2025-09-20 ROOPHLOCH 2025!

hello everyone! Initially I had planned that I would write this from atop a summit. However, the weather was too nice to not go outside, and in lieu of the planning that the summit requires, I have gone down to the neighborhood park.

This constitutes the first real test of two pieces of packet radio & gemini related software I wrote, gem300 and palps. I wanted to make sure I dropped a link to the ROOPHLOCH announcement ... if only because I know that other stations can hear my packets, so I think it would be fun if they got a hint as to what I'm actually doing right now; I made it a point to not write down the URL beforehand, and used gem300 (which is available on my node) to visit circumlunar.space and find solderpunks capsule:

After fetching this url I wrote it down in a note in Emacs, and then went ahead and started `palps`. palps essentially provides a kiosk that lets me manage files (no support for directories yet), and edit them using ed(1), the standard text editor.

Getting ed to work properly over packet was a little bit tricky. Since it is the standard text editor, it only expects standard line endings, \n. But BPQ passes data back and forth between the socket using telnet, which uses \r\n. So I had to implement a custom wrapper around the input and output ports to preprocess and normalize line endings.

In practice I am actually using `red`, which is a restricted version of ed. It cannot get outside of the directory it was started in, and cannot execute shell commands. When I edit a file using ed via palps, palps also will create a temporary file in a private directory which is copied into place after saving and quitting, to provide extra assurances that you cant get outside where you are supposed to be.

In another pane, I have the `info` page for ed open in Emacs. I barely know how to work ed, actually, and am probably not going to go back and proofread or fix any errors ... I've just been typing this all stream of consciousness in append mode.

As far as the hardware I am using right now goes: the VHF port of my station is set up using a Yaesu FTM-150R and an N9TAX roll-up jpole. The Yaesu is hooked up to the computer using a digirig. Here in the park, I have a Vero VR-N76 with a SignalStick.

The other day, I finished installing my new HF antenna, which is an endfed. They are pretty infamous for causing RF in the shack issues ... which I experienced. Like clockwork, when I would TX on HF, the digirig would get reset. Thankfully, I have fixed this issue, so my VHF port is reliable again.

I think thats more or less it ... I was going to use the IRC client on my node to let the FARPN people know when I was writing this post, but I forgot to bring up the wireguard interface on my node that lets the client connect to the server, oops

73, kestrel

edit!!

I just wrestled with appending the link to the right line in my index.gmi and realized I totally forgot to mention the last part!! I have a script running on a cron timer, every 30 minutes, to synchronize the local copy of my capsule to my capsule on The Soviet. I realize, also, for the same reason I linked the announcement post, I will include the URL that this entry will eventually end up at, in case anyone is listening to me write: