On Learning New and Old Things: Ham Radio & Standard Chinese

hello [at] robyn.digital (robyn) — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 13:28:20 -0700

I shared this post on mastodon a couple days ago:¹

Screenshot of the linked mastodon post, showing a stack of three books. An ALT Text description is available within the mastodon post.

… which reminded me that I had not updated my Now page in a while, so I got to doing that. Once I realized that the Now post had reached the length of a grade five class paper, I moved the .md file over to the main blog posts folder. So: What you are currently reading started as a Now post, then became far too big for its britches, and now here we are.

Now #003 - Ham Radio Course : Standard Chinese (Again) : Mages & Modems

hello [at] robyn.digital (robyn) — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 10:23:27 -0600

Learning

Ham Radio Operator Basic Certification things!
Standard Chinese / 普通话 / “Mandarin”

I wrote a whole entire blog post on those two (which started out as a Now post and then became waaaaay more than that.)

Reading

vga256’s "Mages & Modems"

This book has been my “palate cleanser before bed” reading for a couple days now, and so far, I am really enjoying it. I would recommend it to folks who either were actively participating in the age of early home computing (the 80s, roughly speaking) for a shot of nostalgia; OR those who were not quite sentient yet in those years, and would like to know how it all started. There’s another very enjoyable layer of life in the Canadian North / life on the Canadian prairies as well, so if you have some familiarity with either of those, you’ll probably get even more out of it.

Ham Radio on robyn.digital

On Learning New and Old Things: Ham Radio & Standard Chinese

Now #003 - Ham Radio Course : Standard Chinese (Again) : Mages & Modems

Learning

Reading

vga256’s "Mages & Modems"