@eli APRS is a very specialized technology in ham radio. I've never used it. He needs to find a ham in his area who uses APRS a lot to help him. He should look for such people at a local ham radio club. Where is he located? His Yaesu rig is vintage 2010 or so and has been discontinued, which is why I say he needs to find an expert with APRS. The technology was invented in 1992 by a ham who now lives in MD, callsign of WB4APR. He could look him up on QRZ.com and get his email address there, but there are no guarantees it will be current. But if it's working, he might have a bright idea of where he could find someone to help him. Tell me his location and I'll see whether I can find a ham radio club near him.

@Ron I love this reply. Such a great community. I am glad you're here, and to have virtually connected in some small way with you.

@Ron thanks so much! I’ll suggest that he looks him up. My dad is in Denver, and I know he’s connected with at least one local club.

@eli Okay, since he's in Denver I think his best bet is to join the RMRL club, a Denver club with about 250 members. I'm sure there will be someone in such a large club who can help him with APRS. The club is online here. It's only $20/yr to join (see the Membership tab). They have a weekly meeting on the air on Monday night at 8:30 pm. The Membership tab gives the frequencies of the repeaters & the tone he will need to access the repeaters. If he checks in to that net and explains that he needs APRS help, I bet someone will be able to tell him one or more hams who can help him out. They have a club roster with contact information for all the members. Let me know if that works out for him. If not, we'll find some other approach for him to try.

@kitt OMG, thanks so much for that, Kitt!!!! You have made my month!! I'm such an oddball here that I've been thinking about leaving for many months. My interests are so narrow (ham radio, Bob Dylan, writing, tax prep) my age so much higher than most here, & my web developer skills so limited that I get discouraged at times. It has seemed so strange to have found myself mostly surrounded by Apple developers chattering away in their tech-speak that is like a foreign language to me. I joined the Kickstarter because I thought the book would teach me what to do, but it has not been forthcoming for nearly 2.5 yrs now! And most recently having Khurt pound away on his thesis that micro.blog isn't doing it for him has pushed me more into pessimism, which I didn't have in the beginning at all. It has been easy to focus too much on it being a failed Kickstarter, which has been demoralizing for me of late.

BUT . . . if my message to Eli manages to help his dad solve his APRS problems . . . welllll then we're doing something useful here after all. Not just a waste of time or all the discouraging ideas that Khurt has been selling.

AND . . . FINALLY @Miraz has stepped forward with a sincere interest in helping beginners (and the ability to do so), which is gigantic!!! Her tutorials (as well as some help from @simonwoods and @DrOct) may end up rescuing the failed Kickstarter for me, after all this waiting and hoping.

PLUS . . . Kitt, if my trying to help Eli's dad has brightened your day to some degree, well then I can thrive on that knowledge for a long time. I believe people are basically good and most folks find joy from being able to help out others, even if in a small way. Thanks for telling me, Kitt. 😂

@manton I sure hope you are now providing hosted websites to Simon Woods and Miraz Jordan free of charge. You should not only do that out of fairness, but you should also announce it quite publicly, as they definitely deserve a huge amount of credit for the initiative they have taken.

My apologies to anyone who wishes I had made this a blog post with only one line taken up on the Timeline. I agree this has taken up too much Timeline. But maybe it has been worth saying.

@Ron Wow, lots in there that we'll follow up on! Thanks. 🙂 But one thing I love is how even small successes can make a big difference when we're feeling discouraged.

@manton Yes, that's right! Three sentences from @Kitt and suddenly some hope returned for me. Save this in your folder of how some simple human interaction can be far more powerful and effective than clicking on a Like button.

@Ron please don’t leave. I really enjoy your posts.

@Ron yes I would add my voice to the stay camp.. one of the reasons I like it here and I have probably said before is that I feel one doesn’t need to fit in or be one of the cool kidz to belong. I’m not from a code or web background and often feel things are a bit over my head but as you say that one interaction makes a difference. I enjoy reading about other people’s stories hear and I think we all benefit from diverse views and experiences I would hate to be locked into a room of “my kind of people” as I wouldn’t learn necessarily from them. It really does matter what we put into here.. and you have put much..

@Ron Well said. As another someone who is a tad older than a lot of people here, and who also isn’t a tech person, I hope you stay. I still enjoy it here & I have learned so much from so many, At least I do have a ham licence...

@Ron Whoa! I hadn’t thought you would consider leaving. I’ve always appreciated our interactions (and that occasional email). Perhaps I ought to be more explicit in my feedback. Your unique varied interest adds much needed diversity to this community. I usually don’t try to convince people who are dead set on leaving but you would be missed.

@Ron ❤️

@Ron The Like button is the scourge of the Internet. Gives you an illusion of interaction without any meaningful feedback. @manton @kitt

@Ron Thanks so much Ron. You should know some of your posts helped prompt me to create the tutorials (and to be painfully aware that they are written from a Mac point of view).

@Ron and THAT my friend is a good enough quote to be added to the Micro Blog Quote Repository

@Ron thanks so much! My dad has actually connected with WB4APR in the past, so is going to reach out to them again. All this talk of radios has got me jonesing to get my HAM license (a thing my father has been pushing me to do since...birth? 😛)

@Ron quick update! It worked! My dad contacted WB4APR and he was able to help him sort out the issue. Thanks for the great suggestion!

@eli Wow, that's fantastic! The ham community is generally a very helpful community. That'd be great if you got your own ticket too and it's pretty easy to do, with just a simple written test. Let me know, if you need any help.

@Miraz Wow, thanks for letting me know and thanks sooo much for deciding to help us non-nerd bloggers out. After all, we might have some interesting stuff to write about too. I'll probably work on my Mac Basics course first and then give some tutorials a try. You have made a huge contribution to micro.blog!

@Ron Thank you Ron. Everybody has something to contribute and differing levels of skill with the software shouldn’t create a barrier if it can be avoided. Good luck with the Mac basics. I can offer help if you're stuck.

@stickmandiaries exactly. @ron I listen to Dylan a bit but share none of your other interests. BUT l always enjoy your posts.

@vasta Thanks so much, Sameer. I agree with you, the best stuff is the joy and the passion. I have a blog post I've been meaning to write for some time that may touch on this some. It is central to how I blog, so I will try to give it a go here soon. I have so many interesting threads exploding around me right now, that it's hard to know where to turn next. 😃

@johnjohnston That is soooo fascinating! Thanks for telling me about it. I have a blog post that's been brewing in me for days now and your comment screams out to me to get it finished and posted. I appreciate your support very much!

@vasta

I don’t come here to find people like me.

💯 Similar thoughts have been brewing in my head since I read thru the kerfuffle. My first thought also was, if I wanted to be around people like me, I wouldn’t have moved more than 8,000 miles from where I was born.

@pratik @vasta

My first thought also was, if I wanted to be around people like me, I wouldn’t have moved more than 8,000 miles from where I was born.

🤣🤣🤣

That said, I don’t think I would have stuck around here if I hadn’t found a group of people I had some affinity with. There aren’t a lot of people here like me (for some definition of “like me”—for instance, there’s no-one here/active I know in person or from previous online activities, though there are plenty of white males from the US), but there are a lot of interesting people not like me, and some of us have shared interests or characteristics—Sameer and I both attended Georgetown, William and I both trained as historians and write poetry (one of us far better than the other ;-) ), and Craig and I grew up in the same county, for three examples. I have a wide range of things I find interesting at a degree necessary to sustain a conversation, from the web and Mac software to history, archaeology and architecture to the diverse nature of the world writ large to gardening, so it’s been easy for me to find multiple sets of people here that have some shared interest—but not everyone necessarily has this same breadth of interests. If all we did here is talk about cricket and knitting, no matter how much joy and passion it brought to people involved in those conversations, I wouldn’t want to stay, because there’s no shared interest for me (and I think, because there does seem to be such a volume of conversation about software in various forms and ways, and the politics of the web and social media, people do miss seeing that there are all these other, but smaller, conversations about a whole host of diverse topics, so they may feel like this isn’t a place for them. One way to help combat that is to more regularly expand Discover’s tagmoji—cricket, for instance, should be promoted from suggestion to production, IMO, and maybe knitting/sewing, too; I’ve seen a lot of that lately—and we should feel out what other sub-communities seem to be coalescing).

@smokey Exactly. We want some similarities but not to be the same. We can share interests but not all interests. You may have some interests that you may share with someone else but not with me and likewise. And that's ok. That's how a community grows. The Internet gives us that ability of connecting sporadically and specifically.

@vasta Hi Sameer, it's about 2/3 done, so making good progress. I think it's better than the last time I worked on it. Don't let me give up.

@vasta This is why I love having you here :-) That is exactly the reason I chose to employ “affinity” to begin with rather than just “interests” or whatever, but I couldn’t articulate the other shared qualities (much less come up with concrete examples of them—after all, we didn’t discover we’d both gone to Georgetown until a ways down the line; other affinities led to our early interactions).

@pratik 👍🙏

@cm Taxes is how I make my living, Chad. Unfortunately the vested interests (e.g. accounting industry) want to make them seem as complicated as possible, so they can prepare tax returns for people at considerable expense and enjoy the good life for themselves. At one time I was considering explaining how very little the public would understand, if the president's tax returns were made public. People pay the accounting industry to do their taxes for them, so obviously they're gonna have very little clue about what his tax returns "mean" or tell us about his life. Those attacking him say the "public has a right to know." But I realized that I would not be able to educate people here and provide a fair picture of his tax returns, because there is just too much hate stirred up among many people at just the sight of the five letter T word. So I decided to enjoy my own peaceful life instead. I hope you're doing the same thing, Chad!

@stickmandiaries You make a wonderful argument, Tom. I agree with you. It would be really great, if we could have a huge amount of diversity here, wouldn't it! But it's probably best to just appreciate what little bit of diversity we have and hope that it increases with time. I'll be sticking around as well, but I may occasionally voice an unpopular opinion here. I will do my best to not become a curmudgeon, as my age advances even more. It's the only thing around here on which I'm in the lead!

@Ron

It's the only thing around here on which I'm in the lead!

Sadly, you may have lost that, too, when @macgenie’s father (@bobmacd) joined ;-)

@smokey It's possible. His About is very brief. Retired teacher could easily put him over 65, but enough over? Was he alive during WWII? No data. I'll watch to see whether he gives any hints. Maybe I'll ask him for his recollections about WWII. Does he remember the bomb? Did he like FDR or Truman better? Stuff like that. 😊 💣

@Ron In the conversation around the matching shirts and name tags from Jean’s Father’s Day post, she mentioned that the photo was from his 80th birthday party a few years ago, if I’m remembering correctly (the conversation link is long gone, and I can’t get to my replies to search for it there ;-) ). And that he taught at the same HS as my best friend from age 0-6 mos (and later in college) graduated from, but he retired just before she got there.

Maybe I'll ask him for his recollections about WWII. Does he remember the bomb? Did he like FDR or Truman better? Stuff like that. 😊 💣

That would make a fun history project. Everyone’s always interviewing those who went to war, but I don’t know that I’ve really seen any interviews of people who lived through WWII on the homefront. (One time I did think to ask my grandmother a few questions about her job at Westinghouse during the war, but by the time I did so, her best storytelling days were behind her.)

@smokey Well if he has passed 80, he is easily older than I am! Fortunately, I think my About says I am one of the older ones here, so no need to change that. As for WWII, I actually have zero recollections about that, as I was only alive for just under two mos of it, so was probably mostly sleeping during that time! 😴 I have a clear recollection of the newspaper announcing the Armistice of the Korean War. It was in very big type and I knew it was a really big deal. They had been in peace talks for two years and Ike was already president. I still have my "I Like Ike" button some where. 😃