Tech Talk on ABC - with Cat Marks

Close readers of this blog will have noticed that I do a national radio talk about technology every fortnight but this week I was away on a hike. The program was looking around for someone to contribute the spot and went for my daughter Cat. 

It might be seen as nepotism except for the fact that she's much more qualified and certainly smarter than me. Here's her spot: 

The UK has just taken its first step into the Robotaxi era, with Wayve's self-driving cars now available to book through the Uber app; but there'll still be a licensed human driver in the front to take over if needed. 

Communications Minister Anika Wells has announced that the draft Digital Duty of Care law will be introduced into parliament this week, including a requirement that platforms offer the ability to 'opt-out' of their algorithms. What does this all mean?

Cat Marks, data scientist and Principal at Ember Advisors, joined Philip Clark and listeners to Nightlife with all the latest in tech news. Listen here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-cat-marks/107131014

USB-C Power on Airbus

On the trip north to the recent walk I was lucky enough to fly on a couple of different recent Airbus planes in the Qantas fleet. The last one was an A220 which has this USB power port on the seat back:

Having bought, and tested, a few Chinese chargers, I'm a bit sceptical of the Watt claims on USB-C ports but I'm happy to report that Airbus is telling the truth. The macOS WhatCable tool is very handy.

Yep, 20V at 3A = 60W. Great stuff. 

The internet connection on the A220 tested at 18Mbps which is fine for general use. The plane I caught up to Sydney last week was a brand new Airbus A321-XLR and the internet speed was outstanding:

Malcolm Turnbul wouldn't need this speed but I thought it was great to see it.

Yuraygir coastal walk

I've just completed a beautiful 65km walk along the coast in Northern New South Wales.  The Yuraygir coastal walk started at Yamba and ended at Red Rock.

Along the way are stunning beaches, charming bush tracks, and a bit of rather challenging rock scrambles. To mix things up there's a couple of river crossings, two of which required boats to pick us up.

You really can't do this without support and in our case the trip was supported and guided by Marcus from Home Comforts Hiking. 

Walking south is certainly the best way to do it. We had the sun, and usually the wind at our backs.

I'd just left Drummond, Victoria, where it was 10C and I'd had the fire heating the house and arrived where it was 30C for much of the walk.

Happily I did not suffer from any blisters or other mishaps and felt faily fit probably due to my daily bush walks at home. Having said that, my feet were a bit sore at the end of each day but recovered by the morning.

Our guide Marcus did a wonderful job and the logistics all worked well bar a coffee shop that didn't open as advertised for breakfast one morning.

The walk is very well maintained by NSW Parks. We met a few of them along the way who were preparing for the visitors in the months ahead. 

There were frequent patches of no mobile coverage. I have an iPhone 17 Pro on Telstra and was pleased, for safety reasons, to see that it often showed "SAT" as the provider. When I tried to use data it shows this:

You can however send and receive iMessages. I tested this and they seemed to go through without delay.

Of course the high end iPhones also have satellite emergency contact which allows me to call for help in dire circumstances. I think these are fantastic features that help to justify the price of these phones.

The hike was a great experience and quite a contrast from my regular daily life in the cool bush by a warm radio.

Tech talk on ABC - Google preferred sources, the X algorithm, and cutting the price of hearing aids

Have you noticed those new "Make this a preferred source in Google" buttons appearing on news websites? What do they actually do? 

Could choosing your trusted news sources help support journalism in the age of AI summaries and algorithmic feeds? 

Also, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled “Value misalignment of X’s feed algorithm” found, unsurprisingly, that the site’s algorithm prioritised engagement above all else when it generates a users “For You Page”.

What’s been revealed is that rather than simply showing more of what we agree with, the algorithm is deliberately mis-aligned in that it shows us things they know we don’t agree with so that we are prompted to comment on it, often angrily.

Finally, in the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates hearing aids and last week they approved Samsung Galaxy Earbuds under a category of “over the counter” hearing aids.

This follows a similar decision in 2024 about Apple AirPods Pro. Having the two biggest manufacturers of smartphones able to sell hearing aids at a fraction of the price of prescription products: $400 rather than $4,000 is a major win for people with milder types of hearing loss.

You can listen here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/107077464 

Vale Hansen Yee

Beloved next door neighbour Hansen Yee aged just 82 has died.

Hansen was charming, modest and clearly intelligent. He was Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Sydney University. Aparrently a brilliant student. 

After his wife Cora died, he joined us for Xmas dinners and was a lovely part of our children's lives. He tutored daughter Cat in Maths. 

Vale Dr Hansen Yee BSc BE PhD, MIEEE.

CYD Ham Dashboard

The "Cheap Yellow Display" boards are a low cost board with an ESP32, a colour touch screen and a bunch of other useful I/O. I've long used them to display my solar stats (generating, using, net). I just noticed this excellent project HenrysCat esp32-cyd-ham-dashboard. There's an excellent web flash tool which works well.

It can roll through seven screens (you can turn some off if you wish). Here's a few:

The web flash tool shows this. I used the first option.

But my screen came up mirrored so I tried the second. In that case the screen was blank white so I went back to the first. When it boots up it creates a Wifi network with a captive portal. I found that the setting default to mirrored - which seems like a poor choice.

It's a great gadget to stick up in the shack. Great work to HenrysCat and claude. Source code here.

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.

Pain points of running macOS 11

It's getting harder to operate on macOS 11. (Not as bad as macOS 10 which I initially installed - Safari's certificates have expired and it couldn't load any web site with https). Here are some notes on software versions that work:

• BBEdit 15.1.4 https://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/updates.html#up151
• Obsidian 1.10.6 https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-releases/releases#release-v1.10.6
• NetNewswire 5.0.4 https://netnewswire.com/old-versions.html
• Chrome 138 https://google-chrome.en.uptodown.com/mac/download/1095647884

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.