Waves & Stillness

I had a New Nintendo 2DS XL sat in a drawer doing nothing, so I did the obvious thing: pointed its terrible little dual cameras at the sea and the pier and recorded video like it was a real camera, looking like a weirdo to all the surrounding grockles.

It is a real camera, technically, just a very cursed one in 2026. It's VGA — 640×480, 0.3 megapixels, a resolution that was already behind the times when this console launched in 2013. The result has a very specific texture: grainy, slightly too real, somewhere between a 2010s camcorder and old LiveLeak footage. Found media from a timeline that skipped HD entirely.

Test 1 — the sea at Mumbles

25 seconds of the bay and the Mumbles seafront, shot on a console that was never meant to be anyone's main camera. Soft, washed out, slightly underwater looking even though it's pointed at actual water.

Test 2 — the wheel at Mumbles Pier

Same story, different landmark: the big wheel against a grey sky, smeary and low-bitrate, like found footage from a device that was already obsolete when it launched.

No further experiments planned, but if the 2DS XL has more to give, I'll keep finding out.

I've been quietly building a desktop app for shortwave listeners who want a proper way to log and send electronic reception reports. It's called EtherLog, and it's now up on GitHub.

If you've ever tried to send an eQSL to a broadcaster and ended up cobbling together an email by hand, this is for you.

What it does:

• Compose structured reception reports with SINPO ratings
• Station autocomplete from the EIBI shortwave schedule database, updated on demand
• EIBI autofill for frequency, language, and target region
• Searchable, filterable report log with CSV export
• Send reports directly via SMTP, with full body preview before sending
• Passwords stored in your system keychain, not a plaintext config file
• Light, dark, and system themes
• Runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux

It's Python/PyQt5, GPL-3.0 licensed, and there's a PyInstaller spec included if you want a standalone executable without needing a Python install.

You can find it at github.com/hiraethclub/EtherLog.

I've been meaning to build this for a while. A small corner of the internet that's properly mine. Not a feed, not a platform, just a site. Somewhere to put things down.

My name is Ais. I live in Mumbles, a small village on the edge of the Gower Peninsula in South Wales, where the bay opens out toward the Bristol Channel and the light changes constantly. It's a good place to think.

Most of my time is spent in my lab, that serves as radio shack, workshop, and general retreat from the world. It's where I do my IT repair work and run a 3D printer, where my custom Amiga A1200 lives alongside a 1987 Technics hi-fi and a Philips CRT television. It's a room that has accumulated a lot of history and a lot of wire.

The radio side of things covers more ground than I can easily summarise. I run three receivers: two RTL-SDR Blog v4s and a Nooelec NESDR SMArt, fed by a 20m inverted L end-fed halfwave, a Moonraker Scanking discone, and a small V-dipole. Between them I monitor AIS ship traffic on the Bristol Channel, airband, marine channels, pagers, the ham bands, FT8, mediumwave DX, and weather fax. I'm fascinated by HF propagation, by what the ionosphere is doing and why signals arrive the way they do. There's something quietly compelling about pulling meaning out of the air.

Buddhism came to me through a broader interest in theology, but when I found it, it fit in a way nothing else had. Looking back, I think I'd been living by something close to Buddhist ethics long before I had a name for it. I've been practising seriously for about two years now, mostly alone, in the Plum Village tradition alongside a growing interest in Gelug philosophy. It shapes how I relate to myself and to the world around me. It's helped me navigate some serious medical difficulties. It's probably saved my life. I don't say that lightly.

The site has a few sections: a journal (you're reading it), a projects page, a bookmarks page of things worth keeping, and a guestbook. There's a weather and tides widget because I live by the sea and I check it constantly.

I don't know how often I'll write here. When something seems worth saying, I will.

Ais