ZL2TOY What is that? # ZL2TOY is a ham radio callsign. In fact it’s not just any callsign, it’s my father-in-laws former callsign and my current amateur radio operator callsign. After years of threating to do it, I finally went to a Ham Cram weekend and took the test to become an officially licensed operator. I have been threatening to do it for nearly 2 years now, and finally did it.

If you followed my Containerize All the Things post, you know I’ve moved my entire home server workflow to Docker. There were a few reasons for this, but most of all because it made it incredibly easy to move everything or have everything backed up in case of a catastrophic failure of some sort. After all, my hard drives are quite old and have been running hard out. Old drives

From December 28th 2019 11:00 UTC to January 1st 2020 18:20 UTC the International Space Station did a commemorative SSTV broadcast for 3 Russian Cosmonauts that died this year. Those three are Alexi Leonov, Valery Bykovsky and Sigmund Jähn. I was lucky enough to be able to pull an image from the broadcast. My wife and I spend our Christmas vacation in Christchurch, New Zealand with my in-laws usually. This provides some great chances for a nice very open view of the skies.

For quite a while, our house has used a server to host all of our media as well as some other items. There are a great many advantages to this, as it allows easy control over our movies, TV, music, comics, eBooks etc… Ever since the server was first built (it’s actually my old computer), it has run Windows 10 pro. There is nothing implicitly wrong with this, however Windows can be quite a resource hog.

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash I admit it, I was wrong. In my last post, I wrote about how in-probable it was that the 2019 NZ Budget hack was just due to someone using the search engine on the website. Well I was wrong. I had expected the IT team at the NZ Treasury to have at least a little bit of competence. Sadly the seem to be incredibly incompetent.

There has been a whole lot happening here in NZ in the past 24 or so hours. You see the 2019 budget for NZ is meant to be released tomorrow (Thursday), but was apparently leaked by the opposition party on Tuesday. This has led to a lot of speculation, name calling, threats, police reports, etc… You know typical politics. Now normally I wouldn’t care about this at all, and certainly wouldn’t write about it here.

I realized today that I hadn’t given an update on my fibre saga in quite some time. After going back and forth with BigPipe, I ended up cancelling their service as was shown in a previous post. There were quite a few reasons for this, however the biggest one was them removing IPV6, as well as not being upfront about the issues I was having with the fibre installation. I moved to Voyager after doing quite a bit of searching on geekzone.

Tracking some planes 🛩️ using an SDR and homemade antenna # Over Christmas this past season, I spent quite a bit of time with my in-laws. While down there my father in law mentioned he was having issues getting his RTL-SDR dongle to work properly on his new laptop, and asked if I could help. For those not aware, RTL-SDR stands for RTL Software Defined Radio. They have been extremely popular for a long time for not only pulling in analog TV signals, but also tracking planes.