Posted on 2026-07-14 If you live in India, chances are that you would have heard about competitive exams. The three big ones held each year are the UPSC exam, the JEE Mains/Advanced exam and the NEET. Kids often write these exams when they are in the 12th class of school (well, UPSC needs a college degree, afaik). For the uninitiated, let me briefly explain them in the order. As an aside, there…
Posted on 2026-05-10 Watched this really wonderful interview with Nick Hacko, VK9DX. Kevin W9DED’s interviews are all interesting and if you are a serious contester, you should watch all of them. But Nick is amazing and he is very very honest. Nick lives
Posted on 2026-05-09 This household mostly has old things. We use appliances, cloths, bedsheets etc as long as possible. We have a tv that was bought in 2008 and still working though raraly switched on. I drive a very old car. My radios are pretty old, the test gear is not too old though. I am typing on a 3rd gen Intel Core i5 based laptop that came out in 2011-ish. My desktop is from 2015 though…
Posted on 2026-03-30 KiCad uses a number of file extensions which are very confusing (to me), so here are some notes to myself on what they are: ‘ .kicad_sym’, ’ .dcm’ + ’*.lib’: These represent a KiCad symbol uses in Schematics. Prefer the kicad_sym as those are the ones used in newer versions of kicad. ’*.pretty’: These name a directory containing a bunch of footprints for different types of…
Posted on 2026-03-27 While watching this talk on mutexes , early in the talk, the presenter shows a slide with a tiny bit of rust code where I learnt about std::hint::blackbox function. The function is essentially an identity function. The documentation gives some very clear explanation and an example. It is very useful to prevent a value from being optimized away by the compiler. The…
Posted on 2026-03-25 I have an old Thinkpad x230 and it has Coreboot instead of the regular bios. The wireless card is an atheros card that does not need binary blobs to run. When I try to boot 9front (the most maintained Plan 9 fork), it gets stuck pretty early without initializing the graphics card. The solution pointed to, by a few folks on the 9front list, is to use grub to chain load the…
Posted on 2026-03-19 In this post, I want to draw some parallels to the erosion of homebrew culture among radio amateurs with the way computer programming scene is getting changed with the advent of LLMs (often termed “AI” in corporate speak, I would rather use the original technical term, LLM, in this post). In the 70s and 80s and even the 90s, hams built their own equipments. The reasons are…
Posted on 2025-12-30 A good old friend, Raghavendra Bhat (also known as “ragu” among friends) passed away on Dec 14th following a couple of years of struggle with Cancer, he was only 63 years old at the time of death. I have about 27 years of friendship with Ragu. I first heard of him when I first got into the internet in 1998 when I went to do my masters degree. I was already a GNU/Linux user at…
Posted on 2025-12-06 I had a totally unexpected CQWW CW 2025 experience as a guest op at the Royal Omani Amateur Radio Society station, A44A in Muscat last weekend. Our team Anton (RN1B/RT9T), Ashraf (3V8SS), Dmitry (RA5FA), Mohib (A41JZ), Khalid (A41CK), Sangeeth VU2TT/A41TT and myself (VU2JXN). Weeks before the contest, we formed a messaging group to exchange ideas. I started some morse runner…
Posted on 2025-09-28 Several good articles exist on the web on the perils of working with the foreign function interfaces and making assumptions one way or the other. Most of the time, we are in the “unsafe” territory (it is literally being at country borders where one can get shot down from a bullet that can come from anywhere). I have this “forever” project where I am porting an old “legacy” C…