Tony’s Cafe

I’ve been putting together plans to get G-NET2 working — a wireless data link between my house and my friend’s house 6-7 miles away. I tried a few different antenna designs to work with WaveLAN cards and no luck yet! Each antenna design was a learning experience — after making each antenna, I’d review what I did wrong and try to make a better antenna. Now I think I’ve come up with a good antenna design but to test it, I decided to use a phone (voice) mode instead of data. If I test the antenna with two 900MHz radios, I can at least hear Doug on the other end and see if he’s coming in strong… or not at all.

I did some research on (of course) cheap 900MHz radios. Now that I’ve had my ham license for a year, I’ve learned lots of good stuff about radios and antennas. I learned that a cheap way to get on 900MHz phone is to convert a commercial 900MHz radio. Most commercial 900MHz radios transmit over 1 Watt, the unlicensed limit. Since I have my ham license, that is not a problem! I settled on the E.F. Johnson 86xx series mobile radio. Here’s what I did…

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My brother is a 1970s fanatic. When he was an undergrad, he had a disco ball in his dorm room and many 8-tracks to go along with it. For his birthday a couple of years ago, I decided to get him a hi-fi stereo component 8-track player/recorder. Now that my brother had an 8-track player in his Buick, it was time to get something that could record on 8-tracks. (MP3 to 8-track conversion, anyone?) After doing some research, the Roberts “Rheem” 808D (similarly packaged as the AKAI CR-80D) seemed to fit the bill for a good piece of audio equipment. Unfortunately after a few months in service, the audio began to disappear. Since this piece of 8-track hi-fidelity (a paradox?) equipment is around 30 years old, the electrolytic capacitors might be on their way out. As with the Seeburg Sunstar I’m restoring, any electronic device over 30 years old with electrolytic capacitors probably needs all the electrolytic capacitors to be replaced. Since I don’t want to try to hunt down a service manual for the Roberts 808D, I opened up its chassis, noted all the electrolytic capacitors, ordered them and replaced them. If someone else out there is looking to repair their Roberts 808D to listen to their STONE GON’ Barry White 8-track, hopefully this list will help them! I know I wish this list was out there for me to begin with…

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I miss the days of Citizens Band (CB) radio — back in the 1970s and 1980s, the “Golden Age of CB” — where everyone seemed to have a CB. I guess CB could be compared to a cross between Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and push-to-talk (PTT) cell phones today. There is something else, though, that CBing always afforded. You can chat while driving. If anything could bring strangers together to “shoot the breeze”, talk about common interests, or find out what lies ahead on the road, CB is it. It’s free to use and the one-time equipment cost is less than a one year cell phone plan. The problem is, where is it today?

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This is a plugin that satisfies a simple need in WordPress. A function that returns text from one post (the most recent) for one category. That’s it! Save the Get Recent Post plugin to your wordpress/wp-content/plugins directory, then remove the .txt extension. You can see it in action on my site’s front page sidebar, with the “Site News” category.

(Versions of Wordpress prior to 2.3 will need to use Get Recent Post 1.3.2.)

Update: New Release! Download version 2.0 of Get Recent Post. This new version will ONLY work with Wordpress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, 2.6.x, and 2.7; it is not compatible with earlier versions of Wordpress. Please use version 1.3.2 of this plugin for older versions of Wordpress.

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“I think it’s gonna be an UNREAL night!”

I am an advocate for excellent games that don’t need the latest and greatest hardware to run. More specifically, a fun, networked first person shooter that can run on an Athlon with 256MB of RAM! Unreal Tournament 2004 is one of those few games. A few years ago, the demigod of DOOM, Fred, gave me the Special Edition of UT2004. This particular edition comes in a silver case with a stereo headset mic and UT2004 on a DVD. To this day, Fred and our friends still play this game. I wanted to install UT2004 on a Linux box — so here are my notes on doing so on Debian Sarge.

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Well, it’s time to give my arcade posts their own home. This hobby of mine has definitely taken on a life of its own! I’ve created a proper new site and migrated all the arcade posts there. Update your bookmarks to include http://girasoli.org/arcade/

A coworker of mine told me about a billboard time capsule, so to speak, that is in an adjoining building to our office. The billboard had been in a hallway that had been locked off to card key access for a long time. A few years ago, that hallway was opened up for access to a new cafe. A short walk, down the formerly blocked dead-end hallway, around a corner, and there it was. A pristine glass billboard, no staple or tack marks, with three bills. The billboard looked brand new… and the building was built in 1974! The post on the left was for a ski wax service, no doubt by a student for students. On the right were two computer related posts…

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I’ve been told I should write some “less tech, more anecdotal” posts. (Mostly by friends who are tired of reading posts like how to build a Commodore 64 RS-232 interface.) OK. So, in that particular post, I referred to a null modem network I designed called G-NET. G-NET was the answer to our frustrations with data connectivity in our dorm, Grange Hall at UConn, in 1992. In 1989, data jacks were installed in all the dorms on campus. Most of them, like the ones in Grange, were not active. (As a side note, the Grange data jacks didn’t become active until sometime around 2000. 8 years too late! Although, had I decided that being an undergrad was a career…) These inactive data jacks taunted us by saying, “Play Modem Wars with your 2400 baud modem, fool!” We wanted something more; something high speed… something in the 38400 bps range. (That’s 0.038Mbps up/down for you broadband compares.) I figured I could probably make some kind of serial null modem network, at least between two nodes. Something that could run over telephone wire. Something with an intercom. Ah yes, I would create… G-NET. What follows is the story of G-NET, schematics, and photos of the Grange Hall dwellers that participated. (The following photos were taken with an Apple QuickTake 100 back in December of 1992.)

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I’ve always been interested in computer mediated communication. When I was an undergraduate and should’ve been studying, I wrote a terminal program in PASCAL to get two XT clones to communicate to each other. This led to the creation of G-NET in 1992 (short for Grange Network, as I lived in Grange Hall at UConn). G-NET was a null modem serial network with a party-line intercom that used telephone wire. I digress… that is a completely different story! At any rate, before the G-NET days I had my Commodore 64 (C64). I always wanted my C64 to be able to communicate with the world but I couldn’t afford a modem at the time. Not to mention monthly dialup fees! Years later, I discovered Jeff Ledger’s PETSCII pages. On his website, he details how to connect your trusty C64 to Internet Commodore BBSes (and Q-Link, no less!) via a PC. I decided I had to make an interface for my C64 to do the same.

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There have been plenty of times where I want to implement a simple daemon in Debian Linux. I know, I know… I could just install a Debian package and have the daemon created for me (if it’s included). There are times, though, where I want to compile the latest version of an application (like Asterisk). Also, I might want to compile darkice with lame support. (Darkice only has ogg support in the Debian Sarge package). Preferably, I’d like to create a daemon which sets mixer levels then runs darkice. I’ve found various tutorials and howto docs on the Internet but they haven’t been simplified enough. This post will outline a straightforward way to create a daemon in Debian Linux. In this example, I am running Debian Sarge.

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