Projects

A longer while ago a friend sold me his FA-NWT 1, a network tester for high frequency measurements. It's a really nice device, heavy, well built, and capable. Unfortunately, when I recently tried to revive that thing, I found that getting its software to run has become quite a challenge. You can do it, but there are issues: the window elements all seem to mingle in the left upper corner of the dialog, no matter on which operating system you run it.

The software for the original FA-NWT 1 is no longer supported and has been pulled from its author's website. He may gave good reasons for it, but for me and many others it means that our nice FA-NWT 1 devices now are fancy paper weights. This didn't sit well with me, and I looked for a solution. And I found one. Check it out here: 

I was looking for a small computer with display (not a laptop, something smaller) for amateur radio applications such as driving the previously mentioned FA-NWT. The condition I had was that it's display is built-in, that it runs on 12 volts nominal, and that it is frugal with power. I found the Higole 2 Pro, which was reasonably priced at about three hundred US dollars for the lowest configuration - it doesn't have to do much. This thing comes with Windows 11, which, given Microsoft's current antics, is absolutely not going to stay on my device. I looked for ways to install a Linux distribution on it and did some tests; my current favorite Fedora 44 KDE Plasma is a good fit.

The installation adventure is described here: 

I'm a software engineer, working on multiple platforms employing user interfaces and robotic realtime systems. Each has code bases between about 50,000 and 500,000 lines of C++ code. At work, we now have access to Cursor, a "harness" which employs AI agents to solve problems. It automatically selects (or lets you select) the models needed for the task, for example Claude Opus, the latest ChatGPT version, Grok, DeepSeek, or whatever is available on the net. Cursor makes it a breeze to work through a code base and do whatever is needed to maintain it. And it's good! Not only at creating new code, but at maintaining existing large code bases, finding bugs after I describe the symptoms to it, and documenting software functionality for either the engineers working on it or the user. I looked for a similar solution for personal use and found one.