Industries that build their own tools

Here’s an interesting observation, and maybe something you haven’t thought of before. If you work in IT, particular in software development, the tools that you use as a developer were built by other developers.

Think about that for a minute. Can you imagine if chefs built their own ovens, or doctors made their own medicines?

Is there any other industry that builds it’s own tools?

Packet radio: Direwolf and pilinbpq

I’ve been playing around recently with setting up some packet radio software on the Raspberry Pi. The next thing I was interested in getting working was a BPQ32 node with BBS and Chat. G8BPQ’s instructions here are pretty easy to follow. What I got stuck on however was whether BPQ needed or used ax25, and apparently it doesn’t. So from the simplest direwolf and linbpq setup, you start direwolf, configure linbpq to point to Direwolf’s virtual kiss tnc serial port, and off you go.

I played around testing with 2 radios, one with Direwolf, linbpq and a Rigblaster connected to a Yaesu FT-60 HT, and the second, an Icom 880 connected with a Rigblaster Plug and Play to a desktop running Linux Mint, also using Direwolf. There was some random oddness wth connecting from one to the other, maybe because of the radios in close proximity, that turned out I just needed to increase default timeout settings. I set these both to the same in direwolf.conf and bpq32.cfg:

TXDELAY=300

TXTAIL=30

Once I’d added these (based on other suggested settings elsewhere in other people’s BPQ configs), then I was off and running. Looks good!

How to reset your password on Raspbian

What not to do: reset your password before you change/setup your keyboard locale, use punctuation characters in your new password, and then change the locale. Yeah, that’s not going to work. Now I don’t know where some of the characters moved to 🙂

I’m going to leave this post right here for future reference.

Update 2/3/16: after I edit the cmdline.txt and booted to a shell, passwd gave me this error:

passwd: Authentication token manipulation error
passwd: password unchanged

Further down the post, this recommendation to remount / solved my issue:

mount -rw -o remount /

Then I did passwd and the change worked this time.

Setting up your new Raspberry Pi

I’ve had a Raspberry Pi model B for a couple of years and have used it as the basis for a number of projects, and blogged a number of getting started tips and other topics. As I just got a shiny new Rasberry Pi 2, I went back to find some of my prior posts on setting up and customizing some basics.

Here’s a few of my posts that are pretty useful to get up and running: