A few days ago I built a radio receiver out of junk, because my usual radio had died a death and I wanted to listen to a specific part of the shortwave bands around 3.5 – 4 MHz. Last night I scanned up and down the band and located what sounded like a fax transmission, …
Category Archives: Tech
Dark matter detected?
Dark matter is that weird stuff that is supposed to make up about 80% of all matter in the universe. It is invisible, and pretty much non-interacting (you can’t see it, and you can’t detect it (easily) by other means). One way you might detect it is to take a very pure crystal and look …
Papers
Today, via but she’s a girl I discovered an incredibly useful piece of software – Papers. Now I’m not the most tidy person in the world anyway, but when it comes to journal articles and papers I’m hopeless. I keep my references in a bibtex database managed by Jabref, but as for managing actual electronic …
Sixty today
On on Dec. 16, 1947 – sixty years ago today – the world’s first transistor was constructed and tested at Bell Labs, New Jersey, USA. Those responsible for the device were William Shockley, the theorist and John Bardeen and Walter Brattain who actually constructed the first one. What started life as a heap of precariously …
Tech support to random neighbours…
The door bell rang earlier – I answered it to one of the lesser seen neighbours carrying a laptop. “Hello, I’m Brian from number 18, I wondered if you could do me a favour, Tony says you are good with computers.” “Hello, Er, Ok. What’s the problem?” Brian had been using someone else’s WiFi connection …