Every now and then I needed to make a Windows installation USB from Linux and forget how to actually do it. Some notes:

After remapping my grave-tilde `~ key to its original function for my Keychron K6 on Linux, I coudn't help but wonder how those keys are implemented scancode-wise on 60/65% keyboards. FWIW, on a ANSI layout keyboard, the tilde ~ symbol exist only on the second layer of grave-tilde `~ key (by pressing Shift + `) and this is handled by the operating system. So how do these small-form-factor keyboards manage to enter the ` and ~ with manufactors' choice of modifiers?

I recently revisited the idea of using a 65% keyboard with the purchase of a Keychon K6. The setback back then that turned me away from this form factor was the lack of dedicated grave-tilde key (`~), and as a programmer and heavy terminal user that was a deal breaker to me. Turns out it is pretty easy to remap it in Linux (Sway/Wayland).

I was confused the other day while trying to understand what the DIP switch 4 on the Filco Majestouch Convertible 2 does. The manual says:

The whirring fan noise from my headless linux server in my living room has been annoying. Most of the noise, in my case, comes from the graphics card cooling fan. I was curious if the GPU would overheat if I run the machine with the GPU fan unplugged. Below is a little expriment I did.

The 2m J-pole, in particular one made out of copper tubing, is amazingly popular among the amateur radio communities. Ease of construction, especially for beginners is probably the prime reason for its popularity. For the same reaoson, it was the first antenna I have ever built.

Last year I had no luck in receiving the April ISS SSTV event, as the RTL SDR antenna I had back then turned out to be broken. John from South East Communication was kind enough to ship a replacement to me without having the ship back the broken one.

For a very long time I have been baffled by how the DHCP server of my DD-WRT router would crash whenever I added staic DHCP leases.

For some reason, Chrome decides that it's a good idea to forcibly override the opacity of a selected element in HTML, despite one specifiying a background colour for ::section. This problem seems to be most prevalent when the page has a dark backgrond colour.

If you noticed in your DD-WRT Wireless tab that some wirless devices are connected/stuck in legacy mode, one possibilty is the incorrect choice of WPA algorithm being configured for your AP.

A soft 404 is a 404 page returned by a web server that has a 200 success HTTP code. When a 404 occurs, the 404 HTTP error status should be returned (of course).

A small pain point of being an amateur radio operator in Australia is the ancient technology one has to put up with- in this instance, the search of other licencees via the the ACMA RRL registry. The website is dated, and more importantly, slow- on bad days it could take almost half a minute to process a single search.

I have recently accquired a couple of Diamond VHF/UHF dual-band portable antennas, each with different (or no) gain on 2m and 70cm amateur bands. I wanted to see to see how much of a difference they would make.

A quick memo of how to use iperf/iperf3 to test network speed between two machines.

By default logging into dd-wrt via ssh the pre-login sshd banner looks like this:

DD-WRT v3.0-r42054 std (c) 2020 NewMedia-NET GmbH
Release: 01/21/20
Board: Dlink-DIR880L

I use Avahi on all my linux devices on my home network so that I can connect to devices using <hostname>.local instead of local IP addresses. This works well with Mac OS's Bonjour too and is arguably better than assigning static IP addresses to each device on my network which requires maintanence.

I recently signed up to NBN for my home (finally) and in the process of setting up DDNS and public ssh for my router, I notcied the WAN IP reported from my dd-wrt portal is different to my public IP. The reported WAN IP looks like 100.xxx.xxx.xxx.

When I first started fiddling SDR, the very first experiment I ran was to receive and decode airplane's telemetry data. That's esseitnally how the crowd-sourced FlightRadar24.com gather its data - people worldwide set up their radio station to receive airplanes data and contribute received data to the central source.

One of the fun things you can do with RTL-SDR (well, SDR really) is that you can decode pager traffic, with the POCSAG protocol in particular. You'll be surprised to find that many hospitals still transmit unencrypted pager data over POCSAG.

I have done quite a few round trips driving between Melbourne and Sydney since the start of this year. The enormous amount of time spent on the roads has made me looking into CB (Citizen Band), which is used by truck drivers for communication. It eventually led me to the interesting hobby that is Amateur Radio.

It's been more than 11 years since I spun up my first Wordpress site back in 2009. Back in the days, 000webhost was one of the go-to choices of free web-hosting. It was the age of PHP, MySQL, LAMP stack. The site was short-lived, and have never existed for any purpose more than self-experiment.