Month: April 2017

VMware

I’ve been a little bored lately. And my allowance fund has been building for awhile. So I decided to spring for VMware for my iMac along with a memory upgrade to make it a workable thing.

My iMac (which is the latest higher-end model) only came with 8GB of RAM. Some of the iMac models are not even upgradable. Mine is. I had four slots with only two used. At any rate, I replaced my two 4GB sticks with four 8GB sticks for a total of 32GB. That should be enough for some virtual machine fun.

I now have 12 different operating systems installed in VMware. I bought a license for Windows 10… the rest are all Linux. Oh, and FreeBSD just for kicks.

Not sure what I’m going to do with these except just play around. One thing I learned from my previous experience with ChromeOS. And that is, if you have all your data in the cloud, pretty much any computer is a ChromeBook/ChromeBox. That’s because if you have a browser, you have everything right there, regardless of the operating system you happen to be running. So any of these operating systems will serve me equally well, as long as I use a browser that supports my LastPass password manager.

Actually, I find macOS to be pretty sweet. And I really have no need to use anything else. It’s all just for grins I suppose.

Childishness

Twitter is an interesting place. I follow a lot of news people as well as technical accounts. Much of what I hear there is of a political nature. One Fox Business personality that I had been following (@LouDobbs) constantly refers to democrats as “Dimms”. Ok. Time out. This isn’t a grade school playground. Feel free to call them “Dems” if you want to abbreviate but calling them Dimms just makes you look stupid.

I unfollowed him today. I’m sure he would be heart-broken if he knew. Hey, I have to draw the line somewhere. In the interest of full disclosure, I might add that I detest the democrats. I think they are evil. They’ve virtually destroyed this country, and continue in deliberate attempts to do so. But that’s no excuse for childishness name-calling.

Node radio revisited

I will say, messing with the Baofeng 888 radios was a major pain. The main problem was actually getting the second radio from the seller (KD8MST). And when I finally did get it, it didn’t work correctly. So I disassembled both my new (non-working) radio and my old (working) radio to see what the difference was in the wiring.

Both these radios were modified and a cable was wired into the circuit boards to facilitate use as a node radio. I opened them up and sent pictures of the wiring to the seller in hopes that he could identify the problem. He didn’t see any problem, but confessed he may have used the wrong pin-out on the other end of the cable.

The problem I had… once I disassembled these two radios… I could not get them back together. So I simply tossed them both in the trash and wrote the whole thing off as a failed experiment.

I went back to my trusty Alinco node radio with my DB9 A/B switch. Everything is working great. There are only two minor inconveniences.

1) I need to switch back and forth between nodes (having only one node radio to share between nodes instead of each node having it’s own radio).

2) I need to remember to switch on my muffin fan when I’m connected up to something in order to keep the Alinco cool in case the system I’m connected to gets busy. However I did replace my previous fan with one that is now less noisy.

The Baofeng node radio idea really was an experiment. The first one I had worked great. But as I pointed out to KD8MST, my tolerance level for frustration on these things is quite low. I just don’t need the grief. And while the Baofeng solution was much cheaper than what I was using before… I already had a working solution that was perfectly acceptable.

I am truly an “appliance operator” type ham. I want things to just work. I’m not in it that much for the tinkering, but more for the communication aspect. I enjoy having a good conversation. And having a chat with someone you don’t know can be interesting, fun, and also good practice.