Author Archives: Jim Vanderveen

About Jim Vanderveen

I'm a bit of a Renaissance man, with far too many hobbies for my free time! But more important than any hobby is my family. My proudest accomplishment has been raising some great kids! And somehow convincing my wife to put up with me since 1988. ;)

New HF propagation widget

Posted on 2011-07-01 by Jim Vanderveen

I modified the SonicChicken homepage today. The “weather pixie” links haven’t been working for some time now, so I finally removed all those. I may add some sort of weather widget back in later. But in the meantime, I added … Continue reading →

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New tumblr user

Posted on 2011-06-25 by Jim Vanderveen

Two weeks ago [NPR did a story on tumblr][1]. It piqued my interest, as it sounded like a cross between a blog and Facebook. Also the tumblr terms of service were attractive. So I decided to give it a try, … Continue reading →

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Bad synergy

Posted on 2011-05-29 by Jim Vanderveen

Mac OS X has some great features, among which are Time Machine (which allows recovery of deleted or overwritten files) and Mail.app. Junk mail filtering means I rarely see spam in my inbox, but I keep “junk” mail in the … Continue reading →

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Power supply project

Posted on 2011-05-28 by Jim Vanderveen

I built my 11-amp power supply a while ago, but I just now finished writing up the [article about it](http://www.n6na.org/home/UserN3JIMpowerSupply1).

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Home-brewed SWR meter

Posted on 2011-05-27 by Jim Vanderveen

I finished my home-brewed SWR meter last week, but this blog was down. (I failed to heed my hosting company’s warning about a PHP upgrade, doh!) So, now that the blog is back online, I’m posting it here as well.

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Blog updated

Posted on 2011-05-26 by Jim Vanderveen

Well, it’s long past time that I updated this blog! I was given extra incentive when my hosting company updated PHP, which broke the old software. The new version of WordPress doesn’t support my old tags plugin, so I’ve finally … Continue reading →

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PHP/curl proxy error

Posted on 2010-12-09 by Jim Vanderveen

Yesterday I ran into a tough problem at work, (i.e. Google didn’t return a web page describing the solution). I spent almost a whole day trying to figure this out, and the solution turned out to be incredibly easy. We … Continue reading →

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Sopa de albondigas (meatball soup)

Posted on 2010-11-22 by Jim Vanderveen

Our neighbors traditionally exchange homemade gifts (e.g. cookies, jam) during Christmas. Two years ago, we got some sopa de albondigas, along with this recipe. We all loved it, but never got around to making it ourselves until last night. It … Continue reading →

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Poppy seed rolls

Posted on 2010-11-05 by Jim Vanderveen

Poppy seed rolls are one of our family’s favorite Thanksgiving traditions. These are mashed potato rolls with poppy seed filling. We’ve found that this dough is very sensitive to cold, so we bump the thermostat up to about 75° F … Continue reading →

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FreeBSD svn client and https server

Posted on 2010-08-30 by Jim Vanderveen

We recently moved our Subversion repository to the University’s central svn server. When I tried to checkout a copy of the repository to a new FreeBSD server today, I got the following error: svn: Unrecognized URL scheme ‘https://svn.web.server’ I checked … Continue reading →

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