credit to the robustness of web browsers that they managed to render this as well as they did. The podcast has been around for 20 years and while some of the HTML was obsolete, worse was that Bill's copy pasting from his blog had all sorts of errors in it. Mostly table tags that weren't balanced etc.

The HTML had ballooned out and had parts that looked like they'd been generated in Microsoft Word's export to Web - huge runs of fonts and styles repeated over and over.

I thought this would take many days of manual clean up and editing so I turned to Claude code for the project. I downloaded the various existing pages to a local folder, explained what we wanted and mentioned the blog as a place to get missing information.

Claude installed BeautifulSoup and proceeded to write python scripts to extract just the needed information from the existing broken HTML. It also looked at the blog to get missing info, looked at YouTube and even got the modification dates of the mp3 files to figure out publish dates. The result is at soldersmoke.com and now looks like this:

The HTML now validates without any complaint and it's much more efficient and compact than before.

AI will put web developers out of work to some extent. On the other hand it's fantastic at doing what would have been an incredibly time consuming menial task. This kind of job might not have been done at all except for this marvelous new technology. It's not perfect but it's amazing what can be achieved.

Thanks to Bill for all his great content, it's great to see the podcast archive remains available and up to date.

Away from home but monitoring the FreeDV net

My wife unfortunately broke her arm a few weeks ago and can't drive so I've been away from home looking after her. Normally on a Sunday morning I would conduct a FreeDV RADE V1 net on 7.177. 

I tuned in this morning via the excellent Ironstone Range WebSDR and was pleased to hear that stations can chat without my help ;-).

This screen recording was made by using Loopback to pipe audio from the Safari Web browser into my home brew FreeDV app for macOS called FreeDVneo.

Tech Talk on ABC - Google I/O preview and software updates

This week on ABC Nightlife Phil and I preview what's coming up in this week's annual Google I/O conference. Headline topics include AI, Android 17, the Chrome browser and a new operating system for laptops dubbed "GoogleBooks". 

We make a call for RCS messaging which will smooth out messaging between Android and iOS. 

There have been an unusual number of security updates from both Microsoft and Apple - are these vulnerabilities being found by AI? 

Listen here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/106698692

Incidentally, I was in Melbourne this week so took the opportunity to talk to Phil in Sydney from the Southbank studio.

The generation gap in media consumption

A fascinating analysis by leading thinker Tony Stevenson "Who Told You That Was True? How Four Generations Consume Information Differently — and Why It Matters".

The author looks at the dramatic change in the way the last four generations get their news and form opinions. Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and GenZ have different habits and to some extent live in entirely different versions of Truth.

Tony has a list of recommendations that would be valuable for anyone who seeks to transmit a message to the public. Recommended reading.

Sunday FreeDV net - guilty of audio distortion

A good net here in south eastern Australia this morning from 09:30 eastern time on 7.177Mhz. Most people are running version 2.3. The audio problem for Windows users seems to have been figured out and I can see that there are early builds of a 2.3.1 in the wild.

This weekend has been the Dayton Hamvention and FreeDV programmer Mooneer has been busy with a stand at the show.

My own transmit audio was apparently terrible. Nothing much had changed since last week but I was noticing a bit of RF getting back while I transmit so perhaps that was it. I swapped to a USB headset and it cleared up.

Stations participating this morning were VK2BLQ, VK2KNC, VK2EX, VK2KO, VK3FC, VK3KEZ, VK5AG, VK5FD, VK5JPL (ex VK5KVA), VK5RA, VK4GRA, VK3LV, VK3GTP and me VK3TPM.

Inverted L for 160m

At the recent deceased estate sale of Graeme VK3NE's gear I purchased a 160m AM transmitter. Crystal locked to 1832kHz. Turns out it's a Drew Diamond VK3XU design from 2006. Rather nicely put together but missing the audio power modulation stages. Anyhow, step one is a suitable antenna.

There's a big dead tree near the shack so I put up an inverted L. Basically as much wire as I could find. Up the tree then horizontally over to another tree. Using a nano VNA to sweep SWR it was much too long and resonant below 1Mhz. After a series of cuts it looks really nice.

I hear a lot of noise on this antenna, S9. When I transmit I can hear myself on the Strathbogie SDR so I know it's getting out.

An audio amplifier is on the way so I'm looking forward to getting on the air. AM on 160m - what memories.

FreeDV Sunday net - many on 2.3 some issues

A good net this morning after yesterday's release of version 2.3 of the FreeDV app. Two reports of Windows users having audio trouble with 2.3 that led them to roll back but others are finding it good.

Stations heard included VK2AWN, VK2BLQ, VK2CJB (portable VK4), VK2VCO, VK3KEZ, VK3KQT (On Android),    VK3ZD, VK3UBK, VK3ZTR, VK4DKW, VK5AG, VK5FD, VK5KVA, VK2KO and me VK3TPM.

FreeDV 2.3.0 released! - an important step forward

The FreeDV project has just released version 2.3 of the FreeDV GUI app for Linux, macOS and Windows. There's also support for running it directly on a compatible Flex 800 or Aurora series radio. 

The 0.1 increase in version number rather understates the change in this release. FreeDV RADEV1 has, until this version, been implemented in Python. It worked well but required the app to have an embedded python interpreter and the required libraries (numpy, scipy, etc).

Version 2.3 drops all the python requirements and uses a C port of that code. As a consequence of this change, the apps are one tenth of the size, start the modem faster, use less CPU and memory. 

Aside from the move from python to C, Mooneer has been very busy with many enhancements listed in his latest update.

The availability of the C port means that FreeDV RADEV1 is starting to appear in other apps.

Tech talk on ABC Radio - Can police be tracked by the Bluetooth in their tasers?

This week on the ABC Nightlife program we discuss the rather extreme claim on Four Corners this week that police can be "tracked" by hackers using the Bluetooth in their tasers and body cameras made by Axon. I think this is an over-reach. 

Where we are being spied on is when visiting Microsoft's LinkIn site which, if you're using the Chrome browser, probes for the presence of hundreds of plug-ins. This happens even if you aren't logged in and the amount of information they can derive is surprising. 

Finally, OpenAI is taking action to fight goblins. https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/106645068 

FreeDV Sunday net - now with Android participant

We started an hour earlier, at 9:30am eastern time, but still had a good roll up. This morning was notable in that there were several stations on early builds of version 2.3 and also we had David, VK3KQT, who was running on an Android version. He sounded good even though he said he was in speaker phone mode.

Lots of rain here and a bit of lightning but FreeDV gets through all that nicely.

Participating were VK5RA, VK5KVA, VK5AG, VK3KQT, VK3KEZ, VK3FC, VK3DHI, VK3CCR, VK2KNC, VK2GMH, VK2BLQ, VK2CJB, VK3KQT (Android), VK5FD, and me, VK3TPM.

Here's the app in action (not from the net).

I made a screen recording but it didn't pick up the audio so went for the shakycam version.