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curiousfab

1,162 karma · joined August 15, 2014

RF and embedded systems engineer & jack of all trades

contact: xx13hjjq@duck.com

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curiousfab··on Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)
Ctrl+i (Firefox)

Not generally useful to show this by default, because nowadays most pages are dynamically generated and although it's technically easy to implement, the last modified header is typically not set to $now.

curiousfab··on Ask HN: What email service(s) do you use for your side projects?
A VPS @ Hetzner, exim4. No problems with deliverability.
curiousfab··on Taking a Radio Camping
The variation in local noise between different locations is huge. As an apartment dweller and radio amateur, this is something I am fighting every day and in a densely populated environment, the noise floor changes all the time, depending on which neighbor operates which electrical device at the time...

The amateur radio community is very aware of the problems and several initiatives have been launched to quantify the effects. One of them is the DARC's ENAMS, which is described in detail here:

https://web.tapr.org/meetings/DCC_2020/DK5HH/F_ENAMS-DCC-DK5...

curiousfab··on Cloudflare automatically fixes Polyfill.io for free sites
Setting a dangerous precedent, especially doing this by default (no opt-in) needed.

But then again, if the people who carelessly include 3rd party dependencies (i.e. playing with fire) are those who use CF... they probably won't object to it :-)

curiousfab··on How automotive radar measures the velocity of objects
Typical FMCW radars transmit very short ramps (microseconds) at a very long (relatively) intervals (several ten milliseconds), i.e. a duty cycle of less than 0.1%.

In order to create interference between two radars, the ramps have to overlap pretty exactly, within a few nanoseconds of each other. This is very unlikely to happen.

Modern radars employ technologies to detect and/or avoid such collisions.

Overall it is not really an issue, even with many radars in crowded spaces.

curiousfab··on Ask HN: What do devs use for quickly setting up a feedback form?
I am running a few websites which have a simple feedback forms which POST to a simple PHP script that sends me an email.

By filtering for a few keywords, you can get of 99% of the form spam.

Deliverability has never been an issue for me since (of course) I run my own mail server. But I doubt it's a serious issue when you take the little time it takes to set up DKIM etc.

I wouldn't make it more complicated than it has to be :-)

curiousfab··on Fobos SDR: 14-bit, 100 kHz to 6 GHz SDR, up to 50-MHz bandwidth, receive only
Depends on what's "usable" for you :-)

This SDR won't be able to compete with expensive high performance receivers that have a lot of pre-selection, but there are many examples of low cost SDRs that do a surprisingly good job on the HF bands (without too much pre-selection).

I suppose the performance in the HF range will be similar to KiWiSDR, AirSpy, or the RedPitaya. If you want to know how well they work, there are many KiWiSDRs online to listen to :-)

The interesting part is certainly that it delivers 50 MHz bandwidth up to 6 GHz, which exceeds e.g. what the ADALM Pluto can do.

Certainly an interesting product at an attractive price tag. I consider getting one!

curiousfab··on Shave and a Haircut
Interestingly Wikipedia says the Morse version of it is

  Morse code "dah-di-di-dah-di, dah-dit" ( –··–·   –· )
IMHO more common is to send "ESE" (. ... .) - and the other station replies "EE" (. .)

https://lcwo.net/ext/player?z=MjR%2BfjIwfn42MDB%2BfkVTRSBFRQ...

"ESE" is a popular Amateur radio call-sign suffix among Morse enthusiasts for that reason.

curiousfab··on Ask HN: Best open source and/or free EDA tooling
KiCad. It's very stable and offers features that some of the professional programs lack. Extensive part library built-in, and easy to extend. Under active development.
curiousfab··on Signal Identification Wiki
If you find "wave hunting" this interesting but don't have a SDR / receiver of your own, there are plenty of (free to use) WebSDRs to get started: http://websdr.org/
curiousfab··on Qalculate – A multi-purpose cross-platform desktop calculator
Fantastic tool. It also has a command line version which has almost completely replaced `bc` for me.
curiousfab··on Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany
From an average of significantly below 500k to almost 2.5M users. This drives up the global number of connecting users from approx. 3M to almost 5M.

Hard to imagine that so many people in Germany suddenly switched to TOR, especially since there has not been any significant event lately that may have triggered such a decision (afaik)?

My personal experience with TOR (as an administrator of various websites and services) is that it is a major source of unwanted/malicious traffic (spam, etc.) and most of it is automated. The big increase is probably not users but bots?

curiousfab··on Warning: Geomagnetic K-index of 4 expected; electron 2MeV Integral Flux >1000pfu
There was an X flare at around 19 UTC:

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/goes-x-ray-flux

Bands are still doing fine over here in Europe, but I guess the US was hit with it in full force.

curiousfab··on Warning: Geomagnetic K-index of 4 expected; electron 2MeV Integral Flux >1000pfu
As you can see if you scroll down the page (with many alerts of a similar magnitude in the last weeks), this is nothing unusual, solar disturbances of this level happen all the time.

We are getting closer to the peak of solar cycle 25 and increased solar activity is to be expected for the next few years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle_25

Good for radio amateurs (simply speaking, more solar activity results in better radio propagation opportunities), potentially a risk for satellites and power grids.

curiousfab··on Licensee Hit with $24,000 Fine for Jamming Net, Failure to ID
There were many such cases in the past.

https://www.arrl.org/news/glenn-baxter-ex-k1man-sk-engaged-i...

https://www.arrl.org/news/radio-amateur-to-pay-7-000-face-re...

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-15-1375A1.pdf

curiousfab··on Show HN: Learn German with Short Stories
That would be really helpful because taken out of context, single words translated to English will often produce very confusing results. My suggestion would be to ditch the google links and provide a properly translated version that is revealed when hovering over a word/phrase. Such a translation could be crowd sourced.
curiousfab··on QSL Card
Some hams take this very seriously: http://g3txf.com/QSL-Office/QSL-Off.html

Great collection, constantly updated: http://hamgallery.com/whatsnew/

curiousfab··on Tell HN: DuckDuckGo's privacy extension is adding an inline popup to web forms
The description of this extension explicitly tells you it will do this (integrated email protection). Works as advertised?
curiousfab··on Ask HN: What is your replacement for Google search
95% happy with DuckDuckGo. For the rest, I resort to Google.
curiousfab··on Ask HN: How do you choose your usernames?
I may not be under the jurisdiction of the FCC :-)

Some countries publish full records, others just names, others nothing at all.

curiousfab··on Ask HN: How do you choose your usernames?
On most sites I use my amateur radio callsign (HN is an exception). It's unique and very unlikely to be taken already.
curiousfab··on Ask HN: What RSS Reader do you use in 2022?
rss2email + mutt
curiousfab··on Self Hosting a Google Maps Alternative with OpenStreetMap
As a solution in between, for those who want to include a OSM map on their website but don't want to put load on the official OSM tile servers, a simple tile proxy may be a good idea.

I am using something based on https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/ProxySimplePHP5 for a long time already and since I don't need to have up to date tiles every day, I set the TTL to a few weeks.

Together with leaflet this works beautifully.

curiousfab··on Building a private LoRa network (2017)
FWIW, for building your own private network, there is no need to rely on something like TTN (hosted by someone else - isn't that a contradiction in itself?). ChirpStack (https://www.chirpstack.io/) is a very mature and easy to deploy LoRaWAN suite that's worth looking at!
curiousfab··on WinPopup (2001)
No screenshot, but when there were several messages you could go through them with the arrow buttons that are grayed out in the screenshot.

Not very advanced but 'good enough'.

curiousfab··on WinPopup (2001)
Oh yeah - when we finally had laid RG-58 coax from downstairs up to the attic around 2000, my mom used Winpopup to tell us kids to stop playing Duke Nukem and come down for dinner.

Good times!

curiousfab··on Internet Archive Seeks Material for Library of Amateur Radio and Communications
This is a mammoth task but an important one. I wonder if there's a way to collaborate with existing collections of historical Amateur radio data, such as the famous "QSL Collection" from Vienna: https://www.dokufunk.org/index.php?lang=EN

I think they have more material than probably anyone else in the world, but much of it is "offline" (partly digitized but not web accessible).

Another huge collection of historic QSL cards, bios of deceased radio amateurs and other stuff: http://hamgallery.com/

curiousfab··on OpenStreepMap 2012 vs. 2022
HN hug of death :(

It showed/shows a side-by-side view of Open Street Map 2012 vs. 2022.

See https://shtosm.ru/all/verni-mne-moy-2012/ (or translated: https://shtosm-ru.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x... )

curiousfab··on Building Flexible, Low-Cost Wireless Access Networks with Magma
I recommend to have a quick look at https://github.com/magma/magma#readme first to get an overview of what Magma is, before going into the details.
curiousfab··on Association between meatless diet and depressive episodes
Maybe people who are vegetarians have a more compassionate way of thinking, making them more prone to depression?

I.e. they're not depressed because they're vegetarians, but the other way around?

Just my spontaneous thought when I read this.

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