Taking Stock

I started out by looking at what I had, and figuring out what to work on first. Immediately, I noticed memory usage was a little higher than I remembered. Looking closer, it seems the most likely culprit is simply the libraries being loaded - there’s a few:

• libjpeg
• libpng (statically linked into the core dll since the makefile built a static version)
• libcurl
• openssl (pulled in by libcurl, though I might use it directly later)
• cJSON
• zlib (needed by libpng)

Of these, openssl is the largest. I’m not actually using most of these right now, and I am actually tempted to use a design which does not depend on libcurl, however I’ll still need openssl (or similar).

This tweet says it all really:

New RC2022/10 entry from @mich181189
Platform: Windows 2000/XP
Project : make a Twitter client for Windows 2000/XP (maybe also Win 98). Maybe Retro Challenge is enough of a motivation to revive this project?
It's going to be an awful twitter client, but I think it should work!

— RetroChallenge (@retrochallenge) September 28, 2022

So yeah… I signed up for the Retro Challenge 2022/10, my project is a Twitter client that’s compatible with Windows 2000/XP and maybe even Windows 98.

Over the weekend, I operated a special event station, GB4LHS to celebrate the London Hackspace reopening in Wembley, and also to demonstrate amateur radio to visitors at the open day. Some things worked really well, other parts of the setup could really have done with improvement. In this post I hope to describe the details of this.

Some Statistics

• Total QSOs: 76
• FT8: 68
• SSB: 8
• By Band:
• 17m: 20
• 20m: 20
• 40m: 36
• Countries Worked: 36
• Most Contacted: Federal Republic of Germany (13 QSOs)
• Time between first and last QSO: 23 hours

I have actually operated a special event station once before – I organised GB50SWN back in 2007 for JOTA. At the time I only had a foundation license, however with the (mostly quite distant) supervision by the full license holder, I made a total of about 4 contacts over two days. I comfortably beat that “record” at least! I’ll admit I actually set myself a slightly higher target for this event of 100 QSOs – but I’ll take 76 as close enough. Now I think about it, I might actually have got a few more if I had managed to get set up earlier and therefore got more sleep the night before, hence probably started again earlier.

In a previous post, I loaded up a bowl of custard with an ATU. I called the post “Custard Antenna” however, really, it should probably have been titled “Custard dummy load” – with both antenna wires immersed in the bowl, the custard was no doubt mostly behaving as a resistor, with any pickup or radiation likely to be on the wires – though removing the wires did also prevent it from receiving, which does make me think it might be behaving as a somewhat lossy loop antenna. I chose this format not because I thought it would work as an antenna, but because the whole thing was inspired by the phrase “tune a bowl of custard” so I wanted to take it literally.

Some time ago, someone said of their ex-military antenna tuner “it would tune a bowl of custard if you asked it to” – this got me thinking, could I make my MFJ-971 antenna tuner literally tune a bowl of custard?

I’ve always been interested in strange antennas, having stumbled upon the K0S Strange Antenna Challenge many years ago. Sadly, the original website no longer seems to be around, however there are still references to it online, such as a post from the organiser, Erik Weaver N0EW, on eham: https://www.eham.net/articles/10721. Essentially, it’s a special event station that uses only non-standard items as antennas. The example given was that of a tent pole: if you just stick the tent pole in the air, that’s not really a strange antenna since it’s just a bit of metal. If, however, you put the whole tent up in a tree, that’s a strange antenna.

Note: The Pi3 figures in this may be questionable since I have since discovered it was overheating and scaling its clock. A future post will address this. Since I’m interested in real-world performance though, I’m not going to completely discount these results since overheating is a factor to consider!

The other day I came up with a slightly daft idea: deploy the website I’m currently developing to a cluster of raspberry pis rather than my usual Linode setup. Seems like a crazy idea? Yeah, probably! But I still want to try it!

The cool thing about shooting film is the choices! There are so many films to choose from – some are fairly basic, day-to-day films, some not so much. I have tried quite a few films, so here are some notes on them. There is some overlap with the Amsterdam On Film

Cinestill 800T

I’m going to start with the most interesting, at least for me. I’ve only actually shot one roll of this, but I enjoyed it enough that I have another couple of rolls ready to go for when I next get a decent opportunity to shoot it. It has a wide latitude (though I did find mine ended up being a little thin, there was still a very nice usable image on the film). I’ve mentioned it before in this series – it is based on Kodak Vision3 500T – they estimate it to be around 800T when processed in C41 (that’s “standard” colour negative processing) but I’ve seen tweets from them claiming it is usable in the range ISO 100-1600 or so without push/pull processing! (though they do say the optimal range is 500-1600)

Every year, I leave the country for my birthday. I’ve done this for five years in row now, and I have no intention of stopping this trend. This year, I spent 5 days in Amsterdam.

Every year, I take more camera gear than is sane and spend a fair amount of the trip taking photos. This year, I included a film camera in this. I haven’t counted, but there’s a strong possibility that I took more photos on film with a 50mm lens than I did with my 24-105mm lens on a DSLR (compare this to my week in Berlin last summer where I took ALL my photos with that lens on a DSLR).

This post is the first in a hopefully regular series of posts about film photography.

Inspired by a combination of Boredom, YouTube videos, and that nagging feeling I should do something with those rolls of film I put through a Holga a couple of years ago, I’ve been shooting a fair bit of film recently. In fact, I have acquired more than one film camera from eBay recently. Mostly inexpensive, and most recently one not so inexpensive one.

I figured it was time to clean up a bit. So I started a new blog site to replace my old one. I might move the posts over, maybe, one day…