Cool Geek Tricks

Screws

[From mid-2008] My dishwasher’s been making a bad grinding noise that, I think, is the remnant of a broken coffee cup sloshing around in the sprayer assembly. I noticed the screws holding this on are the TORX shape. This got me wondering about the type of screws available and what their trade-offs were. Enjoy! The […]

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CWT – a CW Contest

I’ve been learning Morse Code through CW Academy. One of the things my instructor has encouraged is getting on the weekly contest, CWT, which runs three weekly, one-hour sessions each Wednesday:  1300Z (6am PST) – mostly 20M, some 40M 1900Z (noon PST) 0300Z (8pm PST) – mostly 40M, some 20M early, 80M later  During the two

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Michigan – Part 2

(Notes to self, Continued from part 1.) Sault Ste Marie – I’d originally planned to spend a full day in Sault Ste Marie, but that fell apart when I opted to go to Mackinac Island the second time.  Since I had to claim my Ontario geocaching souvenir, I crossed the border to hike on Whitefish Island

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Rocinante

I’m a pretty huge fan of The Expanse, having read the first three books, listened to the audio books narrated by Jefferson Mays, watched its first three seasons a few times, added Belter easter-eggs to internal company email, and adorning my laptop with MCRN and Remember the Cant stickers. The TV show is gorgeous in

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Fourth of July

Part of the vetting for Eastside Firecorps included taking the first set of FEMA‘s Incident Command System (ICS) courses online: ICS 100 – Introduction to Incident Command System ICS 200 – ICS for Single Resources and Initial Action Incidents ICS 700 Introduction to the National Incident Management System ICS 800 National Response Framework The overarching

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Setting up FT8

(Updated 2022-03-08: links to JT-Alert tutorial, K4 setup tutorial; added links to Meinberg NTP and Grid Tracker; updated screenshots of PSK Reporter & WSJTX 2.5.4) Download and install the latest distribution from the WSJT-X project page. The documentation is well-written and useful. Please, pretty please, verify your system clock is set accurately. Seriously. The FT8

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Fun with FT8

(For setting up FT8, go here.) Setting up WSPR (Weak Signal Propagation Reporting) was done in preparation for playing with the two-way digital communication modes. The set I was initially aiming for is JT9/JT65, named after Joe Taylor, for very short messages that can be received far away, in noisy conditions. What makes this work

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