Hacker Public Radio

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Making First Contact


An amateur radio contact, more commonly referred to as simply a
"contact", is an exchange of information between two amateur radio
stations. The exchange usually consists of an initial call, a
response by another amateur radio operator at an amateur radio
station, and a signal report. A contact is often referred to by
the Q code QSO. It is often limited to just a minimal exchange of
such station IDs. Stations who have made a contact are said to
have worked each other. An operator may also say that he has
worked a certain country.


QSO: (amateur_radio)




Making your first QSO



Kees's history



1990 PD1OOY VHF/UHF only, 25 Watt, only F3E. (NED, BEL, LX, DL)


1991 PE1OOY CEPT Class II


1995 G7TWO 1st British callsign CEPT Class II


1997 PE7TWO First vanity callsign CEPT Class II


2000 M5TWO CEPT Class A+B+ CW included


2000 PA7TWO CEPT Class I + CW included


2002 M5TWO CEPT Class I + CW included



Ken's history




COVID-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom



2020-08-21
Amateur Foundation Examination



2021-01-28
Amateur Intermediate Examination



2021-08-05
Amateur Full Radio Licence






















































Links




UK Amateur Licensing




Baofeng UV-5R Mini 5W Dual Band Radio




BangGood




Tech Minds
video "
This Baofeng UV-5R Mini Is Almost Perfect - And It's Only $25!
"



QSO: amateur_radio




QSL Card




IARU Region 1 HF band plan




QRZ.com




Club Log




Modulation Codes
,
Types of radio emissions







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This series is dedicated to exploring little-known—and occasionally useful—trinkets lurking in the dusty corners of UNIX-like operating systems.

As the zeroth entry of this series, we'll have a little introduction to what it is supposed to be about and why you might want to listen. So that you don't leave without getting at least one piece of useful information, it will end with a little curio that you might find helpful someday.

Back in 2010, I was the editor of the newsletter, titled The Open Pitt, for the Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group in Pittsburgh. We distributed it as a two-page PDF, so had to have enough material to fill each issue. Because we were having some trouble getting contributions, I started writing columns in a series called "UNIX Curio" to occupy the empty space. They were inspired in large part by examples I had seen of people re-inventing ways to do things when utilities for the same purpose had already existed for a long time.

The obvious question is: just what is a UNIX Curio? Let's start with the first word, UNIX. While a lot of people write it "Unix" instead, I have chosen to put it in all capitals because that is the way The Open Group, which controls the trademark and the certification process to use it, spells the word
1
. The history of UNIX is complex (search online for more details
2
)—the short version is that many variants emerged, often introducing incompatibilities. Even within AT&T/Bell Laboratories, two major branches came out. The Research UNIX lineage, which includes Seventh Edition (sometimes called Version 7), was often used in universities and government while System III and its more popular successor System V were clearly intended as commercial products
3
. The University of California's BSD was also very influential. My intention is to talk about things that are relatively common; ideally, they would be present on a large majority of systems so you can actually
use
them.

Luckily, there were people who recognized the value in compatibility, so in the mid-1980s they initiated the development of the POSIX standards
4
. Publication of these not only caused commercial UNIX versions to aim for conformance—it gave Free Software implementations of utilities and operating systems a stable base to shoot for rather than having to chase multiple moving targets. As a result, today's GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD systems generally behave as specified in POSIX, even if they haven't officially earned the UNIX or POSIX labels, so I treat them as part of the UNIX world.

Moving on to the second word, "curio," it just means "an object of curiosity, often one considered novel, rare, or bizarre." There are many well-used utilities in the UNIX world, but people forget about others because they are only useful in specific circumstances. And when those circumstances arise, these obscure ones don't always get remembered. One purpose of this series is to point out some of them and describe where they can be appropriately put to use.

With the flexible tools available on UNIX systems and the ability to string them together, it shouldn't be surprising that people come up with new ways to accomplish a task. I don't want to claim that these curios are always the
best
way to do something, just that it can be helpful to know they exist and see the way someone else solved the problem. Also, if you're using an unfamiliar system, sometimes programs you are accustomed to employing might not be installed so it's good to know about options that are widely available.

So why am I the person to talk about this subject? I am
not
a UNIX graybeard with decades of professional computing experience. If I did grow a beard, it would only be partially gray, and my working life has been spent in the engineering world mainly around safety equipment. Sadly, there I have been forced to use Windows almost exclusively. However, in my academic and personal pursuits, I have been involved with using UNIX and Linux for more than 30 years, so I do have a bit of a historical perspective. For some reason, when I encounter an unusual or obscure tool, I want to learn more about it, especially so if I find it to be useful in some way. After gaining that information, I might as well share it with you. In addition, I have been involved with Toastmasters International, a public speaking organization, for about 15 years so I have experience in presenting things orally. I was inspired to turn this article series into podcasts by murph
5
, who delivered a presentation at the 2025 OLF Conference describing how and why to contribute to Hacker Public Radio
6
.

The show notes for curios 1 through 3 will consist of the articles as they were originally written (though with references added). Because some examples, especially code, can be difficult to understand when they are read out loud, the podcasts will sometimes present the information in a different way. Show notes for this curio 0 and for curios 4 and later will be written with the podcast format in mind, so they will more closely match what I say.

Let's end with an actual curio to kick off the series. Have you ever needed a quick reminder about whether the file you're looking for can be found under the /usr or /var directories? On many UNIX systems,
man hier
will give you an overview of how the file hierarchy is organized. This manual page is not a standard, but was present in Seventh Edition UNIX
7
and many descendents, direct and indirect, including every Linux distribution I have ever used. There
are
attempts to standardize the layout; in the Linux world, the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS)
8
, now hosted by Freedesktop.org
9
, intends to set a path to be followed. It should be noted that systemd has its own idea of how things should be laid out based on the FHS; if it is in use, try
man file-hierarchy
instead as it will likely be a more accurate description.

I hope this gives you a good idea of what to expect in future episodes. The first one will be about shell archives, so keep an eye on Hacker Public Radio's schedule for it to appear.

References:

The Open Group Trademarks
https://www.opengroup.org/trademarks

History of Unix
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix

The Unix Tutorial, Part 3
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-10/page/n133/mode/2up

POSIX Impact
https://sites.google.com/site/jimisaak/posix-impact

Correspondent: murph
https://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents/0444.html

OLF Conference - December 6th, 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyEunLtqbrA&t=25882

File system hierarchy
https://man.cat-v.org/unix_7th/7/hier

Finding a successor to the FHS
https://lwn.net/Articles/1032947/

Freedesktop.org now hosts the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
https://lwn.net/Articles/1045405/

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Thorium Reactors

01 Introduction

In this episode we will describe the use of thorium in nuclear power, including what thorium is, how it differs from uranium, and what sort of reactors can use it.

03 What is thorium

05 How thorium differs from uranium

07 Sources of Thorium

09 Why there is interest in using thorium as a fuel

10 Abundance of Thorium

11 Some Countries Have a Lot of It

12 Thorium Breeder Reactors are Simpler than Uranium Breeder Reactors

14 Supposed Lower Nuclear Weapons Potential

16 What is Thorium Breeding

20 Breeding Ratio

21 What sorts of reactors can use thorium

22 PHWRs - Heavy Water Reactors (Including CANDU)

24 HTR - High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactors

26 MSR - Molten Salt Reactors

29 Light Water Reactors (PWR, BWR)

31 Fast Neutron Reactors

32 The Challenges Facing Thorium Fuelled Reactors

37 Thorium in India - An Example Use Case

39 Why is India Pursuing Using Thorium?

40 How a Thorium Fuel Cycle Would Work in India

43 Current Status

46 Conclusion

Thorium is an abundant material that is seen as an alternative to uranium in nuclear power.

Experimental thorium power reactors date back to at least the 1960s.

No new reactor technology is required to use thorium.

Existing well proven reactor designs which have been in use for decades can use thorium as fuel.

The common light water reactor designs that popular in some countries however are not well suited to using thorium.

Initial interest in thorium was mainly driven by a perception that uranium would be in short supply in future, and slow neutron thorium reactors were cheaper and simpler than fast neutron uranium reactors.

However, huge new high grade supplies of uranium were found in a number of countries, causing uranium prices to fall and reducing interest in finding alternatives.

While some R&D continues on thorium fuel in a number of countries, the mainstream of development continues to be on uranium based fuel.

Some countries with abundant thorium reserves though maintain a major interest in thorium, with India being the prime example.

In the next episode we will describe small modular reactors.

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These are the commands mentioned in the You may need to use
"sudo" to run these commands depending on how your system is
configured.

strace uptime

strace ls 2>&1 | grep open

strace -e openat ls /

strace ls /does/not/exist

strace -o ls-trace.log ls

strace -ff -o pid12345-trace.log -p 12345



HISTORY


The original strace was written by Paul Kranenburg for SunOS and
was inspired by its trace utility. The SunOS version of strace was
ported to Linux and enhanced by Branko Lankester,
who also wrote the Linux kernel support. Even though Paul released
strace 2.5 in 1992, Branko's work was based on Paul's strace 1.5
release from 1991.



In 1993, Rick Sladkey took on the project. He merged strace 2.5
for SunOS with the second release of strace for Linux, added many
features from SVR4's truss(1), and produced a ver‐
sion of strace that worked on both platforms. In 1994 Rick ported
strace to SVR4 and Solaris and wrote the automatic configuration
support. In 1995 he ported strace to Irix (and
became tired of writing about himself in the third person).



Beginning with 1996, strace was maintained by Wichert Akkerman.
During his tenure, strace development migrated to CVS; ports to
FreeBSD and many architectures on Linux (including
ARM, IA-64, MIPS, PA-RISC, PowerPC, s390, SPARC) were introduced.



In 2002, responsibility for strace maintenance was transferred to
Roland McGrath. Since then, strace gained support for several new
Linux architectures (AMD64, s390x, SuperH), bi-
architecture support for some of them, and received numerous
additions and improvements in system calls decoders on Linux;
strace development migrated to Git during that period.



Since 2009, strace has been actively maintained by Dmitry Levin.
During this period, strace has gained support for the AArch64,
ARC, AVR32, Blackfin, C-SKY, LoongArch, Meta, Nios
II, OpenRISC 1000, RISC-V, Tile/TileGx, and Xtensa architectures.
In 2012, unmaintained and apparently broken support for non-Linux
operating systems was removed. Also, in 2012
strace gained support for path tracing and file descriptor path
decoding. In 2014, support for stack trace printing was added. In
2016, system call tampering was implemented.



For the additional information, please refer to the NEWS file and
strace repository commit log.


Links


https://strace.io

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strace

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/strace.1.html

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We start with
Orwellian depictions of the future
read about in the 1950/60s. Working in the 1970s at companies such as
British Telecom
and the L
urgie
. We hear about
telex
,
mainframes
with
magnetic tape
,
type-writers
, and the upskilling of the workforce by the
labour-exchange
. How did a cold and lack of a home telephone lead to businessmen arriving in a foreign land sans camels? Why were
filing cabinets
replaced by
databases
(or were they)? We hear about gaming from a home made version of
Pong
all the way to
Alone in the Dark
. Then modern times: we hear about some favourite
youtube
streams and discover that living in the 2020s is (just about) possible without a
smartphone
.

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