I have been thinking about how to provide my Hermes agent with more context about me since we’ll be working together a lot. I figure the more it knows, the better we’ll be able to collaborate. It occurred to me that the largest somewhat structured sources of insight would be things I have written. I started with this blog since it goes back 16 years and then tried an experiment using archived emails.
Continue reading “Hermes: Local corpus analysis”Category: Computer
Lotoroute
In May, we took road trips to Halsou, a small village in Basque country and to San Sebastián, just on the other side of the Spanish border. It was a fair amount of driving and to pass time, we kept track of the number of license plates (registry plates, plaques d’immatriculation) with various French Department codes or European country code. For instance, we live in Gironde, which is département 33 and part of the Nouvelle Acquitaine région with country code “F” for France. A truck passing us might be from Spain with a country code “E” (not ES – these aren’t ISO 3166 codes). A car from England might be either GB or UK, depending on whether their plate was from back when Britain was great or after (2021).
As I understand it, this is a pretty common activity for family car trips — the French are particularly attached to their department numbers (although strictly speaking, the number of your plate no longer strictly reflects where you live). So, I was suprised when I did a quick search that there weren’t apps for some form of road bingo (or loto, in French). So, I wrote one. It’s at https://dhakajack.itch.io/lotoroute and is free to play online.
Continue reading “Lotoroute”Hermes Set Up
Early in June, I set up Hermes as my go-to harness on my MacBook Air (M4, 32 GB). I followed the tutorials at Nous and got it configured quickly with GPT 5.5, and then added some gateway services so I could access it remotely from my phone while traveling. I had been working with Codex, both as an IDE extension and using the Mac App for most of the year, so some aspects were familiar, but there was still a learning curve.
Continue reading “Hermes Set Up”Hangperson
I’ve written a new variant on that old game, hangman, but modernized it just a bit. The game can be played online in your browser at http://templaro.com/games/hangperson. The game play is familiar: guess the missing letters of a word or die trying, but I’ve added some features. First you can play in English, French, Russian or Greek. So that’s a bit different. Also, you can pick your difficulty. A scoreboard keeps track of how many games you have won out of however many you have played. Finally, as you would expect, if you guess incorrectly, body parts get added to a picture and when the last part is added, you lose. There is a different, culturally inappropriate picture for each language.
Migration
Templaro.com has picked up stakes and moved from A2 Hosting to Opalstack. The site started at io.com (io.com) in 1997, the heyday of animated gifs and PERL CGI scripts with now laughable security measures. IOCOM began as Steve Jackson Games’ Illuminati Online BBS (the one raided in the early 90s by the US secret service to investigate conspiracy theories). By he late 90s, it had morphed into a very welcoming early ISP, a favorite of PERL developers. Unfortunately, it was bought out and the new corporate overlords absolutely screwed the pooch.
Continue reading “Migration”Setting up FT8 on the FT-817
I have had exactly one FT-8 mode contact on my FT-817, so I am now declaring myself an expert. I am sure there are aspects of this that I haven’t discovered yet, but what I have works and will get a field test on my next SOTA outing. Before I forget how it all works, I thought it best to make some notes.
Cheap Radio Email
Being in a remote location with limited infrastructure and occasional disasters of various flavors, I thought it would be a good idea to have some options to get email on and off the island without relying on local communication providers. There are some satellite phones around, but a limited number, and bandwidth is still costly. I have found two ways to get email off the island using amateur radio: APRS via satellite and via HF. I managed both with equipment already on hand and no additional expense.
Both systems rely on some sort of gateway receiving station to route the email to the internet. I’ll focus on HF because it is more robust and more likely to be available at any given time of day.
Wifi for the Garage
Propagation has been abysmal, so it’s time to hang out in garage and work on projects. One catch: the garage PC gave up the ghost about a month ago. The Windows 7 computer had been functioning for a few months as a wifi repeater that let me use other wireless devices in the garage. Unfortunately, it looks like a power spike may have taken out the motherboard. I have retired that PC, and came up with a replacement: a linksys wrt54gs router reflashed with DD-WRT firmware and hardware modifications to add a cantenna.
Last week I made a video about putting up the hex beam, and now that I have the video editing software, I made one about the wifi repeater bridge project. Making video is somewhat addictive, so I think there are more on the way. I have a ways to go in terms of production quality – maybe Christmas will bring a better video-capable camera.
On the subject of videos, my home club, the Vienna Wireless Society, is now posting videos of presentations made at the club.
How my antenna switch became a loudspeaker
I envision having a few antennas: the hexbeam, the G5RV, lindenblads for 70cm and 2 satellite work, perhaps a vertical of some sort if I can figure out where to place it, and maybe some kind of beam antenna for six meters. To make all that work, I’ll need some sort of way to bring the lines in the shack and to switch among them. I brought four alpha-delta four position switches, which should be enough to both perform this function and switch the lines to the available rigs. With that intention, I laid the switches on the bench and drew out the wiring diagram.
However, I never got there; not yet, at least. After piling up some connectors and coax and wood, I realized that what I really needed in the garage in order to do this sort of work was some kind of background noise to keep me entertained. So, I pushed the very useful antenna switching project to the side and turned back to the computer that I had fried a few weeks ago by plugging it into the 230V while its power supply was set to 110V.
Continue reading “How my antenna switch became a loudspeaker”
Fried Power Supply
As a public service message, I feel obliged to share the following nugget of wisdom: before plugging a tower computer into a 220V outlet, reach around to the back of the computer and make sure the input voltage select is 220. Sounds simple, right? This isn’t something you have to think about for most laptops, which have dual voltage power supplies. They are happy plugged into either voltage and the power supply brick just works.
I’m not [arguably, perhaps] an idiot – I was aware of the switch. I just thought that the power outlet was off, but also I didn’t expect to encounter an issue until the computer itself was turned on. Wrong — ATX switching power supplies are always on. When I plugged the computer in 220V, there was a popping sound followed by smoke from the back of the unit. Never a good sign.
I pulled the power supply out, opened it up, and looked around. Nothing was obviously charred. My nose has lousy spatial resolution — it confirmed that something wasn’t right, but couldn’t help me localize the problem. I followed the wiring from the outlet inward. For a cheap supply, I was glad to see some decent capacitors on both live and return wires to ground, and across them. Also, some inductors to quell EMI. Next in line: the fuse. It had blended in because as a safety precaution, it was wrapped in heat-shrink. I cut away the heat shrink to reveal a white tube. I couldn’t see into the fuse, but my continuity tester showed it had blown. There was no fuse holder; the fuse was just soldered in by its leads, so I dutifully unsoldered it.