As autumn draws in we start to see more spiders around the house, what are they are why are there here? The most commonly encountered UK house spider is Tegenaria Duellica, this cute little fellow: I saw fellow because the great majority of these you’ll see are males – you can tell by the …
Author Archives: David
Astrophotography & Star Trails
While trying to photograph meteors in the Perseids shower recently I ended up taking a lot of longish exposure photographs of the same patch of sky. I was hoping to catch a meteor or several shooting though the frame. Reviewing the photos when I got home I found I caught no meteors, indeed I saw …
Playing Radio
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 …
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 …