At best I can just have a fake conversation in my head. Sometimes I also listen to taxi drivers with SDR. I can only pick up 2 companies, unfortunately. Fortunately though, they are just 0.15MHz apart, so I can listen on to both at once.
One of them even routes phone calls over their radios, so I can hear those as well.
But it’s usually boring. Just on new year 2022/2023 one of the 3 companies’ drivers were greeting each other. That was nice. Yes, 3, there used to be 3 of them I could listen to.
Actually, even before I had SDR I could listen to one on VHF because they were overlapping with FM Broadcast band. But that wasn’t the most pleasant experience. With regular radio I had no squelch option and picking NFM with WFM receiver I had to have volume fairly high. The result of that was faint voice followed by absolutely loud static.
Of course, it would be better to listen to hams. That would be far more interesting. But so far I only managed to pick up the end of 2 contacts on 2m. I don’t have much luck. HF is basically unusable where I am due to RFI.
The only stuff I can pick up is chinese AM radio stations, CW (but I’ve been too lazy to learn morse…), FT8, and the Russian-Ukrainian pirates around 7055kHz.
I don’t know how to monitor the 2m band automatically. If I know the specific frequency, in SDR++ I can just set up squelch and turn on recording with “Ignore silence”. But obviously that will also not allow me to listen to a real-time conversation because all silence is cut out.
Yeah, sorry, I got off-topic.
I can also play with random stuff in Termux on my phone. Right now I need to update nginx which will require also re-compiling the fancyindex dynamic module. I also want to try setting up Jellyfin and NextCloud in proot at some point.
I also want to download the 110GB Wikipedia ZIM archive and serve that with kiwix-serve after I free up enough storage, currently occupied by DVD ISO files and satellite signal baseband recordings. (Yes, on my phone.)
Of course this isn’t always without larger issues.
During one math class I took out my phone from the pocket, because it was starting to get too hot, only to find it stuck in bootloop. I forced it off and tried to boot it up. Thankfully, that worked this time. I found the internal storage nearly full. It seems when I forced it into recovery to turn it off, magically 17MB were freed which allowed it to boot up. Otherwise I’d need to fully reset it, most likely. I can’t access the data from recovery, and that’s good from security perspective.
What happened? NGINX error log filled up the storage. I am too dumb to properly manage that, so…
This one is great cause everyone's face would light up as you bring in the pizza box. Their glossy eyes fixed upon the revealing of the most perfect food. Suddenly all their smiles turn to tears and frowns as they see you ruined it with the anchovies. Sadness and the stench of nasty fish now fill the room.
Weed generally puts a halt to whatever ruminations are buzzing around my head and lifts me up a bit, then order a kebab and play some roguelike games for a few hours
If my mental/social energy is high:
Drop into a few of my group chats and see if anyone wants to hang out, maybe go to a pub or play some games
Self-care always makes me feel better. I prepare something nice to drink–tea, wine, beer, depending on my mood—and a tasty snack, then put on one of my favourite audiobooks or TV shows and treat myself to a hot bath or foot bath with a relaxing bath essence.
Usually smoke weed and play a game, or play bass guitar. Weed does well to prevent me from dwelling on things because it shortens my attention span. Games allow me to escape, and not much keeps me in the moment as much as playing music does, to do it right you must live in the moment, so it helps.
That being said, this is all escapism, which makes me feel better, but never solves any of the things I might be anxious about.
If you’re also feeling lonely, you can pick specific food venues. Ones that have bar seating are a good choice. Food cart pods with picnic benches can also provide the opportunity to talk to stangers, especially in the evenings.
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