This account is primarily focused on my amateur radio activities, but I have myriad other interests, and occasionally post non-ham-radio-related content.
I am a long-time licensed amateur, but took a fairly long break from the hobby, coming back into it in Summer 2024. I operate primarily HF, including a fair amount of POTA (activating and hunting). You'll find me on FT8/FT4 regularly, quite often on CW, and frequently on SSB.
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@scott Oh, not me… that’s well beyond my capabilities. @pheller did that work, and it was to emulate the Digiboard multiport serial cards that TBBS used back in the day, among other tweaks. Phil’s also who rescued my old TBBS system.
I’m hoping that perhaps at some point I can run the whole thing in a Docker container or something.
There’s a ton of back story here for another day…
@scott Also, is this available to the masses yet? I’ll need to fire up SyncTERM and come visit.
@scott My attempts to resurrect my old CoBBS failed, but I have a working copy of my last and final BBS, running multiline TBBS inside a heavily altered DOSBox, and maybe it’s actually time to just… Go there.
@scott With the broken way that my broken brain thinks about tasks and projects, I hope it's great enough for me to put-up with... 😂
@k8vsy I love Pihole, and couldn't live without it. In fact, the misery that is the internet without it is what primarily drove me setting-up WireGuard.
Wavelog's proven to be superb, honestly.
Geek on!
@mauvehed It's been pretty cool, but honestly, pretty uncharacteristic for me...
So much #geek this week...
Set-up a CA to make my internal cert struggles go away. Set-up #Caddy reverse proxy in #Docker. Solved the TLS issues on #Wavelog, #NextCloud, and #Pihole (RasPi). Stood-up a #Vaultwarden instance in Docker + migrated passwords. Stood-up a second Pihole in Docker so I can maintain the first one without losing DNS functionality. Set-up #Linkding in Docker so bookmarks are centralized. Next? #Vikunja in Docker.
Does this make me a Linux sysadmin?
Is this floor talking to me in Baudot code?
4/4 Interestingly, the guy who wrote #CoBBS back in the 80s is Richard Duncan, WD5B (then, WB5CNV). I'm sort of inclined to get in touch with him, just to let him know someone was thinking of his little side project from 40 years ago. 😉
3/4 TBD if it sees the light of day, but I have a design document whipped-up. Certainly support for SyncTERM over SSH, but thinking it might be cool to have a packet-radio-friendly access point to make it work in a limited way with #hamradio / #amateurradio. We'll see.
While it didn't end in success, the trip down #BBS memory lane was really fun.
2/4 I also discovered that I'm missing a dependent component originally used by CoBBS. Worse still, there actually were some bad sectors that #Greaseweazle couldn't recover, which isn't surprising for diskettes stored for multiple decades.
After revisiting the old days with this, I have a hankering to do some coding, and decided to write a new application similar in scope and style.
1/4 After spending a lot of time this weekend trying to resurrect my old #CoBBS #BBS from recovered diskette data, I've decided it's not going to happen, and set about deciphering and archiving data instead.
The xRoar CoCo emulator doesn't emulate the hardware needed to run CoBBS; the VCC emulator is for CoCo3, not CoCo1/2, and doesn't work properly. I'm not willing to buy real hardware to try and resurrect things.
Believe it or not, CoBBS was written in BASIC, and published in Rainbow Magazine from 11/85 through 2/86. Slow is an understatement. But with intact data from my very first BBS just as it was when I took it offline and moved to a PC clone, I’d sure like to get it working. Getting closer and closer via VCC running on my one token Win-blows machine.
@particlesbbs Man, that brings back memories.
In other news, I’ve been working the past several days on figuring out how best to resurrect my old CoBBS system (Color Computer 2). I started down this path a year ago and gave-up; I’m already much farther along. Maybe at some point, it’ll work. At least my old diskette image rips are showing the data was, in fact, intact after several decades.
@Ronguest I’ve got three or four bottles of it in different colors. Lasts forever, and performs beautifully. And the pen is a Metropolitan of some type, am I right? I have several, but my favorite is one with a calligraphic tip. I’ve never had great penmanship, but that pen brings it out of me somehow.
@Ronguest From all appearances, we're using the same model of pen and brand of ink. Albeit different colors... 👍
Wow, amazing!
And with respect to falling apart, that's history that's often repeated. A company with a real legacy is acquired, cherry-picked, and eventually killed-off, or at least diluted into nothingness inside a corporate behemoth. Or so it feels, anyway.
@masek Thank you for sharing that! What a great website, and lots of history I was unaware of!
I keep trying #hellschreiber; saw on HamSpots that someone got a partial copy, but no logged QSOs yet. One of these days...
Oh wow! Now here's an honor I've never had before in all my decades of hamming: Being someone's first CW contact! How incredibly cool... ❤️
