Teaching an old dog

Things change so quickly, especially at my age.
Once upon a time I had good control over how the blog thing here was working.

current workspace in my ‘lab’

Years go by, and things change. I have spent several days re-figuring-out the WordPress editors and how they deal with old legacy widgets, and theme options. Kinda like going back to work…

That being said, I have changed (more than) a few things around, trying to preserve as much of the previous functionality as possible. I’m still hoping to be able to continue to use the “blogroll” widget, even tho they discourage sharing links of our friend’s pages… (reduces your ‘ranking’ in Gooooogle searches).

There is still some old stuff on here to be cleaned out, but this is a great start towards rejuvenation.
Feedback greatly appreciated, subscribe if you are even slightly interested.
Promise to not blow up your INBOX.
/;^)

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The day Facebook went down.

Nobody knew what to do.
I’m sure millions of people had nothing to do for a while.
Someday they will look back and say “I remember exactly where I was . . .”
Some folks sent email, others woke up their blog, or a MySpace page.
Some engineers at Facebook had their hands full.
The engineers at Cloudflare keep some interesting logs of internet traffic, and generated this blog posting – for those of us who were interested in the detail.

Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet

So, life goes on – and I am learning how much the WP editor has changed over the last year or so. I plan to be back here posting a bit more regularly, soon – as they say. /;^)

Visio (in pixels) !!

For years I have suffered thru an absence of ‘pixel rulers’ in Visio.
I understand that a pixel is a screen concept, of different dimensions on various display screens… not going into that here. However, I frequently use Visio to construct various image files to fit into an exact space – and resort to using a 2nd program to finally scale my image file to the exact fit ( in units of pixels).

Apparently, in 2008 Noah posted on his blog (ComplexDiagrams.com) an article describing how to deal with this. Unfortunately it was years and years later before I found it (in 2014). But I did, and it works for me, and I will use it often.

A screen shot and quick explanation from Noah :

(from ComplexDiagrams.com)

Why it works Picas are 6 to the inch. By setting the ratio at 1:16, Visio presents a diagram at 96 picas per inch, the same as the Windows standard of 96 pixels per inch. You could set an appropriate ratio with any of the available units, but it works well with picas, and I find it useful that all units are labeled as p.

Thanks Noah ..!..  /;^)

Annual ARRL/ARES SET

That is almost too much alphabet soup.
What that means is that every year those of us that do ham radio, like to test our skills with a large scale exercise – most often coordinated at the state level.
Please read more about ARRL/ARES.            Exercise, Exercise, Exercise…
         “Test what you fly, and fly what you test. . . . . . . ”

Hmm, mobile email via VHF radio – could be useful. (and fun) /;^)

My goal this year was to operate my VHF Winlink email from the Subaru.
I also needed to activate the MSFC club station WA4NZD for the exercise.
So, I setup the stuff in the passenger seat, and drove to the club station. There had been some power-grid work earlier in the month at the Fox AMC (host site for our Winlink Internet Gateway) and it had only returned to service the day before the Simulated Emergency Test (SET).  I have a 4G/LTE modem available, and could have also operated the mobile station as an internet gateway if needed.
Someday soon, I’ll test the HF mobile capability as well.

The N4WGY-10 gateway was easy to access from WA4NZD, and a few exercise-related messages were sent. I think I heard Bill/KB4NEI check in directly from FAMC as well.  This is a great resource for the community and I’m glad to see even a few dedicated users checking it out weekly, with their own station ‘s readiness review.  Perhaps I can update the W4HMC website with the latest version of the Communications Plan diagram we used as a baseline this year for our SET.  If you are not yet registered with the Madison County ARES group – and want to be a part of this, please check our HMC RACES.org website.

There were several nets activated, and lots of check-ins.
Sounds like a good intro for a future post…

Thanks  /;^)