It's been a while since anything new was added to Wireless Waffle which is for no other reason than a shift in focus to things more practical. During the Covid lock-ups time has been spent re-igniting an age-old passion for electronic construction projects.

As part of those projects, it became necessary to be reminded of how the resistor colour code scheme worked, especially for those odd 1% tolerance resistors and their extra bar of complexity. To assist, the Wireless Waffle Resistor Colour Code Calculator or WiWaReCoCo for short, has been developed.

Just click on the link above (or in the links box alongside) and be taken to a mysterious world in which things such as '3.3K' or '4M7' are miraculously translated into different colours. While away those long winter hours seeing if you can work out what to enter to get a fully banana coloured resistor (hint, '4' is yellow), or how to get the stripes of your favourite football team (try 969M for starters).

Fun has never been so mundane!

An ultra-geeky and totally un-wireless-related post today...

You may be aware that as well as running the Wireless Waffle web-site, we also run the Short-Wave.Info web-site. Amazingly, the short-wave site has now had over 27 million visitors. The software is updated from time-to-time to improve the performance or, in the most recent update, to make the map look nicer!

As a result of updating the map software routine, the question of the font used to print the details along the bottom of the image raised itself. For a while this had used a font called 'DejaVu Sans'. However, it seemed more fun if the font could be more interesting and the question arose as to whether it might be possible to use the font that was originally deployed in the ZX Spectrum.

The original ZX Spectrum font uses 8 by 8 pixel blocks (as shown on the right) and isn't that pretty by today's standards, most likely as it is monospace, and as for the majority of characters (apart from the copyright sign) the grid of pixels actually used is only 6 wide by 6 high. This leaves a lot of whitespace around the pixels.

The Short-Wave.Info web-site is written in php, in which there is a function called 'imagestring'. This writes a string of text onto an image and as well as using internal fonts, can also use 'GD' fonts. If the ZX Spectrum character set existed as a GD font file, it would be possible to write text using it and this function.

After some time conducting a web-search, no evidence of a GD version of the Spectrum fonts appeared and so we created one of our own! The image below is now how the bottom of the maps on the Short-Wave.Info web-site looks.



Look at the shiny ZX Spectrum font letters! If you are equally geeky, and also increasingly driven to doing mad things by the current global pandemic lockdown, Wireless Waffle is happy to make the font available for anyone who wants it. Simply download the ZX Spectrum GD font and using 'imageloadfont' you are on your way.

Join us next time on Wireless Waffle, when we share some equally lockdown crazy ideas such as:

• how to make wholesome lard-free bread using old £20 notes and a nail file,
• simulating a Spanish beach holiday with a wet towel and some curdled milk, and
• exciting methods for igniting 5G base stations that are emitting coronavirus.

Wireless Waffle may appear to have gone quiet over the last few months, however this is because we have been working on a very major Artificial Intelligence (AI) programme to automate the writing of articles for the site.

Being a new decade, in 2020, with the advent of AI and neural nets, it is now possible for computers to author text for articles such as this. Take, for example, this excellent recipe for Jello (jelly to those of us in Europe) written by a suitable trained computer-brain.



Once all the internal rinds are removed, and the condensed Cheddar cheese soup is, er, umoulded (though the soup, and various other ingredients, are only in the list of ingredients, not the complete recipe), you can add the onion and brown sugar, and you're good to go.

The Wireless Waffle Automatic Article Author (W2A3) is somewhat more intelligent than the algorithm that wrote the jello recipe. In addition to having a very wide vocabulary, you can select the level of 'complexity' of the article, and the level of 'wirelessness', to have a story written of your own, preferred level of difficulty and technicality. Just select a level from the pull-down menus below and click 'generate' and you're own, personal wireless article will be generated. Try not to spill any lettuce or mustard on it.

Over 1000 delegates are currently slogging it out at the World Radiocomminication Conference taking place in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. The conference can be extremely tedious as various working groups sit in laborious meetings working out whether 'and' or 'or' should be used in a sentence.

To try and help with the boredom, Wireless Waffle presents, ITU WRC Bingo.

The rules are very simple. Whilst sitting in a meeting, every time that a word on your bingo card is spoken, click on it and it will be illuminated. If you get 5 words in a row (vertically, horizontally, or diagonally) you have achieved BINGO! At this point, the rules require you to stand up and shout either 'bingo' or 'house' but perhaps you might wish, instead, to ask the chairman for the floor and quietly state:

Subject to confirmation by the sub-working group, and noting the necessary primary resolution, I resolve to believe that the correct terminology for that which is in front of me, is 'Bingo'!