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Wall Cloud


Here is a picture of a wall cloud in Kingston, MN taken on 7/17/2010

The group of amateur radio operators in Meeker Co activated Skywarn for the weather service three times on Saturday between 1pm and 11pm.  That made for a long day watching the skies



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Ubuntu & JNLP

I wanted to see if I could run WeatherTap   http://www.weathertap.com/ on a Linux machine. It appears that it is designed to run on Windows but it is Java based so it should be portable. My home PC is running Ubuntu 10.4 LTS 64bit.  AMD64 is the magic in this story.

When I try to launch the radar image it gives to a XYZ.jnlp file which is supposed to open up in the Java Web Start engine. My 64bit machine did not know how to handle this file extension and when I tried to manually launch the Java Web Start engine it returned an error.

After a bunch of searching I found some helpful hints at:
http://dmartin.org/weblog/running-java-web-start-apps-ubuntu-linux-amd-64

Steps:
    $ sudo apt-get install ia32-sun-java6-bin

    $ sudo gedit /usr/bin/javaws

I commented all with # at the beginning of each line and added at the end:

    /usr/lib/jvm/ia32-java-6-sun/bin/javaws $1

Save the file and then launch Firefox and you should now be prompted for what to use to open the jnlp file. Choice the proper Java option from the menu and you should be in business.



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Giligan's Island and a new generation



This afternoon I was talking with Jacob (11), Ben (9), and Joe (7) and for some reason the topic of Giligan's Island came up. I did not realize that they did not know what I was talking about.

I took a random stab at the internet and went over to Hulu.com and sure enough they had a link to it over at The WB. The humor from 1964-1967 is still just as funny now. I remember watching these in syndicated reruns as a kid. (They were old back then.)

http://www.hulu.com/search?query=Gilligan%27s+Island&st=0

Here is a nice link to the Wikipedia article about the show:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilligan%27s_Island


Shortly after that we started watching Magnum PI on Hulu.  Now that I know that it they have Magnum I might have to catch the episodes that I am missing. --Great show!


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Sunday night breadboard


Tonight I worked on laying out breadboard for the QRSS rig while talking on Echolink on the QRP conference.

I had wanted to etch a board but the last couple of days have been pretty busy. Tonight was the first time that I have actually played with the radios (outside of skywarn) or visited my electrical workbench for an RF project.

I decided to lay out the oscillator + PA + lowpass filter so that I could validate the combined design and then focus on using the PIC 16F628 for PWM (pulse width modulation) with a LED acting as a varactor diode. I finished the oscillator + 1/2 of the PA. It was fun to get back to the work bench for a little while.

73 de NG0R

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Summer storms

Kind of a weird storm front tonight....





If you looked to the Northwest (above) there was a cool undercast to the sunset... if you looked to the West it was jet black.

Most of the big rain looks like it is going to slide just south of us again.  I will guess that we will get less than 1/2 an inch of rain even though it is being driven like a Monsoon with horizontal rain.

A warm Saturday evening in the upper midwest.