Wanted to share a quick blog post (see link) playing around with a couple methods of validating data origin and integrity without blindly relying on public CAs.

It's sort of a follow-up-to-a-follow-up on an earlier post about using Cloudlfare proxies to selfhost personal sites or services, but it really applies more to TLS and public CAs in general.

I selfhost several public-facing sites, including my personal blog. I'll be needing to relocate my servers soon, though, and I wanted something more "proper" to display in their place while the servers are offline.

I won't repeat the whole post here (see link), but I ultimately set up a CF worker that I can enable with the flip of a switch whenever my server will be down.

It's a temporary, hosted solution to a common self-hosting problem, so I think it still fits here... but no hard feelings if mods decide otherwise.

I've been a ham for about 8 years now, and while I enjoy the concept of contests, I've always felt that I never had the time and resources to be competitive. Long contests like field day involve dedicating an entire weekend (or even running teams of hams in shifts around the clock), but short sprints were easy to miss if you had a job or other commitment that overlapped. I also felt like many contests favor larger stations, since you could often get more points by spinning the dial and hitting several big stations than you could by taking the same time to try to work a single weaker station.

Initially, I planned to just complain about the situation on my blog and then point out how I could probably do it "better." I had some vague ideas on how a contest could be more accessible to the "everyham," like by limiting power to something even smaller rigs can output, letting folks work around their own schedules, and somehow providing more time for working weaker stations.

Then I thought to myself, "well, alright dingus. If your so damn smart, instead of just complaining about it, why don't you just make your own contest?"

...And so the EveryHam contest was born.

20 watts. 24 hours. Points for distance/band/mode. Only the top 5 QSOs count.

You could blast out 20w of RF for the entire 24 hours and collect hundreds of contacts, but you’re still only submitting five. Someone who carefully chooses their frequency and greyline timing could potentially work their radio for only 30 minutes and still win. Longer hours certainly increases the chances that you’ll get a high-scoring contact, but it doesn’t make you unbeatable. Same goes for team size: running several operators at a time gets you more contacts to choose from, but you’re still only submitting your best five. Without the usual contest rush, there's no penalty to taking time to work weaker stations, either.

I think this would help address a lot of the “issues” I have with most contests. Time and resources might help you score higher, but they don’t determine the winner. I also tried to make the website itself friendly to hams who are newer to contesting, by keeping the submission process simple and providing immediate feedback.

A small trial was run earlier this month to work out the bugs in the log parsing and scoring system, but the first "real" contest will be held on 09 MAY, 0000-2359 UTC, with following contests the second Saturday of each month after that.

If you're already a serious contester, EveryHam will be pretty underwhelming, but if you're new to radio contests or are just looking for something that feels more casual, maybe this is the contest for you!

EveryHam.org

I set up a quick demonstration to show risks of curl|bash and how a bad-actor could potentially hide a malicious script that appears safe.

It's nothing new or groundbreaking, but I figure it never hurts to have another reminder.

Someone on another Lemmy instance raised the question of whether an old wifi router could make a usable server of some sort, specifically a decade-old Google AC-1304. Since I happened to have a couple hanging around, I decided to give it a try.

I wrote a little about my experience in my blog but to summarize, I thought it would be fun to se if I could run a GoToSocial instance entirely on the router. It has an ARMv7 processor, 4GB of storage, and 512MB of RAM, so it falls a smidge short of the recommended minimum specs, but I figured that I might be able to get by if I kept the instance simple.

Surprisingly, GTS seemed to run fine after some basic configuration tweaks. The biggest issue I encountered was actually with ffmpeg, rather than GTS itself. The only GTS build available for ARMv7 is a nowasm build, meaning that it's missing the built-in media handling components, and instead relies on ffmpeg being proveded by the host system. The version of ffmpeg that ships with the OS I'm using (OpenWRT) didn't have the needed codecs to create webp files, which GTS requires when dealing with media. Using the OpenWRT SDK, I tried to build an ffmpeg package with the correct codecs, but it still failed to properly convert files to webp. My goal was just to run GTS, though, so I that digging deeper into ffmpeg felt like a tangent I didn't want to pursue.

But I digress. The instance is now online and running (though without media), and I created a simple bot account, named Gale, who will post a random fact about wifi and networking each day. Feel free to give 'em a follow in your favorite Mastodon client at @gale@gts-googlewifi.k3can.us or you can view past toots here

Just wanted to share!

For anyone still using Boost for Reddit, the latest revanced patch from wchill fixes the missing audio from redgif videos and adds the ability to restore some (not all) deleted content.

https://github.com/wchill/revanced-patches/releases/tag/v5.34.3

Posting here since r/boostforeddit is still set to inactive.