henfredemars

Almost a month without a new post? Can’t have that. Have a cute clip!

I don't know many hams nor do I chat with the same hams on a recurring basis, and my wife is only tangentially interested in radio inasmuch as it makes me happy, so I thought I'd be the life of the party and post about the best day on the air I've had yet. My aim is to share my enthusiasm with the world.

I've been a ham for about a year. I'm young (experience-wise) and still learning. Until this weekend I've been using a portable whip on my balcony combined with my President Lincoln for 10 meter contacts. My antenna mounting situation was awfully complicated, so I often left the antenna mounted several days at a time such as on the weekends. This finally bit me when the fine women who were feeding the squirrels next door moved out. The squirrels went ballistic and destroyed my antenna along with wreaking havoc on the rest of the neighborhood. They chewed through the loading coil and the coax! Preposterous. I cannot imagine what they thought to gain from doing so. Nevertheless, it put me out of commission for a while.

I think the math behind magnetic loop antennas is really cool, and I don't have much space, so I decided to try the Chameleon F-loop as my next antenna, the base model. Wow, did I have so much fun today! Tuning was tricky because of that high Q and narrow bandwidth, but I didn't realize how active the airwaves could be when you can hear clearly. My reception was so much better because my noise floor seems to be lower with the mag loop compared to the whip. I also enjoyed the directionality of the loop, giving me a new property to play with to get the best reception.

Thanks for reading!

I really don't want to go into work tomorrow.

This sounds like a nice step towards modernizing texting, but it's a shame that Messages doesn't have an open RCS API to encourage broad adoption across messaging apps.

Been thinking about giving it another go just for some casual fun. I read that the developers still maintain it and the little silly animations are adorable.

Is it a good game? Not really, but it's cute.

Please excuse the YouTube link as I understand it's taboo around here, but I can't stop giggling at that animation and this community can always use more love.

Source: https://www.derpibooru.org/images/3258472

On many operating systems, I can create audio loopback devices to feed audio files into another app as if it was coming from a microphone. I can also tee off audio going out to the speakers.

Is there an app that lets me redirect audio devices to perform the equivalent of connecting audio inputs and outputs on Android?

Note to moderators: while such a feature can be used for piracy, that is not my goal, and there are better methods if I was trying to be nefarious. I want to use it to feed audio samples from soundboard apps into my active phone call without having to play the sound effects through the microphone. I'd also like to use it to directly supply the output of an MP3 into another app that records my voicemail message for better quality than can be performed by simply recording through the microphone.

Google claims that privacy is a priority, and perhaps it is, but we can't deny there's an essential conflict of interest between protecting your privacy and Google being an advertising company.

Recent events in this space include Google's new Ad Topics framework, which purports to offer users more control. I feel it's an improvement over cookies, but having my device participate in tracking me is backwards. After all, my device should be protecting my privacy first, not implementing features to track my behavior.

Data "nutrition labels" in the Play Store are a step forward by encouraging proactively a discussion about how user data is processed and used. On the other hand, recent attempts at DRM for the web in Chrome remind us that the main vendor behind Android doesn't always have user interests at heart.

Is Android doing enough to keep your data safe? If not, what steps could reasonably improve the situation?

In sharing your opinion, please take care to distinguish between Google the company and Android the product. While related, given Google may have privacy issues in one line of business doesn't necessarily define privacy practices on the Android platform. Also, another interesting angle includes what's best for you versus what's best for users as a whole. For example, a privacy feature, to be successful, needs to be reasonably understandable by most users and offer a net benefit without complicating the platform for casual users.

Really love this browser game, and it seems to be quite popular overseas from my USA perspective. It's amazing how expressive they made the characters.

Post 14/14 of my favorite MLP links. This will be my last post for a while and for this series. I feel like I'm the only one posting here, and I don't want to dominate the community activity.

I still love Lemmy. I'll be around!