I am an eBook user and love my Tolino Shine for reading. For management and sorting of the eBooks on my desktop computer i am using Calibre - quelle surprise! Since my inner Monk kicks always in when it comes to consistency and sorting, i have tagged my eBooks with a proper Series metadata, e.g. Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. My Tolino has a “Collection” feature, where it can group eBooks by certain criteria....

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 to LotW was a bit more complicated due to some more validation steps. At first i struggled with the actual creation of my LotW account....

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 wheel. The physical drawbacks of such wheels made out of aluminium which has a smaller conductance than copper are on a breakeven with the fact that such wheels are already perfectly round and can easily be obtained when you ask nicely in a bike shop....

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 and set up an antenna for HF frequencies in our old apartment. Luckily our current apartment has a balcony attached which is rougly 6,50*1,50m in size, so i researched for possibilities to set up an antenna using this 6,50m of length....

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 can easily send money to your contacts with only their mobile phone number as the contact details, and you don’t need to remember their IBAN....