About a month ago I started a new site for my professional pursuits. The first post is a little project I did to keep an eye on a frequent packet user who behaves suspiciously. Many other local sysops have blocked this particular user from connecting, but I did not want to block him without concrete evidence of bad behavior. I put on my tinfoil hat and tried to imagine some scenarios where this user’s activity would be considered malicious, debunked them, and finally created an alert in my logging system and sent the log to a little Python listener that updates the bottom of the post.

My friend Sam, KF0ACN has been bugging me about Hugo and static site generators lately, and convinced me to switch back to a static site from Wordpress. He even took the trouble to convert my existing content for me. So anyway, after some touch-ups, here it is, back in markdown rendered to HTML once again. This site has also been an interesting learning experience in some mild CI/CD. The site updates automatically when I commit changes to my git repo which I think is really cool.

It’s been about a year and a half since I last posted about the GS5B. The takeaways from my initial impressions have remained about the same. My GS-5B has gone on a few trips and the Bluetooth programming has been as nice as expected. The radio normally lives in my desk drawer at work. I have a great view to the west from my desk so I have used it to monitor a couple of Skywarn nets.

I was the fourth place winner of Radioddity’s 2020 Black Friday raffle. Proceeds from the raffle are to support the ARRL’s spectrum preservation fund — a worthy cause given the fate of the 9cm band. When I received the notification I was a winner I got pretty excited. I was hoping to win a GSOC for my G90 (or even another G90) so I felt a little let down that it was “only” another HT to add to the fleet.

It’s been a few years since I wrote a post for the site. Sadly, the blogging software I was using on the old site was a bit of a barrier to frequent posting. Originally I chose PicoCMS for the site due to it’s lightweight nature and markdown syntax. Unfortunately the “Magazine” theme I chose used too much custom HTML and Javascript to make writing in markdown a reality. Each post ended up being written in HTML so at that point why bother with a CMS.