Kev’s Blog – Page 200 – Kev's Development Toolbox

September 12, 2013

Ham Radio Deluxe 5.24 – PSK macros won’t save

As a Mac user and a new ham operator starting to play with digital modes (mainly JT65, PSK31 and RTTY) I’ve been envious of the variety of Windows based apps available compared to what’s available on the Mac. For the past few weeks I’ve been mainly using the following:

RUMLog – as my main logging app
FLDIGI or CocoaModem as my digital mode app
JT65-HF ported to the Mac

These have all been working fine, but from seeing videos online of people using HRD and the integrated digital mode app together with the HRD logging, it kept bothering me every time I had to manually type in details from a QSO into my logging app.

Since we have a HP Mini netbook running Windows 7, I decided to check out the still (up until fairly recently) free version of Ham Radio Deluxe (5.24), and was surprised to find I couldn’t work out how to make my updates to my PSK macros save. Every time I made changes in the Macro Manager, they would never be reflected in the app.

It turns out that from a new installation, HRD either protects the directory where your macros files are saved, and/or installs the default macro files as read-only, so no matter what you do in the app, you can never save any updates to your macro files. What’s worse, the app doesn’t give any indication that it’s failing to save your updates, it just carries on regardless.

Luckily I can across this thread and once I took off the r/o flag on the macro files I was able to save my edits.

Now that HRD 6.x+ is $100, I’m not sure if I’m that enthusiastic about spending $100 on an app that doesn’t by default allow me to customize my preferences, and worse still, doesn’t tell me when something is failing (incorrect permissions to write to a file). Still, I am impressed with the digital modes and log integration, so I’m going to be trying it out for a while and see how it goes.

August 20, 2013

Groklaw shuts down

Groklaw, the site that extensively covered the SCO vs Anyone-who-has-anything-to-do-with-*nix lawsuits in the early 2000s has decided to call it quits, saying that they are concerned about privacy concerns.

It’s sad that they’ve decided to close their site given the insight they’ve given us over the years into numerous legal cases in the Tech world, but it’s worth reading their last post and understanding why.

August 7, 2013

Firefox ends support for the HTML tag?!

Wow! In a way it’s strange that this didn’t happen sooner. I wasn’t actually aware that Chrome, Safari and Opera had all already dropped support?

Can’t say I’ve seen any sites for a number of years that actually still use <blink>, but I do remember plenty of sites ‘back in the day’ that made extremely annoying use of this tag.

June 28, 2013

Multi-window feature on Samsung S3 and Note 2

So if you’re like me, at some point recently you got an Over-The-Air ROM update and noticed a blue tab appeared on your screen with a list of apps in it. I wish features like this would have some additional popup help. At first I thought this was nothing but a quick-link type of thing for your most used apps, but then I also noticed the ‘Multi-window’ feature that also appeared in the pull down menu. Still none the wiser, I only just recently came across an article here that explains how it works.

In short, you open your first app from the slide out drawer. Then, drag a second app from the drawer out into the middle of the screen, and you’ll notice the top or bottom half of the screen will highlight. When you release, you now have two windows with a dividing slider in between, and you have two apps running in the foreground. Huh, that’s pretty cool! Not useful all the time, but definitely handy if you want to compare something in email with something in your browser side by side at the same time. Very cool!