Don't Stick a Butter Knife into a Wall Socket…

So Node-RED is a visual programming environment. It’s called ‘flow’ because you link nodes (the colored boxes) together with lines so the action flows from one to the other.

WSJT-X is Dr. Joe Taylor’s data comms app for weak-signal modes like the hugely popular FT-8. It also happens to have a UDP port built in to query it for information of recently received and decoded ‘packets’ between Hams.

I wanted to look into that port and Node-RED lets me with only two nodes. The UDP node and the Debug node.

The next post will get into installing Node-RED. It’s quite easy. For now, all I had to do was drop these to nodes onto the playing field, tell the USD node what port to listen to, in this case 2273, draw a line from  the UDP node to the Debug node and hit the Deploy button. Viola, what WSJT-X is saying on the UDP port comes out in the debug view, ready to be cleaned up and used for whatever I can think of. SMS notification when rare DX comes up on 17 meters?

Finding that visual languages suit me. I mean the Drag-n-Drop kind that looks pretty and you can program with one hand. Except for Scratch-based stuff. Bleh.

So if you don’t know what Node-RED is, I’ll tell you. If you create web content, you probably use Javascript, which runs on the browser. Node.js is a way of running JavaScript on the server, which is way better.

Node-RED is something some engineers at IBM (yes the home of HAL9000) thought up to make Node.js into a visual ‘flow-based’ programming environment. And it works soooooo good. It’s really neat.

It’s like 5AM and I’m past the insomnia stage. I’m heading to the sack. Next post is about how I pull UDP data off of WJST-X with Node-RED. More Ham Radio geekery.

FOSS. Anti-Windows. The altruistic search for independence. Snowden. Keep going.

Yes, I spent $$ for British Linux magazines at Barnes & Noble. Yes I installed Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Peppermint, et. al.

And the end result. I’m happily back to Windows 10.

Note to Linux community. Any failures, any extra steps, any infighting among the faithful will drive all but the hard-bitten away from Linux in any form.

And the idea that any decent game must depend on Wine is a deal breaker.

I tried. I really did. But Linux just isn’t cutting it for people who want to get on with life and dick around with their OS to get it to behave.

So for a while I was lamenting the failure of the 1TB Toshiba SATA drive on my Dell laptop. Only two years old and throwing a failure to boot. So rather than doing it right and replacing it, I took the easy and cheap way out, mothballed it and cranked up the old Dell Inspiron 1420 with a Fedora Linux derivative call Chapeau that figure out how get the Broadcom WiFi operating – something I had only gotten to do once with an Ubuntu distro.

Needless to say, the old 1420 with the Pentium Dual Core was nothing like the i5 laptop. But with Linux is sufficed. But life is too short to fight Linux. As much as I admire the independence of FOSS, getting even easy things like Conky to work right was downright painful. And don’t get me started about having to use the abomination called PlayOnLinux and Wine to run a PC game. Aweful.

So what does this have to do with Vivaldi. Nothing except for the time sink that was Linux on the old machine. Really pushed me to run to MicroCenter in St. David’s, PA to get a new SATA drive and reinstall Windows 10. And now I can focus on playing with Vivaldi again.

Some excuse eh? Not a good one. Really, I spend far too much time playing Eve Online on my dedicated gaming machine. Now that game is a serious time sink.

Ok, back to blogging…

Here’s the Tecsun PL-880 AM/FM/SSB Shortwave portable radio that I just got through Amazon.  What a nice little box! Reminds me of a small version of the Radio Shack (Sangean) DX-440 from the 80’s, except less than half the size and no tuning chuffing from the PLL. Looking forward to using it to listen to my favorite Shortwave station, The Mighty KBC.