Using Gqrx with USRP SDR's and DSD voice decoding on Mac OS X without losing your mind

The Problem: Homebrew formula is a rotten Brew!

Over the last few years, using the gqrx package was as simple as using homebrew. However, over late, the keepers of the brew formula hasn’t maintained the build with the most recent gr-osmosdr and Ettus Research UHD Library. So rather than depend on the brew formula, go grab the source and build your own version guaranteed to be up-to-date – and working on your USRP device!

Grab the source

So, the latest source (as of this writing 2.11.5) is available on the gqrx download section of their website.

Julia Intro

Juliaet, Wherefore art thou?

As Yoda once said…

> YAPL - yet another programming language. Learn something new, you must.

Why Learn Julia?

Julia was designed from the beginning for high performance. Julia programs compile to efficient native code for multiple platforms via LLVM. As such, it’s an interesting programming language to take a look at as it’s a serious contender for certain classes of programming problems; most notibly, scientific and data-centric analysis.

Ramnode

Drowning in the Digital Ocean

Not all services are created equal - you get what you pay for.

I got tired of paying Digital Ocean for a crappy service so I decided to hunt around for a no-frills service that give me a basic instance worthy of hosting a simple blog. Enter ramnode.

Ramnode

Ramnode is a basic service that quickly affords the addition of new VPS (virtual private servers) at a whopping $3/month per server. At such a cheap price, I’m giddy to add as many as I can think of!!!

Making some Noise - Teensy, TGA-Pro, and MIDI

Making Some Noise (and maybe even Music)!

In this blog post, I’ll share my experiences using the Teensy and TGA-Pro Guitar Audio Shield to process audio - both using an audio processing codec as well as MIDI. I’ve also included the Yamaha UX16 USB-to-MIDI controller to aid in patching my MIDI channels into the inputs of the Guitar Audio shield.

Teensy - Yet antother cheap USB uController board.

At the hear of this project is the Teensy 3.6 USB Microcontroller development board. This sub-$30 board is a feature-rich micro-controller using the Cortex M4, floating-point unit, digital and analog pins, and lots of communication protocols (USB, i2C, SPI, Serial, Ethernet). What makes this little USB-attached board so useful are the accompanying software elements:

Pathocaml - Getting Wacky with Functions And Polymorphism

OCaml on the Fringes - You can do that??

So, I got bored this afternoon and was contemplating why I was enjoying diving into OCaml more than say Elixir/Erlang for functional programming. The quality of the language that’s most captured my attention is the type system.

When you start playing around with the type system in OCaml you can go from some basic definitions of user-defined types to some pretty cool looking constructs. Let’s start of with something pretty transparent and move into something that might actually melt your brain.

OCaml OpenGL - Get into Gear!

OCaml and OpenGL - Getting our Functional Programming into Gear!

In my blog post for this day, I thought I’d take a look at the OCaml OpenGL library, lablgl. If you’re not already familair with openGL, I strongly suggest that you take a look at one of the tutorials available online. One that I found to be very informative; although written in c++, is opengl-tutorial. Nonetheless, in this post, we’ll look at some simple, and not so simple examples written in OCaml. But before we can do that, we need to install the requisite opam dependencies. To install lablgl, simply:

Exercism - Get your Code Deamons Out! Heal Your Body!

Exercis(m)

The best way to keep the mind, body, and soul sharp is to exercise! No better way to learn new programming paradigms than following this same precept when learning new concepts in an unfamiliar programming language. There are several sites online that afford noobs practice problems - Hackerrank, kaggle to name a few. But one that I recently came across, exercism.io, aims to provide not just programming exercises, but a community of folks committed to commenting and sharing both code and criticism on implementations to problem sets across many languages.