Its a late night tonight as I setup the honors network for a smooth start one last time. Its been a long summer to make a clean startup on Void after migrating off of Ubuntu. Here’s what’s happened.

So Ubuntu is a fine platform and I still would probably recommend it for new Linux users. It worked well for setting up the platform and was a decent system for a long time. Where it fell short was in the usability from an administrative perspective. The packages are ancient, the fact that things are linked against gnutls is a real pain and the community doesn’t have great docs for running Ubuntu in the enterprise. Overall it was time to move on.

Well that didn’t last. A midst the reports of Microsoft telemetry that can’t be disabled, continuous system updates that are broken, and a lack of real need anymore for Windows. I’m uninstalling from my T100.

Given that this platform wasn’t designed to run Linux it will be an interesting learning experience to get Void running on here. A later post will incorperate the complexity.

I am a staunch supporter of Linux and open source software. Why then, would I run an MS Windows system, much less a system on the bleeding edge?

Why?

A year ago I was working for UTD Residential Life in the capacity of an RA. Like many departments that have a high dependence on technology, they used Microsoft Office for forms regardless of if that was the best solution available. As a result, I found that when I turned in reports they were often malformed or improperly formated due to LibreOffice 3.5 deficiencies (4.0 corrects most if not all of these issues).

One of the many irons I have in the fire is amatuer radio. A good friend of mine is way better at it than I am and tomorrow he will be demonstrating his skills.

A year ago Andrew Koenig and I were working with UTD’s Science and Engineering Education Center running a space themed summer camp. In the first week there was lots of ballistic rocketry, and the second week had lots of weather balloon fun. The Balloon from that launch did not do well but it inspired us to do better. I helped with some of the initial troubleshooting of the first Raspberry Pi based balloon, but unfortunately could not see it through to completion. Luckily, Andrew could. His website contains a wealth of information about what makes the entire system work, as well as the appropriate frequencies if you’d like to listen in. If you are licensed to transmit, there is a crossband repeater. Otherwise, the SSTV broadcast is a great way to take part in a balloon launch without leaving your desk.

This site is a dramatic improvement over the apache webserver’s default page.

I obviously do not have a large amount of content yet, but as time goes on I will add to this site accordingly.