If you want to follow what’s going on here, there’s now a telegram channel. It will generally follow the blog, with perhaps a few more messages about events here and there, as well as pictures of things I see while out and about that could be of interest to the channel but don’t warrant a full post.
Check it out: https://t.me/wereboarprojects. You will, of course, need Telegram but you can preview the feed without joining.
There’s also a chat channel: https://t.me/wereboar_projects_chat - it’s open to all but new members must be approved. This is just to prevent spambots.
Early boar ticket prices end March 1st, after that the price goes from $26 to $30. This ticket gets you in for all three days - May 15th, 16th and 17th. Ordering now also gives the post office plenty of time to deliver to you.
If you’d like to comment on a post, please do so - click the link at the bottom of each post that has the word comment in it.
You’ll need a name, and will have to answer a simple question to submit your comment. After that, I’ve set it up so that they are hidden until I can review them - while this won’t stop the spammers, you won’t see it until I make sure it’s not spam. I’ll try and look at any posted comments a couple times a week.
Let me know what you think about the work I’m doing, if you like it (or don’t like it, I’ll take constructive criticism,) or even if you’d like to see more of something I’ve posted. Keep it clean, things that are obviously spam, bait, and profanity won’t be visible.
They’re closed again. Strange Russian spam that I couldn’t figure out what they were posting for, and posts that mention sites that only talk about fans…there’s nothing of use here. Please use mastodon to comment, or join the telegram channels.
One of the things that was suggested to me was a quick way to find all of the major projects that have appeared on this blog. The easiest way for me to do this would be as you see it here: a single post, similar to hamfest pictures, that collects all of the projects from past posts. This hub contains projects that have been completed - ones that are still ongoing won’t show up here until done.
There’s a link on the sidebar that will bring you directly to this post.
Click on the title of each item to be taken to that project’s hub.
If you’ve been here before, you’ve probably noticed something different.
There’s a new theme set for the page.
Why? Well - as the world becomes more mobile, the site needs be mobile friendly. While I liked the simplicity of the previous theme, it didn’t react well to mobile and made viewing on your phone difficult. This template is reactive, and shows the site better to both desktop and mobile. I’ll make a few small changes, like the top image, but overall I like this. It’s clean, the colors are calm and pleasing, and it does react well to mobile. I’m still playing with some things, so there’s a few placeholders. I’m also going to try and update Flatpress to a newer version, but that’s going to be in a testing directory - you shouldn’t see any “the way this works” changes until I’m satisfied that the system is operational.
If you’re not seeing a new theme, ctrl+F5 should clear your cache and reload fresh.
I recently undertook a task to clean up and optimize images here on Projects, both for size and content. Some of the images were simply enormous, and some were showing stuff not relevant to the task at hand. You don’t need to have 5MB of image downloaded just to show you my bench with a single part on it. It can be much smaller. I also wanted to name things with a more universal convention.
That has been, more or less, completed. There’s a few images hanging out in hamfest folders that could be touched again, but for the most part they’re fine. And a couple I missed in QA…
Enter part 2.
Flatpress has a plugin that allows the pages to present a set of metadata that makes it more friendly towards searching. I’ve decided to (slowly) go through the pages here, add descriptions and keywords, and hopefully make the site easier to find what you’re looking for. This is probably going to take a while, but you shouldn’t see any interruptions on the front end of the site. I’m going to be working forwards from 2021, with 2026 already fully metadata’d.
Thank you for visiting Projects. I hope you’ve found something of interest here.
Progress:
2026: Done
2025: Done, and found some missing images.
2024: Done, and found some missing images.
2023: Done, and found some missing images.
2022: Done
2021: Done
This project is pretty much done. I’m going to set the search engines loose on the site in the coming weeks, hopefully more links to the site should show up and provide easier searching.
While still about 4 months away, there’s no better time to get your ticket as you can get the early boar price of $26, mailed to you at no extra charge. This is good for all three days - May 15th, 16th and 17th.
Ticket prices increase March 1st, so there’s no time like the present to get one if you plan on attending. Get your ticket here: https://hamvention.org/purchase-tickets/
It’s been a while since I’ve zipped up all the files in the document library, so it’s high time I do it again.
If you’d like a copy of everything I’ve collected for projects here, you can grab a copy of it from dropbox: https://www.dropbox. … ro3&st=djfaezpv&dl=0. The file is about 410MB, and is all of the files in a big .zip for easy extraction.
Used to be every technician had a set of them in their toolbox. They were a required purchase when I was a student in vocational electronics. My set generally vanished years ago, and Radio Shack quit selling them long before they became a piece of history.
Turns out you can still get that exact same set. It’s not in the ratshackpack, but you take what you can get.
So I guess I’ll be over here playing with my diddlestick.
I’m (more or less) done re-doing images here. I did find a couple that I messed up and missed, and a few that were deleted before I realized what I did (use that trash can!) but everything should be back in place. Thankfully, the Internet Archive had that all stored…feel free to submit pages there if you want!
What did I do?
1: Cropped a lot of images to show the relevant parts only. You don’t need to see a photo with 1/3 of it being the dirty mat on my desk.
2: Resized a lot of images so they are faster loading - a 2000×2000 image of a single resistor isn’t useful, and just wastes your time.
3: Moved a lot of things around on the back-end. I had images everywhere, but created folders for various projects and moved general images into appropriate folders.
4: Renamed most of the images so you know what they are if you download and store, and then come across the image some time later. The only things that didn’t get completely renamed were event photos since there’s a lot of those. They’re in their own folders, and that may be a project of it’s own.
Anything else?
There are a few document links still pointing towards my old OX drive. Those documents are still there for now, but you can find everything at the Wereboar Documents Library here: https://wereboar.com … r=wereboar-documents
I’m going to set a search on those old links and replace them as I find them, or simply point to the docs library in general.
edit: As best I can tell, all links to OX drive have been removed. I’ll leave the files there for a while, but probably will remove them no later than July of this year in case someone wants to grab them from an old link.
That all?
Yep, everything should be back in place, the pages should look better, and you should get image downloads a lot quicker. There may be some short delays as new thumbnails are generated for you, but I tried to take care of all those beforehand during preview setup.
As always, if you find anything broken, please hit the mastodon link at the bottom of each page and let me know. Thank you for visiting, and I hope you’ve found something of interest here.
