• 2 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: March 30th, 2024

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  • I’m not car-free, but I do all my grocery shopping without a car. In fact, I’m at my local grocer as I type at 1.7 miles away taking 250 feet elevation gain and 210 feet loss. I understand your pain!

    Here’s why I still think a bike fits your situation. Namely an inexpensive folding bike with a front basket and rack.

    Hills are conquered in the same way as a cart: walking uphill. Also known as “hike a bike.” Folding bikes are usually also allowed on busses, so you could take a bus one way. You could time your departure to a bus schedule and shop knowing you don’t have to rush or spend a long time at the store.

    Folders can be brought inside and consume about the same space as a folding trailer.

    My overall point is a folding bike is a trailer that you can ride downhill in. Electric would be a nice upgrade, but it’s not necessary.




  • You’re probably decoding noise or in the middle of the bit stream.

    What you’re looking for is called “preamble.” That’s a sequence of bits used to synchronize the decoder (marks the start of data, useful in modulation schemes for clock recovery, and a few other things).

    Looking at minimodem’s manual, try using the sync-byte option. Prepend your tar stream with a string of bytes, like 0x01, before sending to minimodem for encoding. Then use the sync code option to mark the start of the tar bit stream. This is as simple as cat preamble.bin myfiles.tar | minimodem --tx …

    Other things to consider: start small with 300 baud BFSK before speeding up. Test with wav files before attempting physical tape or speakers and a microphone.