The Other Wax Drum

When I attended the Teacher's Institute ad the ARRL, one of the items included in our swag bag was an Software Defined Receiver, specifically the SDRPlay RSP1A. Binaries for Windows and Mac OSX typically work "out of the box", but not so with the Linux version. The SDRPlay folks posted an excellent video tutorial covering the process of installing the necessary drivers and libraries, and building CubicSDR from source. Here's a summary.

If you're an advanced Mac OS X user, you've undoubtedly come across the .AppleDouble directories and .DS_Store files at some point. Here's a bit of an explanation of their purpose, along with how to delete them and ensure they never return.

I've been a licensed amateur radio operator since 2015, and Mac user since 1997. The combination of these two meant that when I was looking for a logging application for my ham radio contacts, my options were limited, which is fine since MacLoggerDX is such a great application.

I recently found myself remotely installing/upgrading MySQL on a remote MacOS machine without GUI access. It's an old but solid PowerMac G5 running 10.5 Leopard. I couldn't remember how to do this, but a quick search provided the following solution.

The first step was mounting the disk image (dmg):

$ sudo hdiutil attach 

The volume will be mounted at /Volumes/<dmg>

Next, install the pkg file:

$ sudo installer -pkg /Volumes/<dmg>/<pkg> -target /

Lastly, cleanup:

As a Linux user, I've come to rely on package managers for installing various command-line (and other) programs. Under MacOSX, there are a few third-party options that I am aware of: Fink, Homebrew, and MacPorts. Each one has it's benefits, and I've used all three at various times. I found a decent comparison on stackexchange.

My recent upgrade to 18.04 Bionic Beaver went fairly smoothly. The final glitch was getting the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) services running again. I've abandoned the use of Ubuntu for Time Machine backups, opting for a local hard drive solution instead. This just leaves file services utilizing afpd, netatalk, and avahi. My difficulty appeared to be related to the change from netatalk version 2 to 3, but not all my packages were updated in the process.

I regularly access my linux shares from my Macbook, and occasionally when I want to "eject" or unmount the network volume, Mac OS complains that there are files open. One solution is the "force eject" option, but I always wonder if that will leave garbage around in a cache file somewhere, or have other unknown consequences. The solution I've found is to first identify which files are open, then kill the process that's holding onto the file handle. This may not be any better than just using the force eject option, but it makes me feel like I'm i control of what's going on.

So this is fun.

I use the present tense because it's already been a fairly long-term project and the end isn't quite within sight. I've been working with Arduino microcontrollers for a few years now. Becoming a licensed ham radio operator has opened up a whole new world of applications for these little gems. I even bought the book "Arduino for Ham Radio", published by ARRL and authoerd by George Popiel, KW5GP. This is a guy after my own heart.

I've been using Drupal since version 5.2, but lately, I've really started to become annoyed with the framework. OK, not just lately, but more now than ever. Don't get me wrong, I love Drupal. It's just that everything is so complex, and what I really need is simplicity.