MacBook Air 11 - still great after all these years

I hand down my old laptops and phones to the kids who happily use them for years. Sometimes I try to hand down an update and are met with resistance - this (old) one still works fine, why should I change? When they do, they're stunned by the performance improvement. They are still going through the Intel to Apple Silicon transition.

Recently I got an 11-inch, Mid 2013, MacBook air back, and decided to get it going. The battery was completely dead. I paid $45 for a battery on AliExpress. They are easy to install on the 11 inch Airs and the battery came with the two screwdrivers needed.

There was quite a lot of dust and fluff to remove but the fan still moves well. My daughter got very good use out of this machine. It has a few dents in the edge but the screen is good and all the keys work. (I've done a lot of cleaning with a cotton bud but more to do). What's striking is that she's typed so much on it that the most used keycaps have worn the labels off them.

Even with "just" 4GB of RAM, the machine is surprisingly usable for email and web surfing. But being stuck on macOS 11 means that there are many apps that won't run and lots of sites complain about the version of Safari.

Some apps, like my beloved BBEdit, still keep old versions available.

I love the compact size of these and the fact that I could replace it for under $200 if the need arose means that this would be a good laptop to take somewhere where it might be stolen or damaged without too much anxiety.

Apple should make a new compact laptop. I love my modern Air but would be very attracted to something smaller for my messenger bag.

Tech Talk on ABC - Is AI killing the goose that laid the golden egg?

For more than a year many web sites have reported a dramatic decline in traffic, pointing to a broader structural change in how the web is being used by all of us. 

Many sites that create content - be it news or analysis - are funded either by advertising or subscription. The reduction in traffic threatens their business model. 

Peter Marks, software developer and technology commentator from Access Informatics,  joined Philip Clark and listeners to Nightlife with the latest tech news and information. Listen here and read Sue Ahearn's piece here.

Great interview with home brewer Paul VK3HN

Paul is an inspiring QRP home brewer. Great interview on a recent podcast. https://youtu.be/Rkd1o2PQI9M?si=gzKmEFHAueIDsdYK

Recommended.

Single step debug on a PICO

As you might guess, I'm really getting in to using the Raspberry Pi PICO for embedded development. If I can do a job in MicroPython I will but the C/C++ tools and the library they provide is a fantastic step up from the Arduino. The official plugin for Visual Studio Code is really excellent. I purchased the official debug probe and it seems excellent. 

You can compile and run with a single button but more interestingly you can single step debug and look at variables.

Claude code is a real help and just for fun I asked it to make a program that makes the PICO emulate a USB audio output device feeding the audio to a PWM DAC pin which I've added a simple low pass filter to.

It sounds great:

The debug probe makes it easy to install and run new builds. You don't need to unplug and plug while holding the Boot button, you just click the run debug button. Interestingly it loads the ELF binary rather than the UF2 binary that you'd drag to the mounted volume.

My interest in being a USB audio device stems from my interest in making an embedded version of at least bits of FreeDV RADE. 

The PICO 2 is quite a powerhouse although doesn't have enough RAM for what I have in mind. I haver some 3rd party boards on the way with extra RAM so we shall see. 

Running ML on a Pico

Before the days of FreeDV RADE (which uses multiple machine learning models to turn speech to features, transmit data over HF, and turn the demodulated features back in to speech audio; it was possible to run FreeDV with Codec2 on embedded hardware.

There was the SM1000 and the EzDV boxes.

I wondered if it might be possible to divide up the tasks and perhaps use several microcontrollers working together. I would not have attempted this before the days of AI tools like Claude Code but last night decided to give it a whirl.

This project captures audio from a MEMS PDM microphone. PDM is pulse density modulation and these little microphones have excellent sound.

LPCNet is the input side of the FARGAN vocoder. It turns speech audio into "features" which are a stream of 32bit floating point numbers. In FreeDV RADE, these features are transmitted over the air with an ML modem (but that's another story). The recovered features are turned back into speech audio with the Vocoder. 

This project live encodes the audio to a stream of features which it sends over a USB serial cable to a computer which has a python program which syncs up and captures the features to a file which can be decoded using one of the test tools with FreeDV.

Here's me talking in to it followed by a decode of the features captured.

I tried to get this going on a PICO but it could not keep up. Partly because it doesn't have floating point and must emulate it. The PICO2 keeps up and even has some head room. There is some work down sampling the audio from the microphone that could be dropped if I used an A/D input instead.

Now here is a features to speech decode side. Features are streamed over USB. Audio is PWM into a simple low pass filter. (My tests indicate that this can sound very good). So far the audio is understandable but quite poor.

I'm not sure that the Radio Autoencoder can fit on one of these but you never know... Any recommendations of easy to use embedded ARM boards? 

I'll share the code when it's a bit more polished. Not sure that this will be of interest to anyone but you never know.

Mineral Radio

 

Made me chuckle browsing AliExpress.

(Seems a little over priced if you ask me).

AI tools causing an improvement in software quality

I just saw the announcement of NetBSD 11. Software that has been around for many years. What struck me was this comment:

As you are probably aware, the number of security issues found or suspected everywhere has massively increased with the advent of AI tools. As a consequence, we can't publish a release without open issues. Instead of delaying the release further to fix them (new ones are being reported all the time), we've instead chosen to be transparent about this.

NetBSD is not alone, recently we've seen:

• Record AI Bug Fixes Push Google To Twice-Weekly Chrome Updates
• Microsoft ships largest Patch Tuesday on record and Microsoft Patches Record 622 Flaws, Including Two Zero-Days Under Active Attack
• Oracle Releases Record 1,449 Security Patches As Companies Face Patch Overload
• AI has become Apple’s latest bug detective

I've also seen big bug fix releases in popular software such as ffmpeg.

Last week I pointed Claude Code at my iOS app WSPR Watch which has so far had no AI involvement. I asked it to audit the code for bugs and it found about 20 issues, three of them critical. Some of the bugs are threading issues which can be hard to reproduce and even understand.

My own code has been under development for a decade and there's bits of it I can't really remember. AI tools are fantastic at reading a big codebase and noticing inconsistencies and errors.

People talk about "vibe" coding but bug finding is possibly the bigger win in the short term.

FreeDV Sunday net

Nice net this morning with VK2, VK3, VK4 stations participating. A few new stations which is always good to hear.

Again I ran the net using my macOS client FreeDVNeo. On the frequency were VK5FD, VK5RA, VK5AG, VK5ABE, VK3KEZ, VK3JCO, VK3GTP, VK2KNC, VK2BLQ, VK2AOO, VK3ZTR, VK2LUI (no activity though), VK3PT (first time caller), VK3FAR, VK2KNC, VK5JPL and me VK3TPM.

See you next Sunday from 09:30 eastern time normally on 7.197 but +- depending on band usage.

 

Tech Talk on ABC Radio - ALP conference resolution on AI

Artificial Intelligence was one of the focuses of the Labor Party conference, with disruption to employment, education, the arts and the impact of data centres, unchartered problems needing to be resolved. 

We also discus AI models that hack and "sleepers" - a problem facing robotaxi firms. Listen here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/106968258

Upgraded the SSD in an M4 Mac Mini

When I purchased my M4 Mac Mini I chose 512GB of SSD thinking that would be more than enough. (I'm old enough to remember running on a 200MB disk). Developer tools and video editing eats a lot of space and I ran out. I had already paid an extra A$300 to get 512GB, to go from the default of 256GB up to 1TB Apple charges A$750, so I decided to attempt a cheaper option, and puchased a new 1TB SSD from AliExpress for A$375.

There are plenty of videos showing how to pop the bottom off the computer and get to the SSD. 

The board came with a spludger and a screw driver with the required bits. I was careful with the cable to the power button and fan. Unlike some upgraders I did not remove the power button and all was well.

Once the new, blank, drive is installed you need to put the machine in to DFU mode by holding the power button while plugging in the mains power. The power light blinks orange.

Next step is to plug the middle USB-C socket to another mac which detects DFU and offers to repair or restore the "faulty" mac. As this is a new drive choose Restore.

This is where I had problems. For some reason my internet has occasional ping fails and the downloading of the software image would fail. 

The error message isn't terribly helpful as you can see here.

In the end I located the restore image and downloaded it manually. The trick is to Option-Click the Restore button which lets you choose the restore image. This worked.

The disk seems fast and I have enough space. For now, I would say, 1TB seems to be needed for developers. AI models are also huge and I expect will be eating many people's hard disks in the next few years.

Enphase solar monitor on ESP32 CYD

I had a simple display that monitored my solar generation, usage and net some years ago but the company updated the software to require HTTPS and an authentication token. This update gets it going again. 

A MicroPython project that turns a CYD (Cheap Yellow Display) — an ESP32 board with an integrated 320×240 ILI9341 TFT — into a live dashboard for a home solar system. It polls an Enphase Envoy gateway on the local network and displays current generation, consumption, and net power, along with a scrolling line graph of recent history.

Along the way I ran in to a problem with HTTPS from MicroPython on ESP32 that turned out to be a known bug. To get it to work I've had to use an older version of MicroPython for ESP32.

You'll need to log in to your Enphase account and generate a token which lasts a year.

The code is here on GitHub.

Toyota Yaris - won't start "Drive Start control malfunction" - easy fix

My wife hasn't driven her Toyota Yaris hybrid for some weeks and today when she tried to start it was shown a series of alarming errors.

Happily as well as indicating a serious problem with the car, these can also be a side effect of a low accessory battery. I opened the bonnet but there's no battery I could see. Turns out the fuse box has a special place for jump starting.

I charged at 8A for only a few minutes and the car started just fine. We took it for a drive.

FreeDV Sunday net - good turnout VK3, VK2, VK5

Another good FreeDV RADEV1 net on Sunday. My macOS client was acting up so I used the official client this week.

As is often the case there were comments about audio quality. Charlie, VK3ZD, had particularly crisp audio and it turned out that he had cut the bass and boosted treble in the app. I tried the same here but reports came in of clipping so care is needed.

Stations on the net were VK2BLQ, VK2DWG, VK2KNC, VK3FAR, VK3FC, VK3GTP, VK3JCO, VK3KEZ, VK3UBK, VK3ZD, VK3ZTR, VK5ABE, VK5AG, VK5RA and me VK3TPM.

Z80 Turns 50

In this morning's news a great piece about the Zilog Z80 CPU chip turning 50. This triggers many happy memories. I had a Tandy/Radioshack TRS80 clone called a Dick Smith System 80 that I programmed to key the cassette deck motor relay to send Baudot to a teletype. Later I had other boards and even a Sinclair ZX80. 

CP/M with Wordstar was my writing environment for too many years - although I kept using it and some indexing tools I wrote using BDS-C - a fast compiler that I recall arrived on 8 inch floppy disks I had to get a friend to copy over to 5 inch.

My first paid programming work was in DBase II on CP/M. It was such a rich time in home computing with many fine alternatives and new machines on the covers of magazines every other month.

Tech talk on ABC Radio - Telstra outage, smartphone replacement battle & smart TV shenanigans

This week on ABC Nightlife Tech we discussed how the recent Telstra network outage which affected all sorts of things including country trains in Victoria seems somewhat similar to the Y2K bug. The battle to invent the tech product that will displace the smartphone is getting nasty with Apple suing OpenAI over stolen hardware secrets. Your smart TV apps may be using your home internet connection to scan the internet - perhaps it's time to use a set top box for streaming? Listen here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/106915290

101 Things Pi PICO sideband transmitter

The uSDX transceivers are not great but it's amazing that they work at all. An under-powered Atmel processor being able to demodulate and modulate single sideband is incredible. Hans at QRP-Labs has turned polar modulation in to an incredibly well performing radio in the form of the QMX.

What's missing is the technology of the uSDX ported to a more capable CPU and Jon has done that. It's one of a group of amazing bits of code documented here and shared here.

I've taken just on bit of it, the transmitter example and forked it here.

Not sounding great at this point but it does work. What's incredible to me is that there's no Si5351 being rapidly phase shifted, it's all done in the PICO. The circuit is very simple, even more simple than an NE602 based qrp transmitter.

I can well understand why QRP-Labs keeps their software closed source - they'd be put out of business by clone makers in minutes. Having said that, I hope we can one day have an open source equivalent to hack on. Thanks to Jon for his great work.

My analog switch chips, the FST3253, arrived smaller than I expected. My fault! I have some carrier boards but struggle to solder the tiny chips to them. Second attempt worked today.

FreeDV Sunday net - 17 stations, good discussion

Once again I had to move frequency to avoid analog traffic. Not a problem with the Reporter though and we had 17 stations on the frequency today. There was some selective fading but conditions improved as we went along. This morning we were back on 7.177Mhz.

VK2BLQ, VK2KNC, VK2ZB, VK3AOK, VK3EY, VK3FAR, VK3FC, VK3GTP, VK3JCO, VK3KEZ,  VK3PCC, VK3TPM, VK3UBK, VK5AG, VK5FD, VK5RA, ZL2IT. Unfortunately Error in NZ couldn't hear us.

I was using my FreeDV client for macOS. I've been adding some more fancy graphs. (Click to enlarge).

Thanks everyone who joined in.

AI - The god we made

I highly recommend the feature essay in the latest Quarterly Essay titled "The God we made - the threat and promise of artificial intelligence" by Anna Goldsworthy.

My newsagent's penchant for placing their price stickers over the title makes this look like "Arterly Essay" which is somewhat appropriate as Anna is a music academic but is impressively well read in the AI realm including the amazing Dwarkesh podcasts. 

She talks about the impact on writing, music, art, education and work "the bottom rungs of the career ladder have been knocked out".

On education she observes something that I've also thought, that the current crisis in students using AI to answer their assessments is not to be blamed on AI but rather the mass production of assessment.

Apart from her alarm at the high chance that we'll all be wiped out by artificial super intelligence in its quest to make paperclips, she celebrates the capability of AI to help us all educate ourselves.

Spelling checkers didn't make us good spellers. Grammar checkers don't improve our grammar. Will AI Chatbots dumb down our thinking or raise us up to a higher level of enquiry?

Postscript

After reading this I re-watched Spike Jonze 2013 Movie "Her". If Apple ever makes a folding phone he will have been correct in pretty much everything.

Updates to FreeDV Neo

Work continues on my little FreeDV RADE V1 native app for macOS. Feedback from some users bemoaned the lack of fancy visualisations so I've addressed that. The latest version also improves the operation of the Reporter window quite a bit and adds a filter by my frequency option.

More information and a download link is here.

It's great to see all the third party FreeDV RADE apps starting to appear. We have a list of known ones on the FreeDV site here. Let me know of others that I've missed.

Tech talk on ABC Radio - AI is costing us in more ways than one

This week on ABC Nightlife we discussed new data from a study by the University of Newcastle, published in the British Medical Journal, that concludes that more than 80% of teens under 16 are still accessing social media sites banned in Australia. The government has moved to increase penalties but our teens are technically pretty advanced it seems. 

Social media is currently awash with AI generated content designed to encourage division and presumably promote far right politics. 

Finally, Apple has increased prices due to shortages and price rises of components used to build out AI server farms. Other manufacturers have signalled significant price rises as well. AI is costing us all in ways we never expected. Listen here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/ai-is-about-to-cost-us-more-than-we-anticipated/106862726 

Mems microphone to USB Audio

A PDM (Pulse Density Microphone) and a Raspberry Pi Pico. It appears on the computer as an audio input (I changed the name from the original).

All credit for this project to Sandeep Mistry here. 

A recording of how it sounds (pretty good) is here. There's a bit of mic popping - perhaps a pop filter would help.

Applications of this technology are swirling in my mind...

Strain relief for RG58U coax - 3D print

I've been a bit slack with my dipoles here in the bush, the coax just hangs from the PL259. It's been fine until kangaroos catch the coax and rip the coax out. The repair isn't too hard but I thought I'd look for a way to relieve the strain on the connection and ended up with my own design for 3D printing.

It has a channel that the coax fits in to and two cable ties to grip it.

3mm cord lifts the coax slightly so that there's no weight on the PL259. 

I designed it in Tinkercad and you're free to grab it for printing for further modification here. It will be interesting to see what breaks when a Kangaroo goes through it next time.

FreeDV Sunday net - moved to 7.197

For a few weeks we've run in to analog traffic when using 7.177 so today we moved to 7.197 and the frequency was clear so I think we might stay here in future. Most stations figured out that we'd moved so we had a good rollup and an interesting discussion about the proposal to report centre frequency rather than dial frequency in future.

It was noted that Icom radios have an option to tune to the centre but most of us have turned that off.

FreeDV reporter was a little unstable today.

Stations on the net included VK2AWN, VK2BLQ (combination digital voice and valve audio with 6AU6 and 6AQ5), VK2KNC, VK3FC, VK3GTP, VK3JCO, VK3KEZ, VK3ZTR, VK5AG, VK5ABE, VK5FD, VK5JPL, VK5RA and me, VK3TPM.

iPhone mount for monitor top - 3D print

In a video call with a friend recently I noticed that the video was noticably clearer than normal. They were using an iPhone as the camera rather than the camera in the monitor. 

It didn't take long to use TinkerCad to design a simple mount for my monitor. I've made it public here. 

The phone sits nicely with the camera used in this mode just above the monitor's build-in camera.

Here's the device. After the first prototype I went back and angled the phone forward a few degrees.

I use two of these but you can get by with one. My monitor is about 18mm thick so you might need to adjust the hook part for your monitor.

3D printers are such a useful thing in the world.

PicoRX SDR software for a Raspberry Pi PICO

Amazing work by Jon Dawson at 101 Things and others to bring a very capable SDR to the RaspberryPi PICO.

I've forked the project here and had claude write some very useful documentation on the user interface operation.

It sounds great:

You might notice that my display is offset two pixels to the left. The solution is to select the OLED type of SH1106 instead of the default SSD1306. (It seems they are frequently substituted).

Jon's blog post here is very good reading.

If you're interested in building one of these, I'm not aware of anyone selling these boards - you might try contacting the Manly Warringah Radio Society or it's pretty easy and low cost to upload the gerbers from VK2ARH (he designed this board) git repository and get them made.

I've recently ordered Jon Dawson's board from JLCPCB and the price for 5 was US$5 + shipping. (Shipping costs significantly more than boards).

Sunday FreeDV net - diversity of software

A terrific net this morning on 40m here in VK3. We had stations in VK2, VK3, VK5 and VK7. Stations were using not just FreeDV 2.3.1 but also the macOS FreeDVNeo and the Thetis SDR software. One was listening on an SDR that decodes RADE at the Nepean Men's Shed.

There was some SSB partly overlapping our normal frequency of 7.177 so I moved up 2kHz to 7.179. Most people realised but at least one didn't and when they transmitted interfered. In future I'll be careful to move at least 3kHz away. Lesson learned.

Here's some of the stations on the net, if you haven't heard RADEV1 this will give you a good idea of how it typically sounds.

Stations on the net included: VK2AWN, VK2BLQ, VK2DWG, VK3FAR, VK3FC, VK2KNC, VK3GTP, VK3JCO, VK3JF, VK3KEZ, VK3ZTR, VK5ABE, VK5FD, VK5RA, VK7HOB and me, VK3TPM.

Thanks to Stephen, VK2BLQ, for sending this clip of his reception of me in Sydney (about 1000km away).

Tech Talk on ABC Radio - Apple's developer announcements

This week on Nightlife Tech we discus the announcements at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference. iOS 27, macOS 27 and the others will ship to users in a few months. The Siri features Apple showed two years ago seem to be real this time and the overreach in the Liquid Glass user interface design is being dialled back to be more usable.

In other AI news, after the success of the SpaceX IPO, based largely on future profit from their AI component, the other AI companies - OpenAI and Anthropic - are also planning their own IPOs. One model, "Fable 5", from Anthropic was released and then withdrawn for non-US citizens and this highlights a risk to Australians who rely on AI cloud services not controlled by us. Listen here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/106805414 

Sunday FreeDV net - very interesting discussion

A terrific net this morning in south east Australia. Amazingly there has been mobile FreeDV activity during the week! Most people are now on 2.3.1 which resolved a Windows audio issue.

Stations heard included VK2BLQ, VK3APG, VK2AWN, VK3FAR, VK3FC, VK3GTP, VK3KEZ, VK3PTR, VK3YSA, VK5ABE, VK5JPL, VK5RA, VK2DWG, VK2KNC, VK5FD, VK3JCO, and me, VK3TPM.

Several stations said that they'd like an option in the FreeDV app to auto-start the Modem at launch. This is particularly helpful when operating on headless, or small screen Raspberry Pi. I've raised a feature request here but it needs some more backers. Please add your email if you support this.

FreeDV Neo - native macOS client for FreeDV RADE V1

Built for my own entertainment but might be of interest to other macOS hams. FreeDV Neo is enough of an implementation of FreeDV RADE V1 to be usable on air. More info here including a download link. 

This app is not officially supported and you should first use the official FreeDV app from the project.

Tech talk on ABC Radio - SpaceX IPO, emergency communications & PCs going ARM

This week on Nightlife Tech Talk with Philip Clark, we discussed the US$1.7 Trillion valuation of SpaceX (if their IPO goes as planned), NVIDIA's announcement that they're getting in to the personal computer CPU market with an ARM based chip that seems influenced by Apple Silicon, and if you go in to the Australian outback there's a good saftey reason to carry a recent cell phone from Google or Apple. Listen here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/106751536 

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.

Nanoleaf Matter and Thread finally working

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.