HAMgpt Launches as a Personal AI Copilot Built Specifically for Amateur Radio

“Unlike a general-purpose chatbot, HAMgpt is built around the real operating situation of each ham. It can take into account the operator's license class, country, grid square, radios, antennas and operating history, then combine that station profile with live propagation, space weather, DX activity and current on-air conditions.”

This is quite interesting as it is not just a rebranded chatbot, it actually checks the various live reporting sites that many ham operators use. Just a lot quicker and more broadly, and applies that to the specific operators circumstances. HAMgpt is designed to work like a personal digital Elmer that already knows the operator's station.

It appears otherwise to look like any AI chatbot, so plain English queries work perfectly, making it easy for non-technical users too.

There is a free tier with five AI queries per day, but it does require registering an account.

See or

See https://gadgeteer.co.za/hamgpt-launches-as-a-personal-ai-copilot-built-specifically-for-amateur-radio/
#ai #amateurradio #hamradio #technology

Quest VR Headset Becomes Unlocked Hardware

“The Quest virtual reality headset gets a fully unlocked bootloader thanks to the QuestStack tool, which automates a complex process of privilege escalation to provide stable, privileged access to the hardware. This solidly frees the headset from its existence as a device tied to Meta’s walled garden, although the tool only works on the Quest 1.”

I was on the point on buying one of these back in the day but was not at all keen on Meta owning them (of all the IT companies on Earth). But I'm glad it is open as it can at least be experimented with now, and there is freedom to use it in other possible ways. Interesting innovations may come of this.

See https://gadgeteer.co.za/quest-vr-headset-becomes-unlocked-hardware/
#technology #vr

The Days Of Broadcast Digital TV Could Be Numbered

“When the analogue TV signals were turned off in most places around fifteen years ago, their replacement took the form of a set of digital multiplexes. ATSC for North America, and DVB-T for Europe and other places. This would deliver a multichannel broadcasting solution for the future, and this would be how those not on a cable would consume their telly. It’s a surprise then to find that some governments are already looking at turning off digital TV broadcasting, with the UK in particular wanting to put a date on the switch-off of 2032.”

It always seems bad when radio rolls backwards as it is the ideal medium for disasters and emergencies, but despite that, the trend amongst consumers today is less broadcast TV (having migrated to cable TV, Internet streaming, YouTube) and the same often for audio FM broadcast radio (I listen to podcasts in the car and never the radio, whilst others listen to Facebook).

But actually despite that, radio is still actively used across police, emergency services, ambulances, etc for speed and reliability, especially when teams and groups need to coordinate. One could say something like WhatsApp or Zello could be used, but they aren't used as a primary communications tool in these teams. The problem is apart from the Internet going off for any short periods, phones must have data, users must have apps installed, they must have phones available, etc. And everything short range with phones must travel via that app provider and the phone network (data). Disaster events generally also mean congested phone and SMS networks, delaying those mediums of communication.

Radio bypasses all of that. Most radios don't rely on a network (apart from maybe trunk radio), don't rely on data expiring or being bought, they work instantly at the press of a button, and the devices are provided by the employer, which sets the standard for what will be used by all in the team.

It's why, as much as ham radio operators also have lots of digital modes and satellites etc, we still also rely on the faithful fallback of VHF and HF phone radio — it just works across all users everywhere as it is the one thing all operators have, and were licensed to use.

Given Oudtshoorn's (in South Africa) recent 4 to 5 days without power, it is not a given that power will just stay on at all times. In any disaster there is a chance that power as well as the Internet (along with VoIP phones and Microsoft OneDrive) go offline. Disaster and emergency personnel will still be using their radios and keeping essential communications alive as their initial response.

If those radio networks also start to fail due to extended outages, we as ham radio operators will be responsible for re-establishing communications locally and further afield, using our “fallback radios” and our communications savvy to “make it work”.

And on the topic of traditional radio, I can say now that Cape Town has over 180 MeshCore radio nodes across the city, and many of them operated by ordinary citizens without any radio knowledge. MeshCore links Cape Town to Worcester in the East, and up to Saldanha and past Piketberg 160 km to the North. It is fostering good relations across suburbs where no-one was even aware of the other person before. This has a backbone of solar-powered repeaters that will survive any extended power outage no matter how long it lasts. It is all pure radio without any Internet required.

When everything else needs a network, radio is the network. Or as HAMNET says: “When all else fails, amateur radio will not fail”.

See https://gadgeteer.co.za/the-days-of-broadcast-digital-tv-could-be-numbered/
#disasters #radio #technology

I tested out the new Elecrow ThinkNode M9 with MeshCore Decentralised Radio Network

For those who don't know, MeshCore (similar to Meshtastic and same hardware LoRa radios) is a decentralised radio network that runs in the license free bands. It's a great way of being in contact with neighbouring suburbs and towns. I Cape Town we have just passed 180 to 190 nodes (chat and repeaters) and it stretches oof to the East over the mountain to Worcester, and Northwards about 167 km to Saldanha and other side of Picketberg.

I just bought this newly launched Blackberry style device to use on the network. It is similar, but slightly different to the LilyGO T-Deck. It does some impressive stuff, I tried a few firmwares out on it, and there are some pros and cons to using an all-in-one device like this.

I've settled on using the free and open source WADAMESH firmware, and it has quite blown me away with all it can do.

There is a lot of info, as well as screen photos, that I wanted to share so it is best to view it all on my website at the link below. There is also an additional link on that page, to tips on using WADAMESH specifically on the M9.

See https://gadgeteer.co.za/i-tested-out-the-new-elecrow-thinknode-m9-with-meshcore-decentralised-radio-network/
#meshcore #opensource #technology #thinknodem9

Jellyfin Playlist Membership — Easily browse Jellyfin Music song titles to add or remove from playlists

I wanted to quickly see which of my song titles are already in which playlists, and to quickly add them to other playlists or remove them etc. There is just no view that does this inside Jellyfin, and neither in Music Assistant nor Navidrome. You can do it by opening and closing each one, but that is very messy and time-consuming.

I iterated through something with Claude Code to create a simple HTML file that allows me to do this much quicker and slicker now. It also has some sort functionality, and you can play a track to hear it, and even delete it from your library to clean things up. As I have multiple folders on Jellyfin Music that separate radio shows, there is also an option filter for folders at the top of the screen.

Hopefully this helps others who have had a similar challenge and wondered why this was not a built-in feature.

See https://gadgeteer.co.za/jellyfin-playlist-membership-easily-browse-jellyfin-music-song-titles-to-add-or-remove-from-playlists/
#jellyfin #music #opensource #technology

Moving your Linux home folder to a dedicated drive is the distro-hopping secret I wish I knew earlier

“Home is where the heart is. On Linux, home is where everything personal to you is: your documents, downloads, screenshots, and configuration. In fact, your home is so special, you really ought to be showing it a bit more love. When you first installed Linux, you might’ve overlooked the option to use a custom disk setup—and nobody would blame you for doing so. But take your time to understand the benefits, and a highly portable, easily upgradable system is yours for the taking.”

Although I've stopped distro hopping, I did still move earlier this year from Manjaro to EndeavourOS. It was completely painless seeing I've long had my home folder on a separate hard drive (although a separate partition is also fine).

The key reasons are:

No worry about overwriting your important documents, settings etc when installing a new Linux distro as /home is physically separated.

Can test new distro with a separate / root with your data.

I have a higher speed NVMe boot drive whilst my /home folder sits on a bigger slower hard drive.

It is really well worth setting up.

See https://gadgeteer.co.za/moving-your-linux-home-folder-to-a-dedicated-drive-is-the-distro-hopping-secret-i-wish-i-knew-earlier/
#linux #technology

The Powerful Chinese AI Model Experts Warned About Is Here

The “best” model is not always the “best” model for you. Why I say this, is because Z.ai's model is still outperformed in some dimensions by proprietary models from Anthropic for example. But can you afford to actually use that top end “best of the best” model?

Very usually you cannot afford them. Now consider that the new model for Z.ai is only a few percentage points (depending on what benchmarks you look at) behind Anthropic's Fable 5, but the cost is only 25% of the cost. You end up with a situation, that what you can afford through Z.ai is way better than you'll get from Anthropic or OpenAI (given like for like payment).

I have not done in-depth testing between Claude Pro and Z.ai, but I have thrown some similar challenges to both, and I got pretty good answers from them both. The difference is I'm on the free tier of Z.ai yest I have some access to their current flagship GLM-5.2 model (5.3 is only being released in a week or two), whilst on the Pro level paid Claude subscription, I'm locked out from using their flagship Fable 5 model unless I pay usage credits over and above my subscription.

It also does not seem that the proprietary US based models are fully private either. Someone was recently prosecuted after their AI model chat history was produced as evidence. We have also seen that some API keys and other information got recycled as output to others. The advice has been to not feed private notes and documents with API keys and secrets to cloud based models. All I'm saying here is that privacy is also not some feature separating proprietary AI Models from open weight models.

The very nature of how AI models are trained, means they have all “stolen” information from various sources across the Internet. None of them can claim to be fully self-taught without any hint of theft.

There is a lot depending on the future of AI, some say that can be as much as a country's entire economy being at stake. So lots of money and high stakes, as well as the weaponisation of AI, means this is becoming a lot like politics. Who can you believe is telling the truth, who is trying to sell us vapourware, who could be spying on us through AI, who could pull the rug out from under us, etc?

Either ways though, we should be thankful for two things:

There is right now no “Microsoft” of AI totally dominating the market, so we are seeing healthy and credible competition.

There is certainly the ability to self-host AI, not to the level of the big cloud providers, but certainly fit for most purposes and fully private.

But given that, it is a difficult call to make, and to decide decisively which path to take. Where do you bet your money, as a lot of customisation and work goes into adopting whichever technology you choose? Or do you take the slower more focussed middle road of trying to enable some in-house hosting and skills development. In the latter case, you build incrementally upon what you do, and there is no sudden rug pulling out from under you.

Personally, I've always been a proponent of the latter path, rather being in more control of what is built and ensuring absolute privacy. I've viewed Big Tech cloud services as land grabs and lock-ins. Yes they're convenient, they're quick, and they cost less in the short term, but that turns against you later on as your data is no longer under your control, getting it out later is very expensive and not easy, and the vendor lock-in and cost increases are very real.

Which is why my own cloud subscription is only paid month-to-month. I'm ready to switch or go fully self-hosted once I can get a more mature setup. Businesses don't always have that luxury though.

What I would bet on though, is that AI is here to stay. It is no passing fad. It is the same as moving from steam power to internal combustion engines. The world is moving on, and it is now just a question of which wave we ride, and how it helps leverage whatever we do. We're not going every going back to an age of no cellphones, no Internet, etc, much as I may sometimes wish we could.

Yet, the more digitally instant and interconnected everything becomes, I realise too how very little we own in that world, and how it can be gone in the blink of an eye. I still fear this generation may lose the most of its heritage in the future millennia. Our innovation has outstripped our abilities to preserve the volumes of data we are creating daily. In the year 3030 or 4030, if humans are even still around, they may know more about Ancient Rome than from 2026. I'm not speaking here about Wikipedia, I'm speaking about my and your hard drives at home, and in hundreds of millions of other homes, all collecting documents, photos, memories… They're all going to become lost to civilisation within just 50 to 80 years. Clouds are also not the answer, as they do shut down eventually, and memorialised accounts just get lost.

So who knows, maybe our data being sucked up (stolen) by AI, means it somehow grows and prospers on deeply embedded inside of AI, as it gets “restolen” between different AI providers

See https://gadgeteer.co.za/the-powerful-chinese-ai-model-experts-warned-about-is-here/
#ai #archiving #technology

Open Source Caving: 20 Years of Making Cave Mapping Tools

“In his talk Open Source Caving: 20 Years of Making Cave Mapping Tools at Hackaday Europe 2026, Phil takes us through a series of progressively more advanced open hardware devices that he’s designed to increase the speed and accuracy of underground mapping efforts. Along the way, he’s learned a number of valuable lessons about designing hardware that’s robust enough to handle the uniquely challenging environment underground while still being accessible enough for a hobbyist to build and use.”

Interesting, and entertaining, to listen to this talk about the progression of the technology being used. So true too that these environments require dustproof, shockproof, and waterproof devices. And of course all being open source, means anyone can reproduce it and improve it too.

See https://gadgeteer.co.za/open-source-caving-20-years-of-making-cave-mapping-tools/
#caving #opensource #technology

N64 classic GoldenEye 007 has been 100% decompiled, paving the way for mods and ports

“Rare's GoldenEye 007, which dropped back in 1997, is one of the most influential games in history. It arguably established the FPS genre on consoles thanks to its local four-player split-screen multiplayer. Before GoldenEye 007's release, PC was the dominant platform for FPS games, with titles like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake defining the genre. It's likely that if it weren't for GoldenEye 007, as janky as it is by modern standards, we never would have gotten first-person shooter mainstay series like Halo and Call of Duty.”

So it will be like playing a piece of history actually when this port goes public. One also has to remember that this game is nearly 30 years old and the time it was the cutting edge of graphics and gameplay. It sounds like it may hit various platforms.

See https://gadgeteer.co.za/n64-classic-goldeneye-007-has-been-100-decompiled-paving-the-way-for-mods-and-ports/
#gaming #retro #technology

Cheap USB-C chargers are actually fine—these 4 specs are all that matter

“These days, buying a charger requires you to be familiar with USB PD, PPS, GaN, and a handful of other acronyms, on top of having to check wattage, making it surprisingly difficult to figure out which specs actually matter. The good news is that I'm here to help you figure out how to buy a charger that's fast, reliable, and safe without spending more than you need to.”

And something many people don't understand, is that it takes three devices in the chain to deliver proper USB-C performance. That cable connecting the charger and the user device, is absolutely vital. If it does not have the electronic chips embedded on either end in the plugs, and the correct spec cable, everything is going to default to low power, and even worse, only power without any data communications. So do not skimp on USB-C cable quality.

See https://gadgeteer.co.za/cheap-usb-c-chargers-are-actually-fine-these-4-specs-are-all-that-matter/
#technology #usbc