Getting Started Learning Morse
Morse code is suprisingly (to me!) fun. Want to learn?
mkj’s musings
Random thoughts from mkj (mcdanlj, johnsonm, MichaelKJohnson, michaelkjohnson), collected from old blogging attempts, Google+ (RIP), and now newly written here.
Latest posts
Advice from my first year of learning Morse code
Learning Morse code has been a good struggle for me this past year. I’ve averaged somewhere between half an hour and an hour per day of drill for the whole year, and taken only a few days off here and there. (This is more than most people need. I’ve had to work through some early mistakes.)
Reflections on a year of ham radio
When I was about twelve, I was captivated by the idea of “ham” (amateur) radio and wanted to become a ham radio operator to talk to people around the world. A lot of the learning was easy enough for me, except for two things: I had great trouble memorizing all the frequencies, and the way I was taught Morse code was by memorizing visual flash cards.
Death of a fridge
Eight days shy of nine years ago, I got lucky when my new fridge I had purchased arrived hours after the previous unit died.
Fedora Linux on Lenovo T16 gen2 Intel
My 14” Lenovo T490 laptop broke, so I bought a 16” T16 Intel gen2 to replace it. I chose Intel instead of AMD at least because it was required for the highest resolution screen, and I think it mattered for memory configuration as well.
Deploying Mastodon on CentOS 9 and derivatives with podman
Warning: May 2023 I have given up on using podman due to multiple permissions failures with SELinux that I never resolved. I have moved to only runnning Mastodon on docker.
Deploying Mastodon on CentOS 9 and derivatives
I recently found myself setting up a Mastodon server. Elon Musk threatening to buy Twitter reminded me how fragile it is to live in walled gardens controlled by others. I know something of what it takes to run large-scale applications in the cloud. It’s my job. (Senior Director of Engineering, Platform, at Pendo.) I have some clue what it costs, and I’m not upset at being presented advertisements…
Delicata
About a year ago, my father introduced me to delicata squash. So tasty, and so easy to prepare! There are lots of recipes, but just to show how easy this is, here’s mine:
Dangerous Pumpkin Chiffon Pie
Part of my family heritage appears to be to risk illness on some special holidays. Chiffon is made with never-cooked egg whites, so there’s a real risk of salmonella from this pumpkin chiffon pie. But my grandmother made it, and I make it almost every year in her memory. My version uses less sugar, more pumpkin, and a bit more spice than hers, but it’s still the tradition.
Mail Loop
My package is “running late” and has been “out for delivery” quite a few times now. It wandered of to New Jersey for a while before returning to North Carolina.