On my home server I backup my photos from my phone to a self-hosted photo management system called Immich. Immich is alot like Google Photos but self-hosted. It can organize the photos by date, location, and even faces. It also has a web interface and mobile apps for viewing the photos.

Hardware

I wanted to have a photo frame that would display the photos from Immich. pimoroni had a view options using the RPi Pico, but they were always out of stock, and I wanted a bit more processing power for the photo frame. I decided to use a Raspberry Pi 2W and a 7.3" e-ink display from Waveshare. I used a Waveshare hat for my Pwnagotchi, so I was confident that the Waveshare display would work.

Happy new year folks. Here is a review of a 3D printable boardgame Hextraction. It is how I spent some of my free time over the holidays. I hope you enjoy it!

Hextraction is a exciting 3D printable boardgame created by Zack Freedman. It’s as fun to play as it is to make! The objective of the game is to create a path for a 10mm ball bearing to travel by placing hexagonal tiles on a game board. The tiles have different paths, obstacles, and special effects. On their turn the player slots in a tile and rolls a ball. First player to roll a ball from beginning to end wins! The game is open source, and Zack encourages anyone to try their hand in designing their own tiles, and boards for the game.

Today I managed to collect some images from the Meteor M2-4 satellite. This was after a few attempts, so I hope this helps folks get starting with these Russian satellites.

I used my tried and true V dipole and my RTL-SDR dongle. I used spaceboi to predict the pass and track the satellite. The 137.9 MHz signal is marked as the “Primary” frequency for the VHF downlink. I found this signal was working well for me.

Satellite data collection without a permanent antenna requires some planning. I usually find when the best passes are for the week, and see if I have free time in my schedule to run out and collect data. Programs like gPredict and websites like https://satnogs.org/, or apps like Heavens Above can use TLE data to calculate when the satellites are going to pass overhead.

TLE or Two Line Element data is a format for describing the orbits of satellites. NASA and NORAD developed a data format in the 70s to describe the orbits of satellites that can fit on a punch card. Long gone are punch cards, but the TLE format is still used today.

Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) is a digital mode used by HAM radio operators to send small packets of data on the radio waves. The format was invented by Bob Bruniga in the 1990s and is still popular today. Common uses of APRS are to transmit location data, send messages, weather, and even emails.

Handheld APRS enabled radios like the Yaesu VX-8DR can go for over $400 these days. I needed a different, cheaper solution to dip my toes into APRS. I purchased a BTECH APRS-K1 Pro v1.2 for about $30. It has a Kenwood connector at one end and a USB-C on the other. I can plug one end into my Quansheng UV-K5, and the other into my phone running aprsdroid, or my laptop running direwolf.

To promote interest in space and radio, the International Space Station (ISS) transmits images to earth using slow scan television (SSTV). These events are announced on the x profile @ARISS_Intl.

With a RTL-SDR and a V-dipole antenna (as mentioned in my previous post), I was able to receive a partial image from the ISS. This is from Expedition 72 - Series 22 Fortieth Anniversary.

I used GQRX to receive the signal and used the FM demodulation.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been imaging Earth with satellites since 1975. These satellites are used to monitor weather patterns, climate change, and natural disasters. The data is transmitted to Earth in real time from these satellites, and can be received by anyone in the signal path.

In this post I will be collecting and displaying telemetry from the NOAA 18 satellite. The NOAA 18 satellite is in a polar orbit, meaning it orbits over the north and south pole. It takes images of the earth, and imediately transmits the image at a rate of 360 lines per minute. The data from this satellite is transmitted at 137.9125 MHz with Analog picture transmission APT.

A big push from the Linux community in the last decade has been to make the Linux desktop experience more user friendly. A difficulty users have faced is dealing with the terminal, package managers, and dependencies. With Windows and MacOS, installing a desktop application usually only requires a few clicks. Package managers and dependencies can be difficult to navigate if users do not know about how shared libraries work, and how to navigate the terminal.

I wanted to host this blog on a real domain. No offense to DuckDNS, but I am committing to this project so I want Source to Sink to have source-to-sink.com to call home!

I setup the domain on Cloudflare. The domain is only $10 a year, and it comes with a lot of great features. This blog will focus on the API and Dynamic DNS.

Setup Cloudflare DNS Entry

First I will show how to set the DNS entry in Cloudflare.

Some quick tips on searching in nvim.

To search for a word in the current file:

:/your_word

Uses regex to search for the word in the current file. Use ’n’ to go to the next instance of the word, and ‘N’ to go to the previous.

To search for the word selected in visual mode, press * or #. This will search for the word under the cursor.

Now to find and replace, the %s command is used. For example: