Nick Vahalik's blog

Here's a quick script I wrote to test redirects. Useful if you're trying to... test if your redirects are working properly.

A while back I was doing a bit of research on web standards. Specifically, I was looking at the number of documents that were published by the W3C over time. The last several years have seen an explosion of new recommendations with everything from CSS to Web Telephony. Let's face it, the web is here to stay. Technology points to the web. The Internet of Things surrounds us.

When I came across swmixer, it seemed it answered 90% of my needs for a mixer for an amateur radio application I was working on. However, the one thing that it didn't support that was a deal breaker was that only one mixer could be set up. This was no bueno.

The wonderful thing about swmixer, though, was that it seemed like it would lend itself well to being more objectified so that more than one mixer could be set up. And that's exactly what happened.

Per this thread (see the _Rewrap function in Robin's example code), you need to set the Label Text again in order for it to update properly:

If you're trying to set up a global hotkey in Windows, you can use the win32con.VK_* codes to set a hotkey that uses a regular character (e.g. Control-Alt-B), but on OSX it's not as clear. However, a quick look at the patch reveals that all you need to do is pass the ASCII character code for the character you want by using ord() like so:

result = self.RegisterHotKey(hkid,
    wx.MOD_CONTROL|wx.MOD_SHIFT,
    ord('r'))

And now, when you hit Control-Shift-R, the event will fire.

I've been in process of building and testing a dual-band 2m/70cm antenna for several weeks now. Recently, my antenna fell and it came time to rework it. A friend of mine was kind enough to loan me an MFJ-269. During the tweaking process, it's convenient to be able to just keep track of SWR values over the bands as well as a place for notes and changes to be marked for each test. Maybe you'll find it useful.

Download below.

One of the things that we take for granted given our connected society is radio. It is strange how something invisible has had such a visible impact on our world and our culture. For the past 100+ years, radios have been conceived, built, improved, and now exist in everything from satellites to home security system window probes. They carry entertainment as well as troops orders. At any given moment, hundreds of communications from all around us are likely passing, unbeknownst, right through us.

I've reverted to using 16GB SD Cards to move sundry items between an ASUS Laptop and a MacBook Pro. While not the speediest method, it is the fastest considering that:

A couple of years ago, I wrote some custom functions to help speed up working on estimates for our clients. Well, those functions have been lost since I left Classy Llama, but I think the these versions are much improved anyway.

Anyway, here are some Google Apps Script functions for Spreadsheets which might be useful for those in Technical Sales or software development. They can be used to add up and manipulate hour ranges (e.g. SUMRANGE(["1-2",2,"2-5"]) would yield "5-9"). Those functions are SUMRANGE, SUMRANGEHIGH, SUMRANGELOW, RANGEMULT, and RANGEADD.

Doing some research while building some stuff for our store and I stumbled upon a couple of different things you can do to "enhance" QR codes.

Image Overlay

You can overlay an image on your QR code directly. To make this work can take a bit of trial and error, but to make this work, build your QR code with the maximum amount of ECC (error correcting code). Then, just slap an image down over the QR code and you are good to go. Like this: