Recently, I’ve set up a Packet Radio node. This receives what is affectionately called ‘Packet Nonsense’ in the form of bulletins and personal mail. The APIs and availability of data around this is fairly limited and somewhat archaic. I started poking at various bits of code to see if I could improve that. Mostly with the somewhat redundant aim of checking my Packet Mail from my phone.

This meant that I needed a test node in order to develop against while the main node still received the latest Nonsense from around the world. I was using my Kenwood TH-D75 which has an inbuilt TNC, but that seemed like a waste of quite an expensive radio - and it only supports the basic ‘1200’ and ‘9600’ bps modes, none of the newer implementations.

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As with a lot of my projects, this one started with a message:

David: “Sooo I think I want to launch a high altitude balloon…”

Me: “Sounds like fun! Why? Got plans?”

David: “I have this dream of sending a camera up really really high. From first attempts at research, looks to be plausible”

There was some scope creep.

The story of the balloon aspect of the project will be saved for another day, but this is about the tracking. The immediate question is “once you have launched a balloon, how do you get it (and your photos) back?”.

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Recently, I had the pleasure of taking part in ITERA-lite 2023 as a pair with my good friend David. We crossed the start line (our main ambition) and made it to Transition 3 after 26 hours and 150km before my fitness gave up and we withdrew.

However, in the process of preparing for the race, we were lucky enough to be supported by a bunch of people who have a lot of experience with this event and adventure racing in general. During the many hours of cycling around a forest, we discussed the tips that we had been given that don’t necessarily appear in other ‘beginners adventure racing’ articles.

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The Intro

I’ve been doing a small amount if bikepacking and lightweight bicycle touring over the last 18 months or so. The distinction between bikepacking and touring is a somewhat hazy one, and there are plenty of Think Pieces about how to tell. Short form for me is that I prefer framebags to panniers and wider tyres to 25mm.

This is mostly a reminder list for myself, it’s not definitive and it’s not for everyone. There are also many, many versions of this post available, go read something by someone who’s better at it than me.

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“I’ve been thinking about running a knife making workshop”.

Those were the words in the email that got my attention. Someone was offering to run a workshop and had a PID controlled heated knife oven to do the heat cycle and tempering. Seemed like a good idea to me.

This write up is mostly a ’this is what I did’, the end product is usable, but not ideal. It’s a first attempt and a learning process.

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There’s an IRC channel for our local geeks. Some of the people in it have blogs. In an idle conversation about the state of the modern internet, the idea of a webring came up and continued into ‘why aren’t blog planets’ a thing anymore?

Wait, a what now?

A planet is an aggregator of blogs usually centered around a topic or project. With the slow death of blogging and the idea of commercial content, they seem to have gone away (with a few notable exceptions).

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