In my forty-odd years of employment, I kept a list of things I wanted to do, but for reasons of expense or time, I had to put off. “Fly an airplane” was one of them. “Write a novel” was another. … Continue reading
Category Archives: Electronics
Cooking Up Plutonium-238
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Somewhere between 1995 and 2000, I was sent to teach a pSOS+ class to Westinghouse engineers in Savannah, Georgia. At the time, the debate between Assembler-language versus C for application programming was still hot and heavy. Programs written in Assembler … Continue reading
Vintage 3″ Oscilloscope
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Found this at auction for $15. No name plate and nothing to that effect inside. It powers on and there’s a trace, but definitely needs help. If I can identify the make and model, I can they try to get … Continue reading
Houston, We Have A Problem
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The log in our family firewall caught one of our home computers assaulting another one with three packets. It’s called a “Denial of Service” attack and it comes from a virus, affectionately named as you can see in the snippet … Continue reading
Blinking HDMI
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Does your HDMI-fed TV go black for a second or two and then come back on? If so, you may have what I’m calling HDMI Blink. Ending a multi-year, on-and-off quest, I think I understand the cause and, with it, … Continue reading
Antenna Analysis (New Toy!)
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Ok, Ok, you’re right. It’s a new toy and I wanted to show it off. You’re absolutely right. But I learned some things and can do better on my next wire antenna. So, take this as a sales pitch or a … Continue reading
Back in the Virtual Saddle
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Four days this week and then the same next week, I’ll be teaching via laptop and headset. This week it’s hard real-time and next week it’ll be harder real-time – avionics. The difference is in dealing with the inevitable “Oops!” … Continue reading
Speaking of Flux
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Opening the door to the unventilated warehouse, the acrid stench was unmistakable. “What’s that smell?” someone asked. “It’s rosin-flux, the wetting agent used when soldering resistors, capacitors and wires to electronic circuits. The rosin comes from pine trees. When the … Continue reading
Stop Picking Your Nose!
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After a high school field trip in the mid 1960s to see a digital computer, my electronics teacher said, “Digital computers will never last.” “Analog computers,” he went on, “are faster, more reliable and have some practical uses besides accounting … Continue reading
Flux Your Braid
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Grand knows his stuff — thank you, Sir! More flux did the trick. If you’ve been following the action here, you’ll know that I botched my first attempt with the integrated circuit you see here as “The Problem”. The two … Continue reading