/ Recent content on One Way Conversation from a Cranky Sysadmin Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Sat, 16 May 2020 18:03:00 -0400 /posts/gd32vf103-with-ft2232h/ Sat, 16 May 2020 18:03:00 -0400 /posts/gd32vf103-with-ft2232h/ I recently purchased an RISC-V development board called the Longan Nano, which is based on the GD32vf103C family from GigaDevices. RISC-V is an open source ISA which seems to be getting some traction. Cheap dev boards are becoming available. There is apparently Arduino support, but I couldn’t get it to work properly in the arduino IDE. When installing the board support, there was a java error that the compiler wasn’t available for my operating system. /posts/rc-time/ Sat, 09 May 2020 06:56:00 -0400 /posts/rc-time/ As you begin your study of electronics, you will find reams of information about Ohm’s law, Kirchhoff’s law, etc. While it’s fun to figure out the right resistor to pair with an LED for your first Blinking LED, it gets more interesting when you start looking at the interactions between different components. This article will explore the interactions between resistors and capacitors. For the reader who has never studied either component, the bare minimum you need to know to understand this article is: /posts/why-arduino/ Wed, 06 May 2020 15:36:00 -0400 /posts/why-arduino/ Some folks who may have favorite dev boards which aren’t Arduino UNO might be wondering, why Arduino instead of a more advanced board? I certainly agree that there are more powerful boards for the money. My mind immediately wanders to the Blue Pill. For a beginner in electronics, Arduino UNO and clones may be a better choice since there is a vast amount of information available for Arduino UNO. Yes, the form factor is big and clunky. /posts/beginning-electronics/ Tue, 05 May 2020 17:54:00 -0400 /posts/beginning-electronics/ I’ve been tinkering with electronics on and off since I was a child. My dad used to bring home enormous circuit boards from Burroughs in the 1970’s with many discrete IC’s, passive components, transistors, etc soldered on. My dad taught me how to scavenge components from the boards, identify parts, and trace circuits at a very early age. We had very little extra money, so any junk box full of parts was going to be scavenged. /posts/mathjax/ Sat, 02 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/mathjax/ Tinkering with electronics will necessarily involve some math. If I wish to share my explorations, I’ll need to suffer through presenting the equations that I’m using. Searching about on the web finds Mathjax and some old tutorials (which don’t seem to work with Mathjax 3) about including Mathjax in a hugo site. I was hoping that I could just include Mathjax in the pages where equations are needed, but being new to hugo and Mathjax, I couldn’t figure it out. /posts/letsencrypt/ Fri, 01 May 2020 09:35:00 -0400 /posts/letsencrypt/ I finally got around to setting up letsencrypt certs on this blog site. It’s a lot easier than I expected. The letsencrypt website has great docs, and certbot seems to be pretty smart about detecting and adding the certs used by my apache webserver. The letsencrypt ssl options overwrote my site specific options and enabled TLSv1 and TLSv1.1, which is easy enough to rectify in /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-apache.conf. /posts/hello-world/ Fri, 01 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/hello-world/ I used to run a wordpress site at this location. Maintaining WP was tedious with all of the security updates, so I’m going to try a static site generator. I selected Hugo because it seems easy to use. Topics may or may not include: Electronics Amateur Radio Sysadmin Rants Programming Gaming Navel Gazing /about/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /about/ Greetings! Professionally, I’ve been trying to automate myself out of my Sysadmin job for decades. Sadly, I’ve failed. On this site, you may find posts about Electronics, Sysadmin work, Amateur Radio, and the occasional off-topic rant. you can find my resume here