I can’t honestly claim to to have been a massive fan of Terry’s writing – I’ve not read all (or much of it) – Robert Rankin was always more my cup of Tea (or pint of Large).
That said I am a massive fan of the man himself and I’ve met many good people, some very good friends, some acquaintances via his fandom.
The news of his passing him me a lot harder than I thought it would. So many good memories.
I’ll raise a glass to him at 8pm tonight.
Doing a bit more snooping around the radio spectrum with the RTLSDR (My HackRF should be here tomorrow!) I spotted these patterns in the transmitted signals from DAB stations.
I’m fairly sure these are not just moiré patterns. I expect they probably tell you something about the multiplexing of the signals in the transmission.
Horribly geeky post, more for my own information than anything. Might help others.
After installing MatLab 2014b on OSX, I thought it might be fun to see if it’ll work with an RTLSDR dongle – if you’ve a license you can download a driver package for the MatLab communication toolbox from Mathworks (No, I’ll not give you or help you get a pirate copy.)
The RTL support package installs ok, but it wouldn’t work with the existing librtlsdr.0.dylib library on my system. It seems the library had been installed with a Compatibility Version number of 0.0.0
Recompiling the library from scratch, or installing it from homebrew didn’t fix the error. A nose around in the build folder for librtlsdr showed that no compatibility version number was being set when the library was being linked (final step in the compile process.)
The solution was to edit the link.txt file in /build/src/CMakeFiles/rtlsdr_shared.dir
There’s only one long line in the file, I changed it to read:
/usr/bin/cc -O3 -DNDEBUG -dynamiclib -compatibility_version 1.0 -Wl,-headerpad_max_install_names -current_version 0.5.3 -o librtlsdr.0.5.3.dylib -install_name /Users/dm/scratch/rtlsdr/librtlsdr-0.5.3/build/src/librtlsdr.0.dylib CMakeFiles/rtlsdr_shared.dir/librtlsdr.c.o CMakeFiles/rtlsdr_shared.dir/tuner_e4k.c.o CMakeFiles/rtlsdr_shared.dir/tuner_fc0012.c.o CMakeFiles/rtlsdr_shared.dir/tuner_fc0013.c.o CMakeFiles/rtlsdr_shared.dir/tuner_fc2580.c.o CMakeFiles/rtlsdr_shared.dir/tuner_r82xx.c.o /usr/local/lib/libusb-1.0.dylib [all the above should be on one line]
Then the library was rebuilt (issue the make command in build.)
I’ve always enjoyed a good run, but somehow got out of the habit between the ages of 14 and 25ish. Then got back into it in a not very serious way. Now I try to run 2 to 3 times per week – usually in my work lunch hour (and a bit).
I’ve been running distances up to 20km in 2h without serious problem – apart from needing a few days of doing not much moving at all afterwards.This would put me on course for a 4h marathon time (assuming linear scaling and a bit of effort to get a little faster).
I didn’t get a place in the ballot for this year’s London marathon, but I did manage to get a place in the Cancer Research London 10km Winter Run. I ran that yesterday, without 5000 others. It was a loop down the Embankment from Whitehall to the Tower of London, back along to St Paul’s, another loop to touch the start of Watling St then back past the front of St Paul’s before dropping down onto the embankment again and finishing at Whitehall again.
It was cold, but good fun. I knocked around 6 minutes off my previous best time for the 10km, coming in at 50.52
Might aim for the Royal Parks half-marathon now…
A Christmas eve night sky, including a few stars, a couple of passes of the international space station, and lots of aircraft.
