I was recently asked how I produce the “race tracks” maps from the APRS tracker. The short answer is Google Earth. The longer answer has a few more steps.

The map is a 3D rendering from Google Earth. It requires an KML file. For airborne APRS, these can be found over on Joe’s website. First find the aircraft, then select “all tracks” and then choose the “Google Earth Tour” for the track you want to map. Once you have downloaded the tour.kml file, start up Google Earth and drag-n-drop the kml file onto the window. This will import all of the place markers for the flight. Pan, Zoom, and Tilt until you have the view you like.

The results thus far will be cluttered so here is one way to clean up the view. Find the track in the “My Places” list or “Temporary Places” list on the left panel in Google Earth. Right-click on the track and select “properties”. Select the “Style, Color” tab and click the “Share Style” button. This will let you change all place markers at once. The tab will now display options for Line color, Area color, Labels, and Icons. Set the opacity for Labels and Icons to 0%. (Silly me, there is an easier way … ) Uncheck the mark next to the track label. The track will disappear but this is all right. Now, expand the track’s list of place markers and scroll to the last one titled “End of Track”. Check the box to display just this one entry. The track is now visible.  Optionally set the line width to 2.0 and choose colors for the lines and area under the line.

You should end up with something similar to the picture.

BTW – this track was a quick warm-up flight to three airports with a landing at each airport.

The Eastern Shore of Virginia is known for agriculture – tomatoes and feed grains. The latter means feed corn, soybeans, and winter wheat. The corn isn’t nice to eat but the soybeans have real potential. One challenge is that modern combine harvesters need grains to be very dry and hard before harvesting. This means the soybeans most closely resemble ammunition rather than edibles. Equally problematic is that by harvest time, the beans are past their “pallet ready” flavor.

An old time resident of the Shore once told me his dad fried soybeans as a snack. Being one to try to carry on cooking traditions of past generations I tucked this idea in the “to-do” recesses of my brain. Recently, it surfaced. After some research and trial and error, here is what I have …

Recipe:

• 4 C dry, hard, inedible, soybeans
• 2 Tbsp sugar (I use raw sugar but any will do)
• 2 tsp table salt (kosher and sea salt are too granular)
• cooking oil – enough to be 2-3 inches deep in a heavy pan

Rinse the soybeans to wash off any dirt, sticks, and debris left from the harvesting. Put the clean beans in a 1-1/2 quart contain with hot water so the beans are covered. Stir in the sugar to dissolve. Cover and let sit for 12 to 24 hours.

Strain the soybeans and rinse. Pat dry to remove all of the surface moisture. Warning – excess moisture on the surface of the beans will be dangerous when deep frying.

In a heavy pan – I use a cast iron #8 Dutch Oven – add 2-3 inches of oil. A good high temperature oil like peanut is best but blends are more affordable and will do fine. Bring the oil up to 350-375 degrees.

Fry the soybeans about 1 cup at a time. Start with less until you know how energetic the initial boiling will be. Also, watch how much the oil temperature drops. Try to keep the oil above 325 and below 375 degrees.

Pay close attention when deep frying the soybeans. They are done, not when they are golden brown, but rather, when they are floating and the bubbling has reduced to small bubbles around the beans. This indicates that most of the moisture in the beans has cooked off. There is very little time between done and tasting burnt. The latter will occur well before the beans actually look burnt. In practice, judging “done” is pretty easy if you pull out a few beans every 15-30 seconds once you think they are close. When the beans have the crunch and flavor you like, just note the bubbling and use that visual for subsequent batches.

When the soybeans are done, scoop the out and drain on paper towels over cookie cooling racks. After about 30 seconds to one minute, transfer the still-warm beans to a container. Add the salt. Stir lightly with a spatula using a folding motion like you would use folding ingredients for a cake. At this point, there is too much salt – don’t worry.

Continue to cook the soybeans in 1/2 to 1 cup batches. When each batch has cooled slightly, add it to the container with the earlier batches and fold them together. Once you finish the last batch, the total amount of salt will be close. Taste the mix and lightly salt if desired.

Deep fried soybeans are addictive – especially during football season and when served with a crisp cold beer.

You can experiment with adding a dash of Old Bay spice, honey glazing, etc.

Let me start by saying that “yes” it’s OK to have more than one “junk drawer” in your kitchen, BUT it needs to be organized. Here’s how …

Find a few small cardboard boxes. Set each in the drawer, holding up against the inside front edge. Now, use a pencil and draw a line along the face of the box at the height of the edge of the drawer. It may be easier to use the side of the drawer. Now, turn the box 90 degrees and repeat for the other three sides of the box. When you are done, you have a line drawn all the way around the box. Now cut the box down to the line.

You can repeat this To add more boxes.

With the small boxes in the drawer, it’s easy to organize the little clutter that is typically loose and jumbled up in the drawer.

Now your “junk drawer” can be renamed as the “miscellaneous drawer” !

It was a near perfect day to sneek out at lunch for some flight training … And to test the new iGate. When I returned and looked at the path data, as I happy as I was to see a good track, I was confused why nearly all of my packets routed 7 miles north only to then route 10 miles south to my iGate. More than 80% of my packets were routed through a digipeaters and then back to my own iGate.

So, I went back to look read APRS 101 and what WIDE2-1 meant for packet routing.

Simply put, WIDE2-1 says you get just one repeat or hop of you packet. The reason aircraft in my area have not had good coverage was not that our trackers were not being received; they were. The problem was the digipeaters in this area could not get to an iGate with just one hop.

So, I’m disappointed that my iGate does not receive many direct packets but happy its doing it’s job of connecting the radio packet network with the IP network.

So, if you are flying with a tracker, WIDE2-1 is definitely the preferred setting. And if you find a dead spot in your area where your packets only appear once you’ve gained some altitude, consider adding your own iGate. You probably don’t need much of an outdoor antenna since all you really need to do is be able to receive a good local The digipeater will do the rest.

In an attempt to following the newsworthy (and not so news worthy) activities at a technology conference which I was not attending, I decided to combine a few different technologies in a media experiment.

The conference is Lotusphere 2012. It’s a software technology conference With a strong thread of social software so it is no surprise that a lot of participants (attendees and staff) are using twitter to send little updates. However, twitter is often used to share links to fuller content such as blog posts, pictures, and even other tweets. Collectively, this is a lot of content.

Twitter has encouraged the use of hashtags – a single string of characters proceeded with the hash or pound symbol. For the conference the hashtag is #ls12. Anyone sending a tweet about the conference will typically include the hashtag. Twitter let’s users watch for tweets based on a search for a hashtag – so a search for #ls12 will show a constant stream of tweets from the conference.

To make the reading experience more productive, I’m using the Flipboard app on my iPad and have created a section for twitter’s search of the #ls12 hashtag. The result is a news magazine styled experience of everyone tweeting from the conference. I definitely don’t read everything. More like reading a newspaper where I skim through for things that grab my attention. (BTW, just like newspapers, there are a lot of advertising and promoting going on through tweets so the total experience can have the dirty feeling of a unscrupulous used car salesman.) The only difference is that with hundreds of “writers” there are often more than one tweet about any given event and occurrence at the conference. One example was the emergence of the #occupypelican hashtag and what it represented. (For the curious, you can search twitter and read up on it.)

My conclusion is this has been an effective experiment. The content has not been highly useful but I will likely use this same solution to follow future events – conferences, international events, etc. It works best when the tweets link to blogs or news stories since Flipboard will go the extra step of pulling in the photos, blogs, and articles rather than just post the raw tweets.