VK7HSE RamblingsI got a phone call at around 17:45 to ask me what I had planned for the evening! I was just a little non committal at first, but after I phoned the contact from the IMT the picture was looking pretty grim so I put aside my reluctance and headed to Cambridge.
This is the site of the fire…
This is the temporary radio room…
The TFS details of this fire can be found at http://fire.tas.gov.au/
Posted from WordPress for Android
Wow has it really been that long? I started experimenting with WordPress back in June 2008 with the intention of setting up a site for the company I was working for so that it was the were to get information within the company (intranet) However, as most things tended to never happen there it was never implemented so not long before I was made redundant I was given the server that hosts this blog (and other services) so I put it to use here at home!
So lets look back at the versions of WordPress, Now as I said I started tinkering in June of 2008 so that would have been version 2.5.1 (yes I cheated, see release history here) Now I won’t give a breakdown of each release as you can read that from the link above! But WordPress has come a long way from my early days, there’s a lot more automated items now where traditionally you would have had to ftp your updates or themes and the like.
Also within the 3 year period my server has changed a lot as well (software) as when I originally started it was using Debian Etch. Although my preferred Linux distribution at the time was Ubuntu 8.04, However for some reason the live CD of either the Desktop or install media for Ubuntu Server wouldn’t recognise the RAID card! So that made for a rather short-lived prospect for running Ubuntu. It wasn’t until Ubuntu 8.10 that I was able to install, as for whatever was the issue on the 8.04 LTS had been either addressed or the necessary module was now included by default. I was also wanting to host my Email server and there was some simple setup prerequisites that Ubuntu Server 8.10 introduced that made setting up Postfix with all the bells and whistles of using Amavis, SpamAssassin & ClamAV to give you a bit of mail cleansing! So Ubuntu remained as the servers OS untill September this year when trying to update to 11.10 when horribly wrong! and I was left with a non working system, Yes I certainly did do a system backup of all the data that I considered important, but this didn’t include a full drive clone though (something I considered but didn’t do!)
I’d become a little displeased with the direction Ubuntu was going anyway (I’d stopped using Ubuntu on my desktop not long after the release of 9.10) and the usage of Plymouth cause me some headaches as the video chip wasn’t up to spec for displaying the intended splash screen associated with Plymouth (even my desktop PC didn’t play nice with Plymouth!) It is my opinion that a server should only show verbose output while booting so you can see if there are any issues, by hiding that (verbose output) behind a splash screen as default was a bad move! So after some thought it was clear to me that my server needed to return to Debian (stable release) so that happened on the 9th of September and hasn’t missed a beat for me.
Now I have to admit that the majority of the content on this blog is really of no significance (to any one else!) but over the time of it’s existence I’ve learnt how to set up a Web server, Email server and a few other monitoring solutions. This blog (well the server really) is purely for my self education and none of this would be possible without Free Open Source Software (FOSS) and the developers that dedicate their time etc…
So will this last another 3 years? … Lets hope so! 😉
Just an afternoon on 7 Mile Beach…
Posted from WordPress for Android
I’ve just noticed that most of the images that should be visible within posts appear as broken links! All the images are on the server, there seems to be something wrong within WordPress, or mySQL.
At first I thought no problem, that’s an easy fix… No its not! as this will require me to edit every post and relink the files. Now having just on two and s half years of blog posts, that would be rather time consuming!
So for the moment, broken image links it is until I either find a semi/fully automated way of fixing the problem it’s going to remain. 😐
Posted from WordPress for Android
Over the last few weeks the weather has been rather wet (rain) this of course has the byproduct of flooding, in particular in the north of the state. I happened to be visiting Launceston where most of the heavy rain has taken place. The images below are of the (now) disused Duck Reach Power Station located on the South Esk River, this flows through the Cataract Gorge (a popular swimming & picnicking place) I’ve never been or seen the power station nor the river in flood so it was certainly a spectacular sight!
Also I’ve included a 2 minute video clip to attempt to capture the moment as the still images don’t quite achieve this!
See more information on the power station here
Oh WOW! today has been a wet one, it’s been raining now for most of the night and pretty much all day so far, but my weather station claims no rain! So what’s going on there? well although I’ve not taken the top off the rain gauge I’d say a spider has most likely made a home inside the unit and possibly spun a web inside the gauge causing the mechanism to not read (I hope this is the case!)
Here’s the link to the data I feed into Weather Underground as you can see it’ looks like this has been a problem for a while (not noticed due to the lack of rain!) and the latest observations from the BOM claims a significant rainfall amount!
So when the rain eases a bit it’s time to investigate the cause of no rain measurements…
This is what the rain gauge looks like…
Now here’s something that you don’t see every day! Currently I’m not receiving any weather information for my location…
Today was a day away from the house! with a drive to Richmond then followed by a visit to ZooDoo Animal Park. Although the weather was “supposed” to break up around the middle of the day, it held out nice and sunny (all be it a little windy!) So I thought I had taken more images, but I didn’t! So here are a few of ducks & bridge (c1823) and the tigers at ZooDoo…
Posted from WordPress for Android
Now if you hadn’t heard already about the fact that I have an Android HTC Desire, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN! but if this is your first visit then you are excused! 😉
I’ve used the following application from the Android Market called ShootMe, note to use this application you do need to have your phone “rooted” as it requires superuser privileges to do its magic. As for some strange reason I couldn’t get DDMS working from the current SDK for Android to take screen shots.
Basically, all I’m showing is how I have my phone’s appearance setup, now you have seven work spaces (screens) and one overview where you can touch the screen you want to quickly jump to, but only from the home screen.
The order of these images is as follows, Overview, Weather widget, Calendar widget, E-mail widget, Home screen, Friend stream widget, News RSS widget & FM Radio and Media player widgets.
Posted from WordPress for Android
Ok so the content on this blog doesn’t change that often! so I’ve decided to add some interactive pages that provide real-time data. Notice now that there are two new pages APRS Live Map & Weather list at the top & down the right hand side. I’ve also added a small weather widget as well, this take a live feed from my La Crosse WS-2310. During the winter months the temperature sensor does get a little direct sunlight, so readings between about 8am to 10am may be higher than what the real temperature is, but as this is only for personal use you should not base any decisions on the weather data provided from this, please refer to the BOM for such details.
Just a little more info on the WS-2310…
As I use Linux, the software that was provided with the WS-2310 is for MS Windows. I needed to find something that could talk to and get the data from the weather station, the solution, Open2300 this give more functionality that what the original software provided!
interval2300 cw2300 light2300
dump2300 log2300 fetch2300
minmax2300 mysql2300 wu2300
histlog2300 xml2300 open2300
I won’t go into detail about all of these, but the main two I use are … mysql2300 & wu2300 (with a slight mod) and a third utility that is provided from XASTIR called open2300db2APRS. MySQL2300 places the weather data into a mysql database and wu2300 uploads my weather data directly to weather underground while open2300db2APRS is an interpreter for mysql to XASTIR.