Japan, Tech and Open Source

The Fediverse is quite nice!

I got free time to spend with HAM gear in the middle of Germany, on a house with 3 floors and a garden behind the house.

POTA is ‘Parks On The Air’.

In July, I had my first POTA activation.

I recently got myself an Apple MacBook Air M1, these are down to 5万円/350$ here in Japan.

This is my attempt of describing where Linux power consumption measurement is, the handover of metrics to virtual guests, and the current riddle I see for attributing consumption to processes.

The Cardputer is a small ESP32 based device with Wifi, Bluetooth, battery and keyboard.

Remembering Blinry’s Fifty Things you can do with SDR, I thought that something like that for HAM Radio should exist - so here is my attempt of a collection.

At the middle of last year, I got all the hardware together to do radio transmissions here from my room in the West of Tokyo.

I got this Power-Z measurement device the other day.. what is it, and how does it fare against the other measure methods?

How good is the performance of mobile phones, and how power efficient are they?

TL’DNR: My steps towards emulating an Amiga 1000 keyboard, using the GPIO (input/output) pins of a Raspberry Pi, and implementing parts of the keyboard protocol in Python.

TL’DNR: Introduction into Meshtastic/Meshcore, hardware recommendations, first steps.

Since spring of this year I’m learning to pick up morse code, so to hear sequences of dits and dahs/long and short sounds, and interpret the characters they represent.

TL’DNR: I see warning signs everywhere around the topic.

The Steam Deck is a hand held gaming console from Valve.

Terms Details on some terms I will use: LoRa (“Long Range”) is a technology for transmitting data via radio signals.

In 2008 I was in Japan for 3 month.

I presented this topic at TIARA (with emphasis at Linux/the software), and at the Tokyo Linux Users Group, with emphasis at the radio concepts and how they translate to software.

TL’DNR In this article I will look into the details of a special case with fully emulated systems, where an older Linux distro performs better than a new one.

What’s Morse Code?

How it started A friend owns rice paddies in Tochigi-ken, the district north of Tokyo where I live.

With the right wing parties in Germany getting stronger, my Mastodon timeline gets posts from people considering to move to other countries, temporarily or forever.

Virtualization?

I’ve been living in Germany and Japan, let’s look at some aspects of the health systems.

Capturing some projects of this holiday season.

What’s this about?

What the ISP offers I’m using NTT flets as physical provider (fiber), and Biglobe for the packets ontop.

Note: I’ve taken out the IPv6 pieces here and moved them to a dedicated blog article.

So..

Choosing a monitor is hard!

While last years summer in Germany became the Retro summer, this time I took the RTL-SDR software defined radio with me for playing.

What’s this about?

Let me capture my favourite hiking spots around Tokyo.

When I lived in Munich, the Alps were near - but I never got into the habit of hiking.

We get workplace computers refreshed in 3 year cycles.

HAM radio?

When I came to Japan in 2016, I had my German drivers license translated by the Japanese Automobile Federation.

How do Germany and Japan think about World War 2 (WW2)?

Sorting my pictures from this year, I got reminded of the various pieces of tech I got into contact with..

Background Most flat rental agreements in Tokyo are limited to 2 years, and can then be renewed.

I was born in former East Germany.

I have some retro hardware in Germany - in the last weeks I had access, and got to play, try out, find out what works.

Transport in Tokyo I’m a German, living in Tokyo since 7 years.

CPU and Memory The Star64 board is a bit bigger than the Raspi4, both are available with 8GB RAM.

The Golden Week This years Golden Week approached, a sequence of national holidays in Japan.

1: What’s BSD + my BSD history I mostly use Linux, but since the time of the Linux Install parties with the Thüringer Linux User Group, I’m also using BSD.

When I started to learn Japanese, I tried to look up Japanese input - and it felt much like an in-club: not having the right search terms, not having a good understanding of the writing system either, and without someone around to ask you were lost.

Some weeks ago, architect Florian Busch presented in German on architecture in Tokyo.

I’m back in Germany for some weeks, and have revived the Commodore Amiga 500.