Story of a ROOPHLOP

This post is about my ROOPHLOCH 2022 efforts, but does not itself

meet the criteria to be a ROOPHLOCH post. At this point, with just

a bit over 24 hours left, with tonight already dark and cold and with

family plans already made for Friday night, it seems increasingly less

likely I'll make a post which does meet the criteria. I'm less than

happy about that, believe you me, but at least this year it genuinely

wasn't through a lack of trying.

I was content to make my very first ROOPHLOCH post back in 2019 via

the relatively unremarkable means of connecting an eeePC to a

smartphone's wireless hotspot, but after that humble beginning I always

intended to escalate my game, and from even early days I had a really

clear plan: I was going to head out with the eeePC, write a post, and

then use the minimodem to render said post into a .wav file encoded

the file via audio frequency shift keying. This is exactly the

technology that the earliest dial-up modems were based on. You play a

sine wave at one frequency for "0" and at another frequency for "1",

and you just sing your bits, one by one, in sequence, at a fixed rate,

perhaps with some "stop bits" in there to help synchronise things.

Then I'd use my phone to call my wife back at home, who would pick up

and point her phone at my ThinkPad, which would be running its own

copy of minimodem, set to listen, not to sing, in part of a script

which would save what it heard to a text file and upload it to my

phlog. The big appeal of this approach was, while I'd probably do it

using an ordinary old phone call, the same basic approach would work

exactly the same via walky-talky or amateur radio or any other means

of remote sound transmission. But while coming up with the plan was

easy, I had thus far failed to getting around to actually trying this

in time to make a successful post via the method.

Well, I started down the road to finally making this long-standing

plan a reality, early last Saturday. After a small but irritating

amount of yak-shaving related to the fact that minimodem, to my

surprise, wants to use PulseAudio by default but PA wasn't set up on

either of the machines that I was using, I quickly got to the point

where this worked well and reliably with both laptops in the same

room, even separated by a few meters of empty space. I used a low

baud rate and a wide separation between the two frequencies, to make

the whole thing more robust to noise, and because of that it worked

despite street noise filtering in through the open windows, etc.

Success!

But as soon as I moved from transmitting a phlog post across a few

meters of empty space, and tried to use exactly the same minimodem

commands on both ends to transmit a phlog post from one end of our

apartment to the other via a simple phone call, everything stopped

working and I wasted the better part of the day trying to figure out

why, to no avail, leaving me dejected and bitter. We tried putting

the call on speakerphone, or not doing that, holding it close to the

ThinkPad's microphone or far away from it (and same with holding the

transmitting phone near or far from the eeePC's speakers), muting the

receiving phone call to avoid feedback, and we tried giving up on the

traditional telephone network proper and using a Signal voice call

instead, and we tried every other sensible little change you can think

of, and simply nothing worked. I dropped the baud rate down so low

that sending a post as long as this one would take a literal hour, it

didn't help. You can plainly hear with the unaided ear (and I

confirmed it by visualising the ThinkPad's perspective using the