Recently, I (Joni OH2EWL) accidentally ended up participating in a amateur radio contest. I was checking in pskreporter.info how things looked like on 6-meter band, and noticed that there was an unusual amount of local (to Finland) FT8 activity going on. Intrigued, I set the station up in the balcony and tried to get into the action. Which didn’t work out right away because, although I noticed that the traffic didn’t look normal, it took a while to understand that what was going on was “EU VHF Contest”. Read more...

One of the nodes in my home Kubernetes cluster is running gpsd, and has a cheap GNSS receiver connected to it. Recording what the receiver sees and presenting that in a Grafana dashboard sounded like a nice idea. I wanted to use Prometheus, which is already running, for this. Main lesson: pay attention when sending stuff on a Go channel; go run -race helped here. The repo has more details. Read more...

This was long overdue but I’ve finally switched to a modern static site generator. The old system was written by myself in Python 2 many moons ago, and adding posts consisted of writing plain HTML into a monolithic XML source file, then deploying to S3 where Cloudfront served it from. Porting the Python 2 code to Python 3 would’ve likely been tedious, and would’ve still left me stuck with HTML. Read more...