Sniffing Branches – Things on my mind on a website

Visit to Three Rivers State Park

We took a little day trip to Three Rivers State Park near Sneads, Florida. This park is near the south western edge of Lake Seminole. The shoreline to the east is western Georgia near Donalsonville, Georgia.

Clicking sound on FT-891 during CAT

While running CAT control on the Yaesu FT-891 I noticed that a persistent clicking noise was not very loud but generally super annoying. Without making any changes to the USB cable, I found that I could control the severity of the noise by altering the baud rate in OmniRig. It stops whenever I close OmniRig and stop using CAT.

The FT-891 features three baud rates in menu 05-06 CAT Rate I chose to put that at the maximum number. On my rig it’s 38,400bps. This has to match the baud rate in OmniRig. Once the settings matched both on the radio and on the computer, the noise was much shorter but, unfortunately, it was still present. So what I was hearing is the query command from the computer to the radio and possibly the radio’s response as well. At least by choosing a higher baud rate the noise became shorter and slightly less annoying.

I’ve already tried clamping a ferrite bead on the USB cable with no effect. I suspect perhaps my cable is unshielded and the signal is getting picked up on the coax shielding, so I have ordered a proper shielded USB cable and I will update the article with the result. As is stands now, the noise is more bearable, but still present in my headphones.

Change the font in osTicket editor

In yet another customization effort, I felt compelled to modify the editor font in osTicket from Trebuchet MS to Arial. Why did I do this? Because Trebuchet MS is a terrible font, in my opinion. Notice that you may not have the same opinion, and that’s totally okay! You’re entitled to one!

Visiting Turkey Creek

A recent trek to Niceville, Florida included a visit to a county-operated park that lines the banks of Turkey Creek. The creek drains the sand basin of a nearby US Air Force base. Aircraft frequently fly over the park and this visit was no exception with numerous aircraft flying overhead. Pictures were hard to get since they were low and fast.

A few words about Markdown

I’ve decided to try out the WordPress Markdown block to draft this post. I’ve been using the Block Editor for some time now and, while it is really flexible design-wise, it is challenging to learn when stepping away from the Classic Editor. As time has gone on I’ve gotten pretty good with the Block Editor. But there was a block I had never heard of before: the Markdown block. I just had to dive in and find out more about it!

A Visit to Conservation Park

After debating which projects around the house would need our attention today, it was decided that we would take a family outing to Conservation Park in Panama City Beach, Florida. It’s the height of spring break, so thousands of college kids are visiting the area from all over the country. Drunken debauchery, sex, and drugs. Lots of things our teenager is probably interested in but doesn’t really need to be involved with for a few more years.

Photograph of Conservation Park — Recent prescribed burning charred some areas of the park (left) while leaving others untouched (right).

Due dates as dates in osTicket

So, I noticed that osTicket prefers to show dates for due dates and certain other fields as “human readable” dates. It displays something like Due in 2 days instead of 3/2/21 14:30 which was what I preferred; so they were the same as all the other dates. Sorting on these fields was often unreliable and the various phrases broke table displays and generally drove my OCD bonkers. Unfortunately, there is no way to change how these dates were displayed in the settings. So, I had to dig into the code.

Continue reading Due dates as dates in osTicket

Search custom fields in osTicket

Once upon a time there was no way to add searching capabilities to custom user fields in osTicket. I found a forum post detailing how to do it when searching the user list. But there was nothing on how to get it done when creating a ticket.

That is until I figured out how to get it done…

Using ffmpeg to convert Wal-Mart security footage

I recently encountered an issue where I needed to convert Wal-Mart security footage. I had ten files with two hours of video in each, which to do a screen-grab conversion probably would have made my computer die a slow and painful death. I had to find a way to convert the footage without using a screen grab.

How to force HTTPS in WordPress in Apache

This is a short tutorial on how to force users to HTTPS instead of HTTP when visiting a WordPress site. This tutorial assumes that you have some sort of SSL certificate installed on your site. I personally use Let’s Encrypt, but there are other ways of getting a verified certificate for encryption.