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Electronic goals for 2025

Here's the second of my 2025 goal setting posts, this time dealing with "electronic" goals, by which I mean computer-related stuff and radio-related stuff. For starters I guess it goes without saying that any goals I set as part of Operation Blazing Star last year which I didn't achieve get rolled over, and also that Gemini spec finalisation is still ongoing (although with a major previously set deadline near the middle of this year which I'm sure hoping to hit).

Computer-wise, I don't want to set anything too ambitious. I have three main goals. The first is to finally "properly launch" Smol Earth in some instead of the domain just hosting a bunch of hand-waving future promises. I have a very concrete plan in mind, it's perhaps much less ambitious than what I originally had in mind but I think it strikes a good balance between doing something which might make some kind of an impact and not wanting to commit myself to any huge obligations or responsibilities on my time. What I have in mind will launch this Earth Day (April 22nd). Some of you will hear about it well before then!

The second main goal is to direct a lot more of my time toward the Circumlunar Space community, to perhaps try to rejuvenate it a little, although without trying to force anything. I cleared out some long inactive accounts at the Zaibatsu last year and granted asylum to a few new sundogs, but unlike past times when I was phlogging more often and more casually and would always say "hi" to newcomers and link to their stuff and maybe reply to it, I didn't really go out of my way to make folks feel welcome, and I wanna be better at that. After the great hostname split last year, with zaibatsu.circumlunar.space and circumlunar.space resolving to separate machines, the first meaningful thing I did (and I hope there will be a lot more meaningful things this year!) was to create a combined "recent updates in Circumlunar Gopherspace" menu. It's just a simple script which checks the long-standing "recent updates" pages at the Zaibatsu, Republic and Soviet separately and combines them into a single list, sorted chronologically. It's a simple thing, but checking in on that one page is quicker and easier than checking in at each colony individually which, I have to be honest, even I rarely do. But I intend to keep a close eye on this unified view throughout the year, to read absolutely everything that's written in CS, and to reply where I think I meaningfully can. I don't want to limit this approach to just CS, I know I've said this before but I really, truly wanna start phlogging like 2017 again, more frequently, less formally, more personally, less verbosely. So I'll be responding to people more widely than just in CS, but CS is my first priority. I want to do far more to rejuvenate the space than just being friendlier on Gopher/Gemini, but this will do for now in terms of public advance notice.

=> Recent Gopher updates from all over Circumlunar Space

The final main goal is to try to be a better email correspondent. Over the years I've spent in the public access unix world, in Gopherspace and in Geminispace, I have had the great pleasure to exchange emails with and thereby truly befriend a surprising number of people with whom I feel more on-the-same-wavelength-as than, truthfully, anybody I have ever met face-to-face. I enjoy being able to discuss the kind of stuff I think and write about with these people so much, but nevertheless I have to say that on balance I am not actually very good and keeping these discussions on going for long times with a nice flow. It's more of a "boom and bust" kind of cadence, and I want to try to make more time for this kind of thing this year. I've struggled in the past to split my writing time between phlogging/gemlogging and emailing. I hope maybe the shift to more casual and less wordy *logging will facilitate more time for email.

Beyond these three things, I am planning to participate in both OFFLFIRSOCH and ROOPHLOCH this year. I already have an idea for OFFLFIRSOCH and have done some advance research. It's taking a small amount of willpower not to just smash it out early and think of something else, to be honest, but I think I'm gonna win that fight. For ROOPHLOCH I don't have a concrete plan yet but I want to raise the bar for myself again, so definitely no lame mobile phone hotspot stuff.

All of the above leaves not an awful lot of time for programming, which I'm not too upset about. A lot of what time I do dedicate to it will be debugging and polishing and documenting my existing projects, so in all likelihood my OFFLFIRSOCH project will be the only new public release I make for this year. But I hope I still find some time for casual and playful private projects, just for fun or to learn something new. If I do, as a priority I want to finally get some hands on experience with the uxn virtual machine, which is somehow already four years old! In my personal opinion, the single most useful concept to come out of the "permacomputing" space, by a wide margin, is that of the "bedrock platform". I am completely and utterly sick and tired of programming languages and their associated standard libraries changing under my feet, forcing me to go back and "fix" projects which I considered "finished", and their toolchains changing too, so that when I try to do that fixing I need to relearn how to even build my projects, and of course their package distribution systems changing too. And all this endless shifting is taking place on top of an only slightly more stable platform of operating systems and associated audio visual frameworks which are themselves constantly changing. I'm fed up, give me bedrock, give me eternity.

Learning to make software ought to be like learning to play the piano; there's always more to learn, more to master, more to practice, you can devote your entire life to it, but you never have to completely throw out the fundamentals and start from scratch, you can take a break for ten years if you need to and then come back and it'll feel familiar, nobody will laugh at you and call you a dinosaur for assuming 12-ET tuning is still a thing. You can learn to play things composed 100 years ago, no problem, and when you're old and grey you can tutor young people, no problem, you speak a common language which can help bridge the generational gap. Software engineering (as opposed to theoretical computer science) is just the complete opposite of all that, it's madness. I want that to change, and I still think that designing and building new hardware ought to be the smallest possible part of any sincere effort toward sustainable computing. The uxn approach of specifying a virtual machine which is designed specifically for ease of implementation from scratch on a wide range of existing hardware and then fixing that specification in stone for eternity is just so obviously the correct way to reconcile all this, I have a hard time imagining getting truly enthusiastic about any other approach. I'm not sure if the focus on minimal audio-visual applications of uxn (or more accurately the varvara platform built on it) is necessarily a good match for the kind of software I'd want to write the most of going forward, but it seems absurd not to get some hands-on experience with it.

=> uxn, the one-page computer | "Bedrock platform" at permacomputing.net

So much for computing goals, I think. On the radio front my goals are a lot more vague, I just have a strong sense of "holy heck, I need to do something". It's something like three quarters of a year since I got my amateur license and I've done absolutely nothing with it. Not, mind you, for lack of trying, I've tried like the Dickens. The thing is that I had very specific and strict notions in mind coming into the hobby - strictly homebrew hardware, strictly QRP operation, strictly HF bands. I didn't necessarily think it was going to be easy to get started this way, but I thought it was certainly achievable. I had been reading about this stuff for years, and all my homebrew HF receiver projects had yielded at least some sort of partial success eventually, and sometimes they worked astonishingly given their extremely rough and ready design and construction. But when it comes to transmitting I have just constantly run into endless problems with very single little thing. It's been a surprise, it's been frustrating and discouraging and honestly a little embarrassing. Everybody else on the internet seems to just be dangling a random bit of wire off the end of an si5351 and using somebody else's Arduino code and getting WSPR spots across the planet with milliwatts, I can't even hear my five second CW key downs on an SDR one city over.

I would really hate for the time to renew my license to come and to have nothing to show for it, so it seems clear that I need to pick some single very concrete and not hyper ambitious goal, ideally this month, and then focus on it tenaciously. Part of me is even tempted to lower my standards a bit and consider purchasing used hardware, but part of me thinks this is defeating the purpose. I mean it is defeating the purpose of my original motivations; I have little to no interest in actually communicating with other hams, I got licensed to finally get to grips with analogue electronics, to study and wonder at fascinating propagation phenomena, to enjoy the thrill of chasing maximum distance covered with minimum power and minimum component count. Banging out a couple of appliance operator QSOs on a deadline is orthogonal to all of that. On the other hand, I have come to appreciate that maybe V/UHF is not actually as totally uninteresting as I first imagined, and I can't shake the realisation that a cheap HT and a homebrew collapsible Yagi, the combination of a directional antenna and the need for good elevation just fits so nicely with my whole cycling around, grounding myself in my local environment routine which I want to be a big part of this year. Learning where all the hills and observation towers in my area are, building up a good mental map of the major population centers beyond my city and knowing, without having to think about it to much, which direction to point the antenna in from various bike-accessible vantage points, it's hard to hate that idea. And I have some fun ideas for "subversive" uses of APRS, too...

I dunno. Suffice it to say, this year I need to figure out exactly what the heck I actually want out of amateur radio, set a hopefully realistic goal that I'll be satisfied with, and then either achieve it or just give the whole thing up and focus my attention on something else.