Latest entries

Sic Transit...

At the weekend I was at Auchengillan Outdoor Centre, operating an amateur radio station for the Scouts under our club's callsign. We had quite a lot of interest from Scouts and Cubs who were keen to do their communications badges, and from the various leaders too. At some point over ...

Posted by gordonjcp on May 30, 2011

Some Arch Linux packages

I've got a few packages in AUR. A couple of days ago someone emailed me about my package for osm-gps-map, asking why the Python bindings weren't installed - simple, they're in a separate source tarball. So, I set about figuring out how to get them to work in ...

Posted by gordonjcp on May 3, 2011

Happy Birthday ZX81

30 years ago today the Sinclair ZX81 was launched, and the impact it made forged the future of 1.5 million geeks. Costing about as much as a cheap netbook would cost now, you could buy it in built up and ready to go for £69.95 in 1981 money or as ...

Posted by gordonjcp on March 5, 2011

A simple Arduino-based Synth

I've been footering about with Arduinos for a while now, and have been considering using one as the basis of a simple monophonic synthesizer. I ran across some code for a DDS sine generator which described how to use a PWM output to get 8-bit sample playback going. This seemed ...

Posted by gordonjcp on December 6, 2010

Sorting out sound

I use various bits of USB-connected audio gear for different things. At the moment, I have my Novation Xiosynth 25 and a Behringer UCA-202 audio interface hooked up to my PC, and both work very well. There is, however, a problem. When the machine boots, it's a race to see ...

Posted by gordonjcp on October 7, 2010

Recursive Acronyms

I was greatly amused by an article in Feedback in this week's New Scientist about recursive acronyms. Apparently the prize-winning example is "TEB" which stands for "TDIF Expansion Board". "TDIF" stands for "TASCAM Digital Interconnect Format", and "TASCAM" in turn stands for "TEAC Audio Systems Corporation AMerica". And "TEAC" stands ...

Posted by gordonjcp on September 3, 2010

New Adventures in SSTV

In our weekly sked on 2m we had another crack at sending some SSTV pictures. Here are some of the results - unfortunately I've forgotten which modes were used, mostly Martin-2 and Scotty-2.

Posted by gordonjcp on September 23, 2009

SSTV Experiments

Playing about with SSTV tonight, I captured this: Decoded with MMSSTV running under Wine, with my TR-7730 hooked up to the laptop with just a 3.5mm patch lead.

Posted by gordonjcp on September 9, 2009

Apache config for Django and static pages

Although the Django docs describe how to configure Apache to serve up Django and static files, it seems that actually putting all the bits together so that the app, the admin media and the user static media are all served up properly causes a lot of confusion. One further problem ...

Posted by gordonjcp on September 6, 2009

Alesis SR-16 samples

Some of you may have seen or heard of my Alesis HR-16 sample ROM creating tools. To quickly recap, the HR-16 uses compressed 16-bit samples in two 27C040 ROMs with the sample names and start points stored in the 27C256 firmware ROM. It seems the SR-16 uses a similar technique, ...

Posted by gordonjcp on June 24, 2009

New Callsign!

At last the wheels of Ofcom have ground their way through the exam passes sent on from the RSGB, and after passing my Intermediate exam I am now the holder of 2M0YEQ ;-) I thought it best to keep the suffix, because that's the part people recognise. When I got ...

Posted by gordonjcp on June 16, 2009

Mirage tools and other bits

I wrote a little utility to upload samples to my Ensoniq Mirage. It's pretty basic, but it does take a .wav file (or any other filetype readable by libsndfile) and blat it over MIDI to the Mirage. MIDI transfer isn't fast, but at worst it takes about 40 seconds to ...

Posted by gordonjcp on June 15, 2009

Homebrew Supper

What we have here is tonight's supper - a tasty tasty sweet potato, courgette and mushroom pie, some of my most recent batch of homebrew and some home-made bread. I made the pies a couple of days ago and now the flavours have really soaked into the crust. ...

Posted by gordonjcp on May 23, 2009

Google Streetview Car Spotted

I finally spotted a Google Streetview car! The black Opel of doom was parked up in the Asda Bearsden car park as we pulled in, and the guy was taking a polythene bag off the camera head. I didn't get much of a chance to talk to the guy, as ...

Posted by gordonjcp on May 12, 2009

Making a Bootable Haiku Partition

For a while now, I've been playing with Haiku, which is a ground-up rewrite of BeOS. As it's still under pretty heavy development, there aren't really any "easy" ways to install it. The recommended way is to grab a bare disk image. Now, this works well in qemu, but if ...

Posted by gordonjcp on May 10, 2009