New year, new possibilities, same old stuff. I got a bit
lazy over christmas and new-years, as you can tell. Work got
really hectic and I didn't really feel like doing much of
anything. But I have been up to some shenanigans lately..
As the price of electricity went up a lot here, I have spent
a fair amount of time optimizing servers and things at home.
For now I have replaced my big workstation with an Intel
NUC, and all servers have been condensed down to another
Intel NUC that uses about 4W where it sits. So I'm saving a
lot on power there. All this makes it ever more amusing that
I'm wrinting this on a VT100 terminal clone from 1983. It's
a Plessey Peripheral Systems PT100 unit if you're curious.
It's connected to a Raspberry Pi 2, that is housed in a
suitable early 80s Schroff Eurorack enclosure, in a
wonderfully bland poo-colour. Speaking of that Raspberry
Pi.. I had to reinstall it the other day after several
failed attempts to patch a several year old OS install that
simply didn't want to behave anymore. I'm thinking about
doing one of those 1-week challenges with this terminal, so
me writing this post on it is partially to test it out to
see if it's realistically doable.
On another note, I am also a radio amateur, so today, after
getting some energy back after a man-cold, I pulled out an
old shortwave receiver project I made a few years ago. It's
a so-called dicrect conversion receiver, which is a very
simple, yet effective type of receiver. It however does
require a signal source in order to be tuned and function.
So there is a microcontroller inside the thing, that
controls an AD9850 DDS signal generator. After putting the
project back together, and upgrading it with Lithium
batteries instead of the, now totally dead lead acid battery
it had before, I discovered that the DDS module is dead, and
not outputting any signal.. So that project has been put on
the shelf for the moment, while the replacement DDS
module(s) are on their way from China.
This post is also going to be the first one I'm
auto-formatting. Until this point I have been manually
putting in line breaks and such. So if this looks weird,
don't blame me, lol.
