M0YNG is the callsign of a radio amateur in Gloucestershire. This is a smolnet website available via Gopher and Gemini and HTTP.
Three years ago I wrote mastoWelcomer , a python script to semi-automate the process of approving new accounts on mastodon.radio. Since then I've made some changes and documented them in the original post, but I've recently made a few more and added a new feature, so I thought an update post might be good. Fixing QRZ check Originally I was using pyQRZ, which worked well enough but wasn't written…
Note: I started this post in March 2026, and didn't do much with it until late May. Much like I didn't do much with the radio setup! I've finally gathered all the bits required to covert DC into AC that bounces off the ionosphere again. Well technically I have the equipment to covert the carrier wave from a few hundred THz and re-radiate it at a handful of MHz. (I can run off solar power.) The…
Let me tell you a story of storage and suffering (and also some notes for future self) Several years ago I bought a buffalo NAS, it has/had 4×2TB drives in it. After I got frustrated with the built in OS I forced it to run Debian using Debian_on_Buffalo and foolishly made the main storage pool RAID5. It worked well enough, kinda slow (the CPU was not up to the task of RAID5!) but it worked and…
I've posted about the Charge before, in 2022, when I'd had it a few months and done 160km on it. Since then I've done over 2000km and it doesn't make sense to me. Charge The Mycle Charge is a "fat tyre folding electric bike". It has fat tyres which come with "puncture resistant tyres" (spoiler, they're not that resistant) which are nobbly. Great for loose surfaces, mud, etc. But that doesn't make…
On / In my house I have a 4.4kW (peak) solar array (facing West), a 3.6kW (peak) inverter, and a 9.6kWh battery for storage. I've posted about this system before, so have a look at the tags to find other posts. So, we generate electricity in the sun and store it in a battery, we can also charge the battery from the grid, and send both back to the grid. We can also track the real time cost of our…
The Amateur Radio Inclusivity Pledge is great! I've been meaning to add it to my site for ages now (one moment ... done! See About ) and Mastodon.Radio has been listed as an Organisation we love for some time. Accessibility is a key foundation for inclusivity, but it sounds like there may be some issues ( "I'm very much an amateur on the web design front" ) so let's see if we can help. Although I…
flohmarkt is "A decentral federated small advertisement platform", think classified ads like eBay used to be. midzer asked for help checking the accessibility. Although I am a professional accessibility consultant, this is not a paid for audit and I am not using all my usual tools (as I'm not at work!) so it's probable that I've missed things. I've also not looked at every facet of the service so…
Fuck twitter, anyway I've just deleted every tweet I posted since I joined in 2008 before deleting my accounts. I threw this code together to do it, it sucks, it doesn't work without needing to refresh the entire page often, but it does work. go to your profile, then "with replies", then open developer tools and paste this into the console, then when it seems to stop working refresh and do it…
My long suffering and much used (and abused) MacBook Pro 13" (retina) from 2013 finally gave up recently. It's had memory issues for some time but mostly was able to keep going. Untill it couldn't and I get a full screen error one day and it would no longer boot. At some point it had gained a "retro" rainbow apple sticker over the apple logo, and a wood veneer (real wood!) which had been stickered…
I've often got multiple things plugged into my computer, for example a USB to serial cable for the TNC and a different USB to serial cable for CAT control of my HF radio. These usually show up as something like /dev/ttyUSB0 and /dev/ttyUSB1 . The problem is that the order is not always the same. Sometimes a reboot results in the devices swapping number and suddenly your software can't talk to the…
The Dell DA-2 is a power supply for, I don't actually know. A Dell computer of some sort I assume. They're popular for running external GPUs, and can be easily modified to supply 12v at up to 18 amps, aka 200 watts with no fan and (in theory) decent performance etc. So, let's modify one to use as a radio power supply! (Please ignore the continuity errors, I took the photos after doing the mod and…
I got solar panels, and a battery, and a heat pump! Be prepared for an info dump. I've been writing this blog post for a month now, so if there are things missing or questions unanswered ... sorry? Maybe I'll do an update next year. What do I have, what is it? Why? Getting it Checking my privilege Solar Heat Pump Living With it Heat Pump Checking my privilege again Solar + Battery Data and control…
Well, effectively infinite anyway. I <3 my Beepy and use it a lot, something which is hindered by the fact that the stock charging current is limited to 100mA due to a 10k resistor on the TP4054 charging IC. So, I ordered a bunch of tiny resistors and got the soldering iron out. Increasing charge current The charge IC is limited to 500mA so although the 2000mAh cell could in theory take a full 2A…
I'll admit this is a bad a title, but there isn't a snappy way to describe this. Why do? Not all electricity is created equal Maybe you've never thought about this, but not all electricity is created the same way, and every method has a different environmental impact. Plus the way the electricity delivered to your home is generated changes throughout the day, week, month, season, and over years.…
The Anycubic Vyper is a pretty good 3d printer, in my experience of only ever using two 3d printers. It has a bowden tube, which means the extruder (that pushes the filament into the hot end) is a good 30+ cm away from the hot end so, can it print using TPU, a flexible and soft plastic? YES! Go slow This seems to be key, print slow, very slow. I'm finding 20mm/s works well (20 being the top speed,…
I've had this bike for a few months and covered around 160km (100 miles) so thought I'd share some thoughts. What is it? It's a bike of many features! I won't copy the entire sales pitch but the things that sold it to me are: It's electric It has good range - claimed 65km! Fat tyres for various terrain and bad roads Folding It retails for £1,599 but I got it on the Cycle To Work scheme, which…
It's been around a month since my "Thoughts on the TwitterMigration" post and things seem to have calmed down again, so I thought I'd take some time to pull together some thoughts and numbers for you all. Previously ... After 4 years of fairly steady increase in users mastodon.radio got an influx. We went from less than 100 new users per month to 111 joining in the final 4 days of October, or 28…
It's been about a week since "The Bird Site" was purchased, lots has been written about that, and lots has been written about Mastodon, but I've not spotted much about the impact of the influx on servers like mastodon.radio, so here are some thoughts. A ramble, so beware. Brief History Mastodon.radio started in 2018, for a long time it ran on a single core VPS with 4Gb ram. Then when an influx…
I have a few project ideas currently pending parts, budget, time, etc. and I wanted to write some of them down so they can get out of my head! There is a lot of ESP stuff in here ... Page Content Page Content Penkesu Computer ESP Solar Server Fix the APRS Solar Setup ESPHome Video Doorbell "Smart" Laundry basket Remote "HomeScreen" Remote WLED DishWasher Monitor ESPHome Flashing Service ESPHome…
Page Content Page Content Background Proof of concept Current version The Code Rules Canary? Some workflow optimisations [November 2022] Make Alex do it [November 2022] The updated code [November 2022] Background NOTE: There is an update post in July 2026. I run mastodon.radio, and I have it set to require approval for new accounts. I also like to welcome every new user. This can result in delays,…
A while ago I spotted some "Smart" 4-way power plugs "Reduced to Clear" in Tesco from £30 to £7.50 - so I bought two. They are named "CALEX Holland Smart Power Plug 4-way / 4 USB", and are still listed on the Tesco website at £30 They use tuya - as so many things these days do, and I excitedly began the process of using Tuya-Convert to convert them to use the ESPHome firmware. Sadly these devices…
I've wanted to build a keyboard for ages now, and the Penkesu computer needs a keyboard, so my first forray into the custom keyboard world was to build a koda keyboard by odd-rocket Sourcing components PCB I needed to get PCB(s) made, which isn't something I've done before. I went with JLCPCB on the basis that people like Big Clive dot com use them. The process wasn't too complex, but I did end up…
I'm currently babysitting a 3d printer, it's a "GEETech i3 Pro C" - apparently. The end goal is to make the Penkesu Computer, but first I need to get the printer working as well as possible so I can print the case. It's a fairly basic device from what I understand, manual bed levelling for example, but has a heated bed and two extruders. Aligning the nozzles for these to be exactly the same height…
Who wants a smart home that stops working if the internet is down, or the OEM goes bust, or wants to charge you extra, or ... Not me! I have a couple of TP-Link Kasa "Smart Plugs" because they were fairly cheap and they can be controlled from the command line by using python-kasa or Thomas Breydo's thing however, they still (try to) talk to their OEM a lot and at the time I needed to use the app…
Note: This is not a full write-up of my solar power APRS radio, I will do that one day, honest! I've been running my APRS RF iGate purely off solar power for a few months now, and we're at an interesting time of year for solar stuff, so I thought I'd quickly note down some observations as the seasons change. Quick history Some time ago I wondered if I could press a 20w solar panel and 7.5Ah SLAB…
Today I made the source of Complex 19 available, so I thought it would be a good time to write a little bit about Complex 19 itself, and why it took me so long to release the code. What is Complex 19? Complex 19 is a Static Site Generator which takes in Markdown and outputs Gopher, Gemini, and HTML. It can do: Blog posts (like this one) Pages (that you want to stick around for longer) Make a page…
mastodon.radio has an XMPP server, which is mostly there because I wanted to see if I could. WIth some help from Mike it even authenticates using the user's mastodon account ( mastodon xmpp config file ) but none of that is relevant to this! Danie van der Merwe wrote Matrix is interesting in that it bridges to lots of other networks. So we have a #hamradio-za IRC channel at Libera.Chat, but it can…
eQSL is a cool idea, I have some reservations about it (most useful features are paid for, control over cards is limited, card size is small, the site is clunky) but it provides all the thrill of QSL cards without the delay ... or something. Anyway, I can see my cards in cloudlog, which is great, but there isn't an easy way to just browse the cards (that I know of) or get a copy of them. When you…
I couldn't resist the raspberry pi pico any longer, and I also got a pico display to do with it. This is a pico sized hat that sits directly onto the pico and provides a nice full colour screen, RGB LED, and 4 buttons. After playing with the demo code I wanted to try something myself, so I thought I'd try making a name badge of sorts, and using the pride flag as the background. Then I wanted to…
prefers-color-scheme is the magic sauce to get CSS to care about the user's preferred colour scheme - aka DARK MODE. For a little while you have been able to toggle the theme on the HTTP version of my site between a dark theme and a light theme, but I wanted to respect your choice and present the theme you are most likely to want based on this CSS property. Obviously this won't work with older…
'cos I can't document this in just one toot... #!/bin/bash # Tell the server hostname and today's date echo "Visitors to $( hostname ) on $( date +%d/%b/%Y ) " # Search nginx log file for today's date and slice it up to get just IP addresses, then sort them, then get just the unique ones, then count them HTTPV = $( grep "\[`date +%d/%b/%Y`" /var/log/nginx/access.log | cut -d " " -f1 | sort | uniq…
Ok, I have to hold my hands up here. I screwed up. I broke the mastodon.radio server and I shouldn't have. I'm sorry. Here I'll try to walk through what happened, and how I fixed it. The initial mistake I thought it would be a good idea to add nitter as a service to mastodon.radio, I thought as people using the server are actively NOT using twitter they might like a proxy to view the odd tweet,…
I've been playing with the Gopher Protocol and the Gemini Protocol and thought it would be interesting to make some things accessible over Gopher. I was interested both from a "gopher seems fun, maybe it could work over the radio" and "I have an old netbook here that might be interesting to use rather than a full laptop" and "this looks like cool tech". Here follows a story that could be used to…
What is it? TL;DR - a small low cost APRS tracker, which uses an arduino and a radio module. Recently I was handed two kits with the understanding that if I could get both working, I could keep one. F4GOH's blog post has more info, but not quite enough to make it easy to just pick up and build. I have one working, now I'm going to make the other, and document the process to help anyone else do the…
I don't have any analytics on this site, but it would still be nice to know if anyone is looking... and something reminded me of the hit counters we used to have back on the old web. They were almost always a graphic which showed a number that increased every time that image was loaded, I don't think I ever made one so I'm not sure how exactly they worked. I wondered if I could combine a bit of…
In part one I knocked up a thing to let me know when various things in my house needed updating. This works well as everything I wanted to keep an eye on is running Debian (or a variation of it) and is on the same network. But, what if I wanted to keep an eye on something not on the same network? I could open the firewall so the remote system could directly POST updates, but that wouldn't be very…
It's an obvious problem to me that I have too many computers, and keeping on top of which have been updated recently is... not simple. I've finally got around to making a semi solution, using a bash script and some PHP! Is there a better way? Almost certainly! Would it work easily and quickly on even a raspberry pi v1 and zero without stopping them doing the thing I want them to do? Maybe not.…
Recently I discovered some spare parts from past projects, and ended up with this, a battery powered Raspberry Pi Zero W. But what to do with it? A few ideas came to mind or were suggested, such as a portable DMR hotspot, POCSAG transmitter, and others. But one idea came together from a few other bits. What if I could have a WiFi hotspot that served content, rather than the Internet? What if the…
Who doesn't want to post messages to a social network using APRS? It's an idea I've been not-really working on for a while, and I've had various iterations. One would watch the log files of APRX and toot weather reports heard off the air. This one connects to the APRS Internet Stream and lets people send an APRS message to M0YNG-15 , then have it tooted by @APRSBot (it toots "Followers only" so it…
For a while I've used Traccar for friendly stalking of things, and it works well. But it is very feature rich, which isn't always what you want. I'd heard good things about Owntracks , and it seemed to have a good balance of features and performance. However, the documentation is as far as I can tell mostly a list of things you can do, rather than details of how to actually set anything up, and…
A note from the future that goes at the start I started working on this nearly two month ago, and I've not had time to get any further with it. So I'm going to post this now, incomplete as it is, in the hopes it might be useful to someone else, or my future self if I get back to it at some point. Some background Recently I was too tempted by the seemingly very good price of the Baofeng dm1702 DMR…
Recently I managed to have some success with FT8, which was great! But I didn't want to have to log contact manually. I've also started using CloudLog (which you can view at https://log.m0yng.uk) I looked around and didn't find anything simple and native for Linux to do this log uploading (I'm sure there are things I didn't find, but 🤷) Previously I've (ab)used a handy Python script by Giampaolo…
I get bored playing games like Snakes and Ladders, there is no skill, just luck with a die. I wondered if I could save the time and effort of actually playing the game, and just let the computer tell me who wins. Not by random selection, but by actually playing the game for me. So, using Python (obviously) I knocked up a thing to play it for me. I based my code on this travel game I used to play.…
A little while ago SP6MR pointed out that Pi-Star now supports POCSAG, a pager standard. I know pagers are basically dead, but who cares, this is Amateur Radio! So, after a couple of false starts with pagers bought off eBay that I couldn't modify, I bit the bullet and ordered a new pager from China 🇨🇳 which was suitable for use on the 70cm amateur radio band. Easy! I'll spare you the details of…
In September 2019 I gave at talk at The Cheltenham Amateur Radio Association about APRS. I'm far from an expert on the topic, but I was told I didn't say anything that wasn't true, so take from that what you will. This post won't try and replicate the talk, but it will try to be a companion to the talk, and hopefully cover the same material for those who weren't there. What is APRS? It is…
It's been nearly a year since I last posted on this blog. Oops. In my defence, I've spent a lot of that last year working on mastodon.radio , a twitter-like social network for the Amateur Radio community. I should write about that too... I've been inspired by a range of other cool blogs and websites I've seen in the last year that are static, or very minimal in both design and code. That, plus the…
This Opinion Piece was written for the October Edition of "CARA News" (the Cheltenham Amateur Radio Association 's newsletter), but I wanted to share it more widelly, and see what people make of it. This toot by Adam MU0WLV got me thinking the other day: FT8 is great for learning propagation but it can be like watching fish in a tank.. interesting yet boring… it's most definitely not the death of…
When I first visited a hackspace I was introduced to the rules, most of which I have since forgotten, but rule 0 stuck with me. Don't be on fire. The standard power source for portable operation is the SLAB, always heavy, often bulky, but reliable and pretty resilient to charging and high drain operation. However, mine weighs 3kg and only gives me 7.5Ah of power. It's also almost as big as the…
After deciding that 7+kg handing off one arm wasn't ideal, I've invested in a sturdy rucksack. It's 28 litre, so "small" but a good size to fit the radio and kit into, without too much room for things to flop about and break. It has lots of sections and pockets, which is great for organising stuff, and MOLLE loops, so in theory I can hang stuff off it too. Oh, and it's black "British Terrain…
Continuing my attempts to get out and about operating radio (and points) I've been up my local "big hill" and activated Cleeve Hill. Supporting the aerial was a bit easier than on the beach, a couple of bungee chords around the bench and the pole was nice and stable. The bench also proved more comfortable than the beach pebbles! It was also interesting to see how many people stopped to talk and…