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.
As an early adopter of home automation I've suffered over the years from a collection of incompatible devices each requiring a proprietary app to control the one brand of light or switch or whatever.
When Apple, Google and Amazon got together to standardise Matter and Thread I jumped in and purchased some bulbs from Nanoleaf. Matter is the protocol which can run over different transport including Wifi and Thread is a mesh radio system that works in Wifi black spots and seems quicker.
Apple has been shipping Thread border routers built in to devices such as the Apple TV and HomePods so I have a few scattered around already. Thread devices also act as mesh relays so it's easy to cover the house thoroughly. It's also in some phones which greatly helps with configuration.
When I got the bulbs I took advantage of the ability to use Apple's Home app for configuration thinking it would be smoother than the dodgy proprietary apps. Big mistake.
I've had a rough time until this weekend. Setting up new bulbs was frustrating and often took several goes at it and often lights, which I had set to come on at dusk, would often come on very dim and purple, requiring manual intervention.
This weekend I got a notification that there was a critical software update to do. It was actually two updates in a row. It didn't go well and I ended up deleting all the devices and setting them up again using the Nanoleaf app which then did the firmware update.
Only some of my bulbs support Thread. You can see the little icon on those ones above. The Thread devices definitely work better than the Wifi only ones.
I'm afraid we're not free of proprietary apps but at least things are working reliably for me now.
My advice:
Choose Matter & Thread capable home automation devices
Do use the manufacturer's app and apply the software updates
After all that add the devices to Apple's Home app (or Google's equivalent)
There was a feature I wan't too keen on, it makes the light warmer in colour as the night goes on, but having lived with it a bit I quite like it now.
Claude Code has been my helper for a few months now. Others have observed that while it can help a non-programmer to create software it can be even more help to an experienced programmer.
Knowing what to ask for, being able to evaluate the generated code, and thinking up tasks are things that a seasoned coder can employ to get fantastic results.
In February 2026 I had the bright idea of asking Claude to port the python in FreeDV RADEV1 over to C. To my amazement it did that daunting task in under a day of prodding. This has saved our proper programmers months of tedious work and has led to a trickle of other FreeDV applications. I made one myself that is a simple native application in SwiftUI for macOS. Here it is receiving Anthony VK3YSA.
Another app is a simple client that talks the excellent digital chat mode Olivia 8/250, again native SwiftUI for macOS.
In the shack I run Linux and have been getting Claude to make little utility apps using GTK+3. (They will also build on macOS but look rather out of place).
Presumably because of the extensive amount of open source software to train on for Linux and GTK, it's particularly good at whipping up little apps.
The job of the programmer has changed probably for ever. I'm dreaming up projects that I never would have considered before. I wake in the night with ideas and have anxiety about not using the available quota for the day.
It was proposed that we move to an hour earlier for improved propagation and with a few exceptions this was fine with everyone. I'll update the list on the freedv.org site to reflect this change.
Two of us were running an early build of version 2.3 which has the C port. It seems solid to me and Leighton, VK3FC, and I look forward to it being released as it's smaller and faster.
Stations included VK1RF (Running the Flex AppImage!), VK2KNC, VK2BLQ, VK3CCR (welcome to the net Brian), VK3FC, VK3GTP, VK3JCO, VK3KEZ, VK3ZD, VK4EV (not heard), VK5AG, VK5KVA, VK5RA, VK5ST, VK2AWJ and me VK3TPM.
It's amazing to me that a 500GB disk can get full but that happened to me on the Mac Mini yesterday. I have a lot of large developer tools including Xcode and Android Studio. Like any unix system, macOS doesn't do well when disk space is low. I've long had an external drive and store source code there but a lot of space was taken up inside my Home directory in ~/Library so I thought I'd try putting home on the external drive.
Doing this is pretty easy:
Go to Settings > Users & Groups
Control Click on your username and you see an "Advanced Options..." menu item
Scroll down to Home directory and Choose.. the disk you want to use
You'll be prompted to reboot and when the machine comes up it will be like a new user setup with all the Apple ID login etc. Once all that is done you can copy over files from the old home directory, things like Documents, Developer, Movies, etc.
I left it to iCloud to sync over my music and pictures.
Perhaps there's a way to move over the old home but I decided not to risk it.
All is working well now but the external disk is noticably slower than the fast internal SSD but Applications, which are still on the boot disk, still launch quickly.
Was chatting with FreeDV regular Joe, VK3SRC, who's been pushing for an appliance like implementation of FreeDV RADE V1 for Raspberry Pi, mainly for portable operation. It occurred to me that a better way would be to have a client app for the phone - we all carry phones and they are powerful enough these days.
The project noted recently an effort by talented developer Lee, BX4ACP, who has started work, open source, on both iOS and Android clients.
I forked the iOS code and started looking around. Lee commented that there would be problems with the iPhone audio system but his app looked quite polished so I tried to get it going.
It turns out that while you can attach other audio devices to an iPhone including bluetooth or USB audio devices, the phone basically takes the device as an input and output pair. My use case is to have the phone connected to both a transceiver and probably a headset or some sort.
Audio must come from the transceiver, be decoded and play into the headset. For transmit we'd sample audio from the headset's mic and send encoded audio to the transciever.
I fought the OS for a few days and finally gave up. It seems that Apple doesn't want developers changing audio devices programmatically. They want the user to be in control.
Talking with Mooneer this morning, he raised the idea of special USB audio hardware, rather like what was done in the EzDV box which even uses the separate channels of a stereo pair.
I dialled back what I was trying to do and now have a RADE V1 decoder that takes audio from the input of a USB sound dongle and sends decoded audio out to the same device.
This works well. The phone easily handles the load. It's a pity 3.5mm patch cords are needed but I think a portable decoder like this might have some applications.
Another problem on the iPhone is that Apple don't let you talk to USB serial devices unless they've been specifically approved by them. A friend suggested that a bluetooth to serial adapter would be a work-around.
In the end though, I think an Android app might be the solution for portable RADE operation - until we get it built in to a radio.
This week on ABC Nightlife we discussed the stepping aside of arguably the most successful CEO of any company in history with the move of Apple's Tim Cook to Executive Chair of the Board. The AI model so powerful it's too dangerous to release and the boom in electric vehicle sales around the world due to fuel prices - and what needs to be done to make them practical in Australia. https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/ai-revolution-arrives-in-software-development/106589944
Good conditions for the Sunday morning 10:30am net but a smaller group probably because I've been away for the past two weeks. I had reports that I could be heard directly in VK4 and another person who listened via Web SDR.
There were deep fades on the OFDM waterfall but all signals could be decoded well enough. I was particularly pleased to hear that David, VK3KQT, was talking with my C port client on a Raspberry Pi and Peter, VK3PCC was using a pre-release build of the FreeDV client using my library.
Participating were: VK2AWJ, VK2DWG, VK2KNC, VK2BLQ (once he got the audio working!), VK3KEZ, VK2UMZ, VK3KQT, VK3PCC, VK3UBK, VK3ZTR, VK5ABE, VK5AG, VK5FD, VK3JF, and me VK3TPM.
