Last weekend a bunch of us from the Havering Amateur Radio Club decamped to a field at the Kelvedon Hatch secret nuclear bunker and set about trying to contact as much of the planet as possible by radio. It was a good excuse to try out my new radio, an Icom 9100, and break out …
Author Archives: David
The insides of things are beautiful…
…lets see what they look like. These days I work with X-Ray systems. I’m just finishing up commissioning and testing of the latest one, so I’m using it to image various things. This is a compact fluorescent lamp. At full size you can see the coils of tungsten wire in the electrodes in the glass …
Too soon.
Yesterday I read the news that Iain Banks wasn’t doing too badly all considered. This lunchtime I heard via Twitter that Iain had died. Fuck Cancer. I first discovered Banks’ writing via the internet, a recommendation in a long forgotten place lead me to a copy of The Use of Weapons and a whole universe …
The Shard
At 309.6 meters high, The Shard dwarfs other London high-rises, and seems to curiously move around the London sky-line – never quite being where you expect it when viewed from afar. When it’s officially open to the public on Feb 1st, access to the viewing platforms on the 69th and 72nd floors will cost £25 …
Game of life
Conway’s Game of Life is a mathematics puzzle / toy / serious bit of research that I mess with from time to time; usually when I get a new computer and want to see how fast it is compared to older ones. I wrote a basic GoL simulation for the Sinclair Spectrum back in the …