gopher://aussies.space/1/~freet/phlog The free-floating phantasms resident in the mind of The Free Thinker, brought home to you in 68 columns of plain-text purity by the kind generosity of your local neighbourhood Gopher. en-au https://cyber.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html Tue, 16 Dec 2025 09:36:00 +1100 gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2025-12-16Something_New_in_the_Cupboard.txt SOMETHING NEW IN THE CUPBOARD There's a phlog post I've been failing to finish for weeks, and while writing it I was reminded of the collection of Electronics Today International (ETI) circuit book scans that I assembled about a decade ago. ETI was an electronics magazine which, in spite of the name, seems to have been mainly an Australian pulication. Alongside Electronics Australia it was popular in the 1970s and 1980s, when they got into the habit of publishing circuit/project books compiling past articles and submissions. I've built some of the circuits, and it's also quite thought inspiring just to read through. I do however have a habit of forgetting about these books and instead finding half-baked electronics projects on the internet for which better alternatives are already in them on my shelf. Years ago I had the idea that I should scan the contents pages and most interesting articles, so I could look at them from the computer as easily as websites. So about a decade ago I obsessively scanned in a whole lot of them, and... completely forgot I'd even done so. Yeah it didn't work at all, and indeed I see now there are again some projects I scanned which would be good alternatives for projects I've since copied from sketchier online designs. But, always keen to find some content other than my own moanings to fling into the Gopherspace, I've now decided they're a good fit inside The Cupboard: gopher://aussies.space/1/~freet/cupboard/ETI_circuit_book_scans/ Although ETI hasn't been on newsagent's stands for decades, I do know that the rights were bought by Silicon Chip magazine which has made some effort at getting ETI and EA magazine scans taken down from websites in the past. It nags a little at my law-abiding nature to share them here, even though I think it's really dumb that documents like this that are 40-50 years old are still under copyright protection for decades to come. But since the government changed the political party minimum membership rules and killed off my ability to vote for the Pirate Party and similar democratic representatives of better copyright laws at recent elections, I now feel less inclined to respect the system. By the way, any names written on the corners of pages aren't mine. Like most things of mine these circuit books are all second-hand. Requests to scan in articles I didn't bother with but are listed on the contents pages will be considered. - The Free Thinker gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2025-12-07No_Time_to_Type.txt NO TIME TO TYPE Well I've been busy getting nowhere for too long, and now I'm starting to get somewhere with a few of the things I've been trying to achieve, which only makes me busier trying to get further with them. Still plenty of things that needed to be done a long time ago which haven't been started. Still no extra financial reward from any of it. Oh no that's not true, I made $1000 from the AI bubble. Since hypocrites win in this world, and I keep losing, I figured I'd invest $2000 into some semiconductor companies a year or so ago and sure enough the value went up by almost 50%, so I sold almost $1000 worth of shares. Now to see if the bubble lasts long enough for that to happen again and I can earn back my full initial investment and still have shares in some major companies (indirectly via an ETF)... Actually when the bubble bursts and the price does crash I'm hoping to put a lot more money in as a long-term investment, since semiconductors aren't going out of fashion anytime soon, AI or not. I finally got my free Jag started after many weeks trying to get black sludge out of the fuel tank (well one of the fuel tanks anyway). Also bending one of the mounting points for the body back into shape since I discovered it was bent (not good!). Now that I can finally drive it out of my "service bay" I can try and do some jobs on my other Jag. But then the service bay is needed for something else for the summer, so I've only got this weekend to do those. So I should stop falling into the trap of wasting my time typing this BS instead. Not talking to you is probably the only reason I've started getting things done again! In fact besides that I've started viewing my writing here as more of a symptom of loneliness than any cure for it, and although a cure seem less forthcoming by the year, I might as well not indulge myself in displaying the symptoms. - The Free Thinker gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2025-10-31Sock_in_Glove.txt SOCK IN GLOVE Although I tend to fail, I try my best each summer to avoid getting sunburnt. One tricky aspect is driving in the car with the sun shining on my hands. Ideally I don't want to put sunscreen on them every time I drive (and recent revelations have pointed out how figures for comparing the effectiveness of Australian sunscreen brands have been widely meaningless anyway due to dishonest testing labs), so in an extra mark of strangeness I've taken to wearing gloves when driving. Yes I'm the last man standing who actually keeps gloves in his glovebox! But still there's a problem since while turning the steering wheel my long shirt sleeves get pulled back and reveal a gap of exposed skin between the glove and the cuff of my shirt. So I spend whole journeys pulling my shirt sleeve back or trying to hide my arm under a shadow. What I need are gloves with a long neck to cover my sleeve. Unfortunately there are few enough places that sell you regular gloves these days, let alone specialty ones. In theory there are gauntlet gloves, very thick things now sold to motorbike riders rather than medieval knights. Or masonic gloves, so you don't get your cuffs dirty if the secret handshake goes too far. Or American cowboy gloves which, for those of you thinking I'm a sissy, show that coyboys are sun-safe too. The almighty internet will of course supply all those things, but without the rather essential ability to try them on first and see if they'll really work for me. So, always afraid of wasting my money, I've been looking and comparing and procrastinating all year about what to buy. As is often the case I eventually settled on the ideal answer of "none of them". All I need is to add an extension onto an existing pair of gloves, and in Alexandra on my holiday I actually found a second-hand pair for $5 in a junk shop that perfectly suited such abuse. I just needed to try and guess how to sew again, or cheat by threading with small steel wires as usual. But it occourred to me last night that I don't even need to extend the gloves, just wear something under them that extends back up my arm. In fact a sock with a hole cut before the heel for my fingers to go through, and then the rest cut off after the heel leaving another hole for my thumb, seems to work great. I can even just about slide them on at the same time as putting on the gloves, and the neck of the sock pulls nicely back up my arm. Worn-out socks even come with the finger hole pre-made! So this summer I'm going to exceed my existing strangeness of wearing gloves on my hands to drive, and wear socks on them too. Others might prefer getting their car windows tinted, but I never quite liked the feeling of isolation from outside that you get behind tinted windows, and they only make it harder to see the things you're running into. At some point all these neat little ideas of mine must add up to madness, but so long as nobody's around to judge, I might as well be a happy madman. - The Free Thinker gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2025-10-30Pleasures_and_Pain_in_the_Neck.txt PLEASURES AND PAIN IN THE NECK It took a full week for my neck to get right again to really start doing things again, so typically I went mad doing all sorts of physical jobs that were digging at me all the time I was stuck propped up in positions of slightly less discomfort on the couch. Now a few days later of course it's sore again because I've been busy doing all the things that probably hurt it in the first place. But such is only to be expected. It really is frustrating because I've been getting more determined with my many and varied DIY projects lately, and with the weather warming up and drying out it's finally practical to attempt more of them. But then trying to do that is exactly what breaks me. I called my father to see if he could give me a hand with something yesterday and he couldn't until Friday when the weather looks bad, so I even ended up moving another one of those heavy sleepers on my own again, which might well be what's set my neck off again. It's like I always say, the only peace in life is to sit on your bum and attempt absolutely nothing, trying to achieve things is hopeless, but I keep trying anyway. My weekend time limit doesn't help. I kick myself about doing non-money-earning things in work hours during the week, then Saturday comes and I'm too tired out to be bothered, or distract myself with something silly on the computer like writing for this phlog (which I've been trying to cut down, this morning I woke up early so I have some extra time). Then it's suddenly Sunday and I have a year's worth of things to rush into, none of which quite get finished, but a few things get close enough that I get distracted trying to make them work or packing up on Monday, which I kick myself about for the rest of the week. At the same time there's a certain peace to just making/packaging/posting things to sell when that's what I'm doing during the week. When it's not another thing making my neck sore, there's something enjoyable about just doing the same basic task without all the failures ever-present in attempting to design or do something new. Yet I manage to stuff up doing the same basic tasks often enough too, in new and innovative ways, and that's even more frustrating. I mean how _can_ you do something litterally 2000 times and then suddenly start stuffing it up completely one day? Like I keep yelling at myself in frustration: "I know what to do, I just don't do it!". Mind you there's also my other little motto of frustration muttered to myself: "there's a solution to every problem, and a problem with every solution". Last sunday I did finally get around to finishing replacing the fuel injector hoses I talked about before. First step was to cut the ($40/meter!) fuel injector hose to length. So I tried to measure it against the hoses I'd removed. But I didn't match all thje bends in the stiff old hose quite right and cut them all too short, which I only discovered after installing all six. So I pulled that all apart again and set to with my much-smarter new solution of bolting the fuel rail in place first, pushing one end of the new hose onto the injector, and cutting it off at the length required in-place. Much smarter, and it worked great until the last hose which was a smaller one looking just like one of the spark plug leads. No worries, hold the leads all out of the way and cut the one that's left. So I went ahead and cut through the lead to the ignition coil instead. On Monday I thought I'd quickly rig up a new lead from an old spark plug lead from another car, but I eneded up spending about half an hour just trying to get the old one out of the distributor cap where it had corroded in place with a strength that superglue would envy, and ended up making rather a mess of that distributor cap too. So that's off until this weekend, if my neck's not out of action again then. On the up side the vehicle I'm working on is all very exciting. I think I mentioned that for years there's been a promise that I might be given an old Jag by a relative of one of the few people I know, and amazingly enough it actually happened. It's the model earlier than mine, which was actually the model I originally went looking for when I ended up buying my first car/Jag a decade ago, but far fewer Km and apparantly with a fairly recently rebuilt engine. But of course, a few faults, the first of which being a preference for spraying fuel out of those injector hoses which had hardened and cracked over the years it spent sitting after its last real owner died. The body and interior are actually in great shape, so it's just a case of working through mechanical issues and braving all the bureaucratic hoops of the roadworthy process. The latter is really what I fear most since it was an expensive and annoying run-around for my other Jag. But first I just need it running because it's taking up the place where I was already meant to work on solving a mystery knock sound from the suspension on my other Jag, put off over winter when the floor of the shed floods (the solution to which is of course another slow work-in-progress weekend job). I've also been trying to learn MIG welding, which was going well enough (in spite of a dodgy wire feed motor on the cheap welder I'm using) I thought I'd rent a bottle of gas to use to try sheet metal welding, with the eventual aim of more Jag-work - patching up the bits of bodywork that are rusting away. Of course since then I haven't had time to use it at all and now it's $120 down the drain in monthly rental fees for the gas bottle I haven't even used. It's not all car-related stuff I've been doing, but I'm tired of talking about computer things here for one thing. Out of time now anyway. - The Free Thinker. gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2025-10-20Neck_Test.txt NECK TEST Was it lifting the wooden sleepers which were a bit too heavy to handle alone? Was it bending over an engine bay while removing some old fuel injector hoses supposed to be replaced last weekend? Was it bending over a laptop I had out to duplicate my backups when I was too lazy to grab the stand to bring the screen up to a comfortable height? Or was it pushing through the initial discomfort while doing my pre-bed push-ups the night before it got really bad? Or countless other possibilities? While waiting for my neck to heal these thoughts to the origins of its agony have been circling around in my head constantly for the last four days while I moan around hopelessly, alternating from silence in bed, to the still-tiring noise of entertainment on TV, to the shrieks of pain as I thrash around trying to use the kitchen. Just a sore neck, nothing new, but an extended case, and now the old dilemma of when to go back to trying to do things. I've kept up sending out orders, but I was supposed to return to a project I put on hold to deal with my tax return and applying the tariff charges to orders from the USA (which has turned out to be proper pain in the neck all of itself). After this weekend I really hoped to be back in action, and indeed it seemed the constant pain was reduced this morning to just constant discomfort. But here in fact is the test, typing this on my laptop, one-handed with the other supporting my head, and again the pain is creeping up along with my 9AM start-work time. Am I being undiciplined? I'm a bit out of passion for this project - in seeking to make something other people want to buy these days it's all about working on the firmware code rather than real electronics designed on paper and with logic tied together by solder alone. Is it an excuse? No, I can't stand much more of typing this whinge, so thinking properly about code would be way out. Away with the laptop for another day, or at least until I'm due to prepare those orders and shriek my way into the car to drop them at the post office. - The Free Thinker. gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2025-09-17On_Gopher-Optics.txt ON GOPHER-OPTICS So with my last phlog post, 2025-09-15Optical_ROOPHLOCH.txt, I've finally fulfilled my long-running intention since 2023-09-30Last_Radio_Roophloc.txt to make a ROOPHLOCH post via optical communications. Unfortunately since it turned out to be a drizzly night, it ended up a pretty short message, but received very well. I measured out the distance from my optical transmitter to the receiver perched on the verandah of my house as about 17m. Not exactly a record breaking distance, but a step up from the 9.5m of my first test down the longest unobstructed path inside my house. The receiving laptop on the verandah automatically uploaded the message using my home WiFi, which I probably could have picked up from the transmitter laptop anyway, but that's not the point. ROOPHLOCH (the point): gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/1/~solderpunk/roophloch First and second world war tripods aren't particularly accommodating for fine directional adjustments, even though it seems the models I'm using were partly intended for an equivalent role as stands for heliographs. But they are quick and easy to mount to, and did the job quite well. Since I ended up packing up in a hurry due to the rain, I didn't get a photo of my set-up, but at least the photos I took before of the transmitter and receiver can still be seen here: gopher://aussies.space/1/~freet/photos/optical_comms/ As with my earlier optical post I used shell scripts to send and receive the serial data sent via my DIY optical Transmitter and receiver, then automatically upload it to the phlog. After all the trouble I had with getting the Linux serial configuration right for that, it was wonderful that everything pretty much just worked this time on the software side. The one issue I did have is that my optical receiver seems to have developed an intermittent tendency to oscillate. That might just be a loose connection inside or something to do with connecting ground to the laptop. I know RF noise from that laptop drowns out FM radio reception wherever it's running, so maybe I should try it with another one before digging too deep into that issue. Here are the latest copies of my scripts to transmit and receive phlog posts via serial connection, then automatically launch them into the Gopherverse. Much the same as those presented in 2025-01-01Lighting_Up_a_New_Year.txt, but now with some extra precautions to help with reliablity. OpenSSH could be used instead of PuTTY under "Uploading..." if desired, and setserial will probably need to be installed. The first USB serial device might be at /dev/usb/ttyUSB0 or /dev/ttyUSB0 in Linux. The stty commands might need to be run as root on some systems. Generally I've found there's a lot to go wrong! :) opticrx.sh ------------------------------------------------------------------- #!/bin/sh # opticrx.sh [filename] [serial device] [baud rate] # eg. opticrx.sh hello.txt /dev/usb/ttyUSB0 600 FILE="$1" DEV="$2" [ $3 ] && BAUD=$3 || BAUD=200 HOST=ausshell DEST=/home/freet/goph/phlog CMD="cd $DEST && /home/freet/bin/simplemkphlog.sh" stty -F $DEV raw icanon -crtscts $BAUD || exit # Set serial port time-out to 20min which setserial > /dev/null && sudo setserial $DEV closing_wait 120000 echo " Receiving $FILE at $BAUD baud..." cat $DEV > "/tmp/opticrx_$FILE" echo " Uploading..." pscp -C -sftp "/tmp/opticrx_$FILE" "$HOST:$DEST/$FILE" plink -C -batch "$HOST" "$CMD" less "/tmp/opticrx_$FILE" echo " Operation Complete" rm "/tmp/opticrx_$FILE" ------------------------------------------------------------------- optictx.sh ------------------------------------------------------------------- #!/bin/bash # optictx.sh [file] [serial device] [baud rate] # eg. optictx.sh hello.txt /dev/usb/ttyUSB0 600 FILE="$1" DEV="$2" [ $3 ] && BAUD=$3 || BAUD=200 # Set serial port time-out to 20min which setserial > /dev/null && sudo setserial $DEV closing_wait 120000 stty -F $DEV raw icanon -crtscts $BAUD || exit echo " Transmitting $FILE at $BAUD baud..." cat "$1" > $DEV echo -e '' > $DEV ------------------------------------------------------------------- The optical transmitter and receiver circuits are the same design I presented in place of last year's ROOPHLOCH, when I didn't get it ready in time: gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2024-10-01ROOflop.txt When I've sorted out the possible oscillation issue with the receiver, and chanced upon some more accommodating evening weather, I plan to try and find the limit for distance. It would be interesting to compare how it works in daylight too. It's fair to say I've got a long way to go to match the works of past optical adventurers, such as the work documented excellently on fellow-Australian Chris Long's website about analogue voice communication by light: http://www.modulatedlight.org/Modulated_Light_DX/MODULATED_LIGHT_DX.html And more info elsewhere at www.modulatedlight.org that I must get around to reading. They clearly think a fresnel lens would work better, but I tend to stick with the junk that I've got to hand. They can even transmit from mainland Australia overseas to Tasmania, sort of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sil33vRms64 - The Free Thinker Index to my optical communications related posts so far: gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2023-09-30Last_Radio_Roophloc.txt gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2024-10-01ROOflop.txt gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2025-01-01Lighting_Up_a_New_Year.txt gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2025-02-02Night_of_Lights.txt gopher://aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2025-09-15Optical_ROOPHLOCH.txt