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 …
Category Archives: geeking
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 …
Hellschreiber
What do you get when you mix a cheap MSP430 development board with a simple oscillator circuit and blend in a handful of code from various sources? Hellschreiber– a radio transmission mode invented in the 1920s. The screenshot above shows the signal as transmitted across my bench – a distance of about 50cm. The text …