{"id":3640,"date":"2016-02-18T10:39:54","date_gmt":"2016-02-18T17:39:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3640"},"modified":"2016-02-18T10:39:56","modified_gmt":"2016-02-18T17:39:56","slug":"odd-lots-292","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3640","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/forum.lazarus.freepascal.org\/index.php\/topic,31575.0.html?PHPSESSID=88999cb8e28af3874d670e8e8b85d678\" target=\"_blank\">Lazarus 1.6 has been released<\/a>. It was built with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.freepascal.org\/\" target= \"_blank\">FreePascal 3.0.0<\/a>, a first for Lazarus. Mostly incremental changes, but there&#8217;s a new rev of the docked form editor that looks promising, even though it&#8217;s not quite stable yet. Wish I had more time to play with it!<\/li>\n<li>Older versions of Lazarus have run well on the Raspberry Pi for me. However, installation on the newer Raspberry Pi 2 is <em>much<\/em> trickier. <a href= \"http:\/\/www.tweaking4all.com\/hardware\/raspberry-pi\/install-lazarus-pascal-on-raspberry-pi-2\/\" target=\"_blank\">This installation tutorial<\/a> is almost a year old, and I haven&#8217;t yet installed Lazarus 1.4 or 1.6 on my Pi 2, but it&#8217;s the best how-to I&#8217;ve yet seen.<\/li>\n<li>From Glenn Reynolds: <a href= \"http:\/\/observer.com\/2016\/02\/christopher-nuttall-ebook-author\/\" target=\"_blank\">Indie author Chris Nuttall lays out his journey as an indie<\/a>, emphasizing that all but the biggest names are being driven to indie by publishers who simply don&#8217;t understand which way the wind is blowing. Read The Whole Thing, as Glenn says.<\/li>\n<li>Back when <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3353\" target=\"_blank\">I reviewed the Baofeng handhelds<\/a>, there was some discussion in the comments about <a href= \"http:\/\/blog.nutsfactory.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/RDA1846.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">the RDA-1846S SDR chip<\/a>. Gary Frerking pointed me to <a href= \"https:\/\/www.kickstarter.com\/projects\/749835103\/hamshield-for-arduino-vhf-uhf-transceiver\/description\" target=\"_blank\">the HamShield project on Kickstarter<\/a>, which is an Arduino add-on board (a shield, in their jargon) that uses the RDA-1846S to transceive on 2M, 220 MHz, and 450 MHz. Like the Baofeng radios, HamShield will also operate on FRS, MURS, and GMRS, though the group doesn&#8217;t say that explicitly. (This is an SDR, after all.) It&#8217;s not shipping yet, but they&#8217;ve raised a fair amount of money (well over $100,000) and appear to be making progress. Definitely one to watch.<\/li>\n<li>Cool radio stuff is in the wind these days. One of Esther Schindler&#8217;s Facebook posts led me to <a href= \"http:\/\/www.beartooth.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Beartooth<\/a>, which is an SDR roughly similar to HamShield built into a smartphone battery case that snaps onto the back of your phone. Unlike HamShield, beartooth is going for FCC type acceptance and will operate on MURS. However, there&#8217;s been no activity on their Web site since mid-December and I wonder if they&#8217;re still in business. It&#8217;s not an easy hack; see <a href= \"http:\/\/forums.radioreference.com\/gmrs-frs\/298384-beartooth-radio.html\" target=\"_blank\">this discussion from midlate 2014<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Oh, and I remembered <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gotenna.com\/\" target= \"_blank\">GoTenna<\/a>, which is similar to Beartooth except that it&#8217;s limited to texts and geolocation data. (That is, no voice.) It&#8217;s a Bluetooth-powered stick that hangs on your belt and uses your smartphone as a UI, basically, and allows you to text your hiking buddies while you&#8217;re out beyond the range of cell networks. I guess that makes it a sort of HT&#8230;a Hikey-Textie. Unlike HamShield and Beartooth, GoTenna is shipping and you can get two for $300.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/www.breitbart.com\/tech\/2016\/02\/16\/exclusive-twitter-shadowbanning-is-real-say-inside-sources\/\" target=\"_blank\">Twitter continues to kill itself slowly by shadowbanning users for political reasons<\/a>. What the hell is in it for them? When they collapse, something else will appear to take their place. They&#8217;re a tool. (Take it any or every way you want.) When a tool breaks, I get another tool, and generally a better one.<\/li>\n<li>In case you&#8217;ve never heard of <a href= \"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Stealth_banning\" target= \"_blank\">shadowbanning<\/a>&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>I stumbled on something called <a href= \"https:\/\/www.roblox.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Roblox<\/a>, which is evidently a high(er) res take on the Minecraft concept. It&#8217;s looking more and more like what I was thinking about when I wrote <a href=\"http:\/\/www.duntemann.com\/Breakpoint60.htm\" target= \"_blank\">my &#8220;RAD Mars&#8221; piece<\/a> for the last issue of <em>Visual Developer Magazine<\/em> in late 1999. Anybody here use it? Any reactions?<\/li>\n<li>Slowly but steadily, reviews are coming in on my Kindle ebooks. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/customer-reviews\/R1CONY0ONRTPA6\/\" target=\"_blank\">Here&#8217;s one that I particularly liked<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>The Obamacare exchange in Colorado &#8220;smelled wrong,&#8221; so Carol and I avoided it. <a href= \"http:\/\/freebeacon.com\/issues\/numerous-weaknesses-inadequate-security-settings-found-in-colorado-obamacare-exchange\/\" target=\"_blank\">We were right<\/a>. (Thanks to Sarah Hoyt for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>I don&#8217;t care how many tablets and smartphones you have. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/smmodyssey\/videos\/819489691493793\/\" target=\"_blank\">Paper is not dead<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lazarus 1.6 has been released. It was built with FreePascal 3.0.0, a first for Lazarus. Mostly incremental changes, but there&#8217;s a new rev of the docked form editor that looks promising, even though it&#8217;s not quite stable yet. Wish I had more time to play with it! Older versions of Lazarus have run well on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[17,21,45,39,43,132,90,32,16,14,20],"class_list":["post-3640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-ebooks","tag-electronics","tag-ham-radio","tag-health","tag-humor","tag-lazarus","tag-pascal","tag-programming","tag-publishing","tag-software","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3640"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3641,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3640\/revisions\/3641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}