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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Actually, amateur TV broadcast was something that interested me. I had the opportunity to buy an SDR with wider bandwidth, but I wasn’t sure how much I’d get into it, so I kept things cheap.

    Another thing I’m looking into is ADS-B flight tracking. My house is within range of a sports arena where there are all manner of overhead banners get flown. Might be fun to follow them around on a map.













  • A story I heard was that it was the poor indigenous farmers who were forced to cultivate coffee for the Dutch. They weren’t allowed any of the beans they grew, but were able to collect it from the dung of civets that prowled around near the plantation. Of course, once the colonizers learned that it tasted “good”, it was commoditized too.

    Might be apocryphal.


    1. Study free materials available online.
    2. Take free practice tests.
    3. Look for license exams in your area, or take an online one. Exam fees in my experience have been ~$25 and go towards whichever club is proctoring.
    4. Pay the $35 FCC licensing fee and get your callsign.

    Theoretically, that’s all you need. It’s possible to use certain internet linked amateur transmitters for no cost as long as you have a valid callsign. However, I promise it’s a lot more fun with a real transceiver. You can buy a bare minimum, highly hackable handheld VHF/UHF transceiver for as little as $20.

    Or you can slowly give your soul to the moneypit of HF equipment…






  • As someone who has owned enterprise servers for self-hosting, I agree with the previous comment that you should avoid owning one if you can. They might be cheap, but your longterm ownership costs are going to be higher. That’s because as the server breaks down, you’ll be competing with other people for a dwindling supply of compatible parts. Unlike consumer PCs, server hardware is incredibly vendor locked. Hell, my last Proliant would keep the fans ramped at 100% because I installed a HDD that the BIOS didn’t like. This was after I spent weeks tracking down a disk that would at least be recognized, and the only drives I could find were already heavily used.

    My latest server is built with consumer parts fit into a 2U rack case, and I sleep so much easier knowing I can replace any of the parts myself with brand new alternatives.

    Plus as others have said, a 1U can be really loud. I don’t care about the sound of my gaming computer, but that poweredge was so obnoxious that despite being in the basement, I had to smother it with blankets just so the fans didn’t annoy me when I was watching TV upstairs. I still have a 1U Dell Poweredge, but I specifically sought out the generation that still let you hack the fan speeds in IPMI. From all my research, no such hack exists for the Proliant line.