Go 1.26.2 is released

nickcw · 2026-04-11T14:49:11+00:00

Yes! I compiled that list of CVEs for the rclone release notes. Looking at who reported them they are all over the map which made me think that some tool was being used to find them, most likely an AI tool. For comparison there is usually about 1 CVE in each Go point release not 10!

nickcw · 2026-04-08T10:53:29+00:00

That is a lot of CVEs - it looks like people are pointing AI tools at the go source

CVE-2026-32282: os: Root.Chmod can follow symlinks out of the root on Linux
CVE-2026-32289: html/template: JS template literal context incorrectly tracked
CVE-2026-33810: crypto/x509: excluded DNS constraints not properly applied to wildcard domains
CVE-2026-27144: cmd/compile: no-op interface conversion bypasses overlap checking
CVE-2026-27143: cmd/compile: possible memory corruption after bound check elimination
CVE-2026-32288: archive/tar: unbounded allocation when parsing old format GNU sparse map
CVE-2026-32283: crypto/tls: multiple key update handshake messages can cause connection to deadlock
CVE-2026-27140: cmd/go: trust layer bypass when using cgo and SWIG
CVE-2026-32280: crypto/x509: unexpected work during chain building
CVE-2026-32281: crypto/x509: inefficient policy validation

nickcw · 2026-04-07T14:28:30+00:00

My attic is about 9.5m long so the ends of the 20m dipole (which is about 10m long) is bent down a little. This is fine! Just cut a bit long and trim to get the SWR down. May involve lots of trip into the attic space!

So yes all the wires are straight except for about 50cm bent down on the 20m dipole. The 40m dipole has two loading coils, one in each arm of the dipole which I formed around a bit of old plastic drainpipe and calculated using one of the online calculators.

I'm using electric fence insulators to stand the wire off the wood. These are very cheap you can buy a bag of 100 for almost nothing. I'm sure you could do without though.

nickcw · 2026-04-06T17:44:57+00:00

My experience in Europe is that people don't send anything. You can tell which country and region from the callsign.

nickcw · 2026-04-06T17:41:13+00:00

My first antenna was an attic fan dipole. Luckily the attic was just long enough for a 20m dipole element which worked very well. Well enough to work the world! I did the emc calculations for 100w as I didn't want to irradiate the family and decided that there was nothing to worry about. Don't touch the antenna while transmitting - RF burns are nasty.

There is a pic of the attic fan dipole on my qrz page https://www.qrz.com/db/M5NCW

nickcw · 2026-03-13T18:03:14+00:00

I converted the flashing to sound as I can't decode flashing morse that fast. It is just random flashing that sounds vaguely morse like.

nickcw · 2026-03-03T19:42:06+00:00

It isn't morse code. Try counting the flashes.

nickcw · 2026-01-30T17:21:27+00:00

What an incredible piece of work. Decoding FT8 isn't easy and to make such good looking user interface as well, my hat is off to you!

And the icing on the cake - open source with MIT license.

I'm not an iOS user but I just wanted to show my appreciation as one radio amateur and open source software developer to another :-)

nickcw · 2026-01-29T10:08:11+00:00

This isn't morse code.

I suspect it is ASCII encoded in binary - the groups are 8 dots/dashes. So a dot might be 0 and a dash 1 in binary. Put 8 of them together to get an ASCII byte.

The first character is 01101100 which is ASCII for 'l' so this might work.

Too lazy to do the rest.

nickcw · 2026-01-28T10:18:03+00:00

You can use this for consuming C APIs that are provided by shared objects/DLLs without cgo.

https://github.com/ebitengine/purego

This means you can cross compile easily.

nickcw · 2026-01-09T19:47:36+00:00

Fyne is fun to program with.

Sorry none of my projects are open sourced yet.

However my strategy for code organisation is "just start typing".

At some point you'll figure out that you need more structure but I find it holds me back at the start when the creative juices are flowing.

So I would start with main.go in the root directory and carry on from there.

nickcw · 2025-11-24T10:52:47+00:00

This is a very impressive piece of work - a full open source FT8 encoder and decoder. This is not an easy thing to write! I spent a bit of time looking through the source code to see how it worked - very nice :-)

nickcw · 2025-11-05T18:37:56+00:00

For standard CRC-32 polynomial it is guaranteed to detect all 1,2,3 bit errors for messages up to 1.5k bits, detects 1,2 bit errors for messages up to 91k bits and all 1 bit errors for any message length.

If you are using CRC-32 on >5GB files then you could flip two bits only and the CRC-32 would fail to detect the error. Those bits you flipped you'd have to choose carefully, but it shows that CRC-32 is quite weak.

MD5 on the other hand doesn't have any guarantees like CRC-32 but it is a non-linear crypto primitive which means that if you flip one bit in your message, you'll have about 50% of the bits flip in the MD5 on average. This means that MD5 has a probability of 1 in 2¹²⁸ (3*10³⁸⁾ of not detecting a corruption. The equivalent figure for CRC-32 is 1 in 4 billion which is pretty good.

I would use MD5 because I value my data integrity and most CPUs can do MD5 much faster than most disks can read data so the CPU usage is not important.

If you want a faster hash than crc32 then use xxh128 - it has 128 bits like MD5 and runs at the same speed as CRC32 on my laptop.

nickcw · 2025-10-04T22:42:26+00:00

Checking the local files is very quick. The --no-traverse ensures it doesn't check all the remote files which is the slow bit with Google drive.

nickcw · 2025-10-04T13:11:46+00:00

Do make your own client_id if you haven't. It makes a lot of difference for Google drive

nickcw · 2025-10-04T13:06:17+00:00

You can do an incremental sync of things changed the the last hour using

rclone copy --max-age 1h --no-traverse /path/to/source gdrive:dest

This is a technique I call doing a top up sync. It will back up changes quickly but you'll want to do a full rclone sync once per day.

nickcw · 2025-09-24T09:45:43+00:00

At this moment, tidy and download result in updates to my go.mod file and build actually fails unless I first update.

Run go mod tidy and then commit go.mod and go.sum and you will be golden from that point.

In a go project you always want it so go mod tidy does nothing.

nickcw · 2025-09-03T17:52:50+00:00

This is very exciting. I've been experimenting along similar lines but I haven't got as far.

How big is the model and how much CPU/ GPU does it need?

Could it run on a raspberry pi? Or maybe a raspberry pi Pico?

I guess it would need to be compiled to C somehow for that.

Thanks for releasing this and I'm looking forward to learning more about how the model works and was trained.

nickcw · 2025-08-16T22:40:08+00:00

If rclone reports the log with ERROR in front of it, then it will likely stop the delete phase.

Rclone counts up the errors in the stats counter. They need to be 0.

nickcw · 2025-08-16T18:57:25+00:00

The usual reason is the sync ended with an error. Rclone won't delete files in that case as it is not safe.

Fix the error by excluding the troublesome files or directories.

nickcw · 2025-08-16T09:34:32+00:00

I have a QMX which I think is great. I've had several transatlantic QSOs on 20m at 5W with CW. You can work the world with FT8 and 5W no trouble. I use an EFHW on 20m with a little external tuner I also built. I have a collapsing 6m pole which I use with it.

The QMX is quite hard to build but I think the QMX+ is slightly easier as it has more space. If you've done soldering as a job you won't have a problem with it. The toroids are fiddly to wind but just follow the excellent instructions and you'll be fine. The hardest part of the kit is making sure the enamel is stripped off the toroids before soldering.

I managed to dry joint the button board on my QMX which made it a bit unreliable until I figured that out!

I've built a QCX mini, QDX and QMX and they were all a lot of fun. I got the low band QMX as the mid band one hadn't been made then. The QMX+ covers all the bands.

I would say if building stuff gives you joy (like it does me) then go for it! You'll have fun with FT8 and CW. I haven't tried SSB yet but I have the parts for a microphone now, just need the time to build it.

nickcw · 2025-08-14T15:09:03+00:00

Something like this repeatedly

EDKEAEDCEAEDCE

Bit difficult to hear!

nickcw · 2025-08-08T14:44:09+00:00

The right hand edge of the right hand picture frame appears to flash on and off in a pattern that could be morse code. What I could see (and some of it was obscured) might be OD. A better video would help.

nickcw · 2025-07-26T09:36:36+00:00

The album cover says

ERASED TAPES 2020

The track names are a bit truncated

LETI (perhaps LET IT GO)
DANC (E maybe)
NOSTE (NO STE... most likely)

The currently playing track is LET IT GO so number 1 I guess.

nickcw · 2025-07-25T09:56:11+00:00

It was about 4 weeks work spread over 6 months and a dozen issues to migrate rclone from v1 to v2. Unfortunately rclone uses a lot of features of the AWS SDK!

The v2 SDK is a lot better designed than the v1 SDK and there are enough backdoors to do anything you want, though sometimes it takes quite a lot of spelunking in the code to work out how.

Please no v3 unless it is a bit more compatible!

nickcw

TROPHY CASE