ryan

I've recently earned my ham radio license. It's something I've wanted to do on-and-off for years now. Easily a decade of trying to get it.

Not that I couldn't pass the test or even tried, but the flow would go something like:

1. “it would be cool to get into ham radio”
2. Let's find some a testing session nearby that isn't on a Saturday, is nearby, and is in the near future.
3. Neat, there's one on a Sunday in 3 weeks
4. Test day comes and goes, I forget about it
5. “danggit, forgot about the ham exam... oh well”
6. oh well, maybe next time

And so on, for years. I'd remember, plan, and then forget.

Recently though, it worked out where I thought about it on a Thursday, found an exam session on an upcoming Tuesday down the street, and managed to follow through. I took the exam, passed it first try.

The ham community over on Mastodon has been great. I've learned a bunch of information from them, got some great resources, and I've been on the air since.

I went from not having a radio to now I have a couple. They have kind of multiplied. For now, though, I think I'm good for a while (famous last words!).

I started with a Baofeng UV-5R, listening at first since I didn't have my license. I quickly found that there wasn't a bunch of folks on the air near me. I couldn't reach enough hams to really enjoy anything. Did some more research, reached out on Mastodon, and got into digital radio (specifically DMR). My main radio is now an Anytone 878 UVII Plus.

With a hotspot that I cobbled together with an old Raspberry Pi, I was able to chat with people all over the world. Granted, it used the internet and not local, but it got me going. I was able to find some local repeaters, both digital and analog. I have access to APRS and a bunch of other neat stuff. Lots to learn.

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I've always messed around with electronics. Making semi-useless circuits, blinkenlights, sensors... that sort of thing. Amateur radio has re-ignited that passion and given me some concrete goals with my accumulated electronics skills/knowledge.

Making antennae is pretty neat. It's sticking together some wires in just the right way and voices come out of thin air!

Figuring out how to power and charge the radios in ways their manufacturers didn't intend (like with USB-C) is fun too.

Overall, I'm glad I finally focused long enough to get into amateur radio, become a ham, and start experimenting.

My journey into the fediverse continues with a fresh installation of Mastodon. I even bought a funny (to me) domain for it toot.beer.

It's currently running on my NAS in a couple of docker containers. If this needs more reliability or if some friends want to use it, I'd look into shoving it into a VM or two over at DigitalOcean or the like.

For now, the low barrier to enter with self-hosting is the approach I'm taking.

I tend to eschew social media. I've seen enough folks get into trouble with it that I consider it to be a moderately risky drug that I just don't need.

That, plus I'm just generally not very social by nature. I also can't bring myself to buy into anything that Facebook owns but that's a story for another day. Twitter was fun years ago, but it kind of became a stupid place for flame wars and now it's total chaos.

That being said, I can see some of the benefits. It's harder for me to find interesting people, harder for me to share my work or art, and it's increasingly hard to connect with people. Especially considering that most people can hardly conceive of someone without any social media presence.

What I have been interested in, is something like Instagram. Not all the fancy stories and other nonsense, but as a place to learn and connect with photographers and artists. For the past year or so, I've really gotten into using a mirror-less camera and I want to both share my work and learn from others.

To that end, Pixelfed seemed like a decent alternative. Sadly, it's missing the one feature it needs to fill that role. Apparently, it cannot federate across instances! So it's not really a federated instagram or photo sharing service... it's a service that you can follow from the fediverse (mastodon).

That's great and all. It's a start. But I want to self-host my content and follow/share across the fediverse. It just isn't there yet.

I'll keep an eye out for that feature and be willing to try it again once that's there. But for now, it seems it just isn't ready.

Rather than manually updating the few services I'm running in docker, I setup watchtower to take of this automatically. This is mostly here for myself as notes and may not be up to date, but it might help you too.

My docker host is currently a Synology NAS and here are the steps I followed it set this up.

After sshing into the NAS, as root, I created the following script at /root/scripts/install-watchtower:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

docker run -d --name=watchtower \
	-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
	--restart=always \
	containrrr/watchtower --cleanup

Then I can make it executable chmod +x install-watchtower and run it with ./install-watchtower. This will get it running in docker.

I sometimes want to be able to force an update, so I also have the following script at /root/scripts/run-watchtower:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

docker run --rm \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
    containrrr/watchtower --run-once

#docker #selfhosting

One of the hot topics with our federal leadership is student loan forgiveness. This is a fun concept that probably won't ever happen. Why? Not because it's impossible, but rather, both sides of the aisle prefer that it doesn't. This way they have something to argue and compromise about.

The left can compromise by not doing forgiveness outright, but rather deferring it for another few months. Then they can go back to their base and explain “we can't do it yet! elect us again and we'll fight for you!”.

The right can compromise by yielding to a deferment rather than forgiveness. They can go back to their base and explain “we stopped those liberals from giving away money! elect us again to stop it again!”

The right gets to shout how fiscally responsible they are, they left gets to shout how reasonable they are. Both get what they want and the people get to worry about loans coming due.

Neither side actually cares. They don't have student loans. They don't have to actually work for a living to put food on the table or a roof over their heads.

But should we cancel the current student loan debt? Would it make any sense?

I think so.

Rather than creating a system to bail out businesses or provide other means of stimulus — all prone to fraud and abuse — let's just use a system that can have minimal fraud because it already uses information we have... the student loan information!

You can't go back in time and get a student loan. You need to already have one. And if it suddenly was voided... you've put money into the hands of all the educated people in the country. Will some go spend their money on nonsense? Absolutely. And that's totally okay — it's the economy working.

But plenty will now have the financial freedom to take some more risks, maybe start a business, maybe just invest a bit more. In the end, it would take the decision of who gets money and manages money in bailouts or stimulus out of the hands of the federal government and put it into the hands of educated people.

At the same time, we should make student loans dis-chargeable in bankruptcy. If your education didn't give you the tools you need to make money... you should be able to start over! Just like any other debt. That's not to say it's a free-for-all, there are consequences to this, but why should you be saddled with this debt for the rest of your life.

The student loan market currently provides schools with an unlimited source of funding. If a school needs more money... raise tuition or admit more students. The government will loan that money to the students, of course it will! And it's not like that government giving those loans has any say into the quality of education or what the tuition is spent on.

They already spend it on building stadiums for sports leagues so they can earn money from the lucrative college sports industry. Who do you think pays for all that stuff?

Much of the things that higher education has can only exist because there is a limitless supply of cheap capital built on the backs of students future wage garnishments.

We also already have a parallel student loan system — the GI bill. Basically, if you join the military and serve, the military will pay for your college education. That sounds like a fair shake to me. Society gets immediate benefit, people can get an education, and there aren't much in the way of loans to hold them back.

Will education suffer? I doubt it. Our university system isn't the greatest in the world. There are better. And I imagine forcing universities to actually provide value for their funding would be a great start to coercing them to improve.

I'm pretty sure that's what folks call the Free Market.

#civics #loans #finance #education

We need term limits for congress people. We have some folks in the house and senate that have served for their entire lives. These folks cannot possibly represent the interests of their constituents since they don't have lives anything like the people they represent any more.

They've average ages of a senator in the united states is nearly 62 years, with many being much other than that (it's an average after all). The retirement age (we'll go with when you can get Social Security benefits) is somewhere around 65-67 years old. Which means that the people of this country, whose median age is somewhere in the 40's, isn't represented by our generation!

I'm not saying that the older generation doesn't have great things to offer in leadership, I want their input, but since there are no limits to serving in congress, we are being limited into the viewpoints from multiple generations ago.

Rather, we should have congress people be limited to something like 2 terms with an age ceiling relative to the retirement age. If you're old enough where society expects you to retire from the work force, you shouldn't be representing the work force!

This would also increase the turnover of our representatives, giving more people the chance to serve and reducing the impacts of incumbents. It would also tie the representatives closer to their people, since those folks are gonna have to live in the area they've setup. Will their choices improve their local society?

Today, it doesn't matter. They live in DC, they look to cultivate multi-generational power. They can spend a lifetime getting hands dirty and building influence. But maybe if we took that away, we could get some of those leadership skills at the local level. Maybe we can have less infighting, since we won't have entrenched seats of power for multiple decades foisting their opinions on the people that disagree.

Imagine how much harder it would be to buy politicians if they had a shorter shelf life. Today, you can spend years working to corrupt a politician and reap the rewards of that corruption for decades. With term limits, even an irredeemably corrupt politician can only have power for a limited scale — reducing the blast radius of their corruption.

Term limits could also reduce the existence of career politicians. These folks are a danger to democracy, as they are focused more on keeping their jobs than doing their job — serving and representing the people. It drives me crazy when my representatives spend time campaigning for their new job while they have a current job! If you're a governor and want to be a senator, why should you be able to take time out of your governor day job to campaign for a seat as senator?

I'd never get away with spending so much time searching for a new job while at a current one. Not a chance!

As the employer of my representatives, senators, and other leaders, I want them working for me not themselves. I want our incentives to be aligned and I want to succeed together. Not watch them get fat making things worse for me.

In short:

• Reasonable term limits for representatives, per category
• Reasonable age limits for representatives relative to the “retirement age”

#civics #politics