Simon Szustkowski - Yelling at clouds

Connecting Logbook of the World to Cloudlog

I am using the excellent Cloudlog to log my ham QSOs. Cloudlog has built-in functionality to upload QSOs to electronic QSL services like eQSL, qrz.com and Logbook of the World. While connecting Cloudlog to the former both services was as easy as entering my username and password, the connection

antenna

Building a Magnetic Loop Antenna

Since i am the usual rented-apartment tenant, and since my experiments with the Spring Antenna were not that much promising, i decided to build a magnetic loop antenna. After researching on the internet i found some resources where hams have already built such an antenna out of an old bicycle

ham radio

Building a dipole antenna out of a cattle pasture door spring

Recently i decided to finally unpack all my ham radio gear from its box where it was stored since our last movement to our current apartment. While being able to do some VHF/UHF activity prior to that with a Diamond X30 antenna, i did not had time to build

The very nice user experience of the Giropay onboarding process

You know, there is PayPal. But: 𝕴𝖙 𝖎𝖘 𝕲𝖊𝖗𝖒𝖆𝖓𝖞 𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖊. And in Germany we are very proud of our Insellösungen because of Data Protection and stuff. So the german banks invented something called Giropay. Or Paydirect. Or whatever, it seem to be two names for the same service. The promise is the same: You

Backup ArangoDB on Kubernetes

In a recent project, our architect decided to use ArangoDB as a database. I am not familiar with that, but it seems like one of these fancy hipster NoSQL stuff - at least it is written in node.js. But who am i to judge? As the responsible DevOps engineer

A busylight for home office

During the peaks of Corona, when both my girlfriend and i worked from home, we had some situations where one of us was in a call, and should not get disturbed. The usual open/closed door indicator did not work, because if we let the doors to our working rooms

A MQTT enabled smart doorbell

I am a huge fan of IoT and smart home. For that reason, i have deployed an instance of Home Assistant [https://www.home-assistant.io/] to my home server and am thriving to get all kinds of sensor data into the system which then gets evaluated by automation scripts. One

A shelf to mount a Netatmo weather station to a SKADIS pegboard

Recently i searched for a way to clean up my tinkering corner in my work room. Like many others i stumbled upon the Ikea SKADIS [https://www.ikea.com/de/de/search/products/?q=skadis] pegboard series and was hooked - literally. The internet is full of STL files to

One thing a week

As you may have noticed, i am not the most frequent author - despite having lots of projects going on, which i could write about. I want to change that. Lucky me i stumbled upon the "One thing a week [https://www.timoschindler.de/ein-jahr-one-thing-a-week/]" challenge, which aims toward doing,

A sane way to handle Zettelkasten IDs in Obsidian

I am using Obsidian [https://obsidian.md/] as my personal knowledge management/external brain tool. In the past with PARA [https://www.der-generalist.de/para/] as the way to organize notes, which was not really satisfying. I ended up with lots of subfolders and always struggled with the question where

Hello world

Apparently this is the first post of my most recent attempt to create a blog. Some of you might still know my old blog, filled with personal and tech content, which was scrambled up by trying to migrate its content between several blogging platforms. This attempt aims to be a