marxy's musing on technology

Attended the mini field day at the WIA NSW Dural site today. Beautiful weather for it, a good turn out, got some useful bits and pieces thou...

Since having a wisdom tooth out on Tuesday I've been laying low this week and took the opportunity to construct a kit. Shown at right du...

I saw Dom Bragge's posting about a 2m J-Pole antenna made out of 300 ohm TV ribbon and thought I'd give it a go. Although the desi...

Spotted this wonderful book this morning. "The Nature of Photographs" by Stephen Shore, subtitled "A Primer". The reprod...

Finally making progress on the NSW Home Brew group's 80m challenge project to build a 20W 80m AM transmitter. I'm a bit daunted as ...

As part of my elaborate procrastination about learning morse code I've started writing my own tutor program for MacOS X. So far it sound...

Python decorators are a wonderful syntax for wrapping one function in another. I had a bit of trouble understanding the documentation, which...

Ever since I started hanging up antennas here, I've been plagued with a terrible, pulsing, interference across 40m. Walking around with ...

To maximise my procrastination on the morse code front, I've spent the weekend improving the antenna situation here. There are two HF an...

Attended a Wednesday meeting of the MWRS . Great fun, a lovely group of blokes. I asked about learning Morse code and was treated to a live...

I'm learning Morse Code. It's hard getting started. Amazingly, given that it's no longer required for Amateur radio, there is a ...

I had a plastic box full of resistors collected over the years. When building some project, one of the hardest things for me is finding the ...

The yard is filling with antennas. I think they look great. There is a very tall tree at the back of the block that I've been trying to ...

This is a response to Alastair's excellent workspace post. My little home office is a mess. I have three main hobbies: photography, com...

I'm sitting in front of a shiny new install of Ubuntu 7.04 listening to the Radio New Zealand International digital broadcast on 7145k...

Just returned from a couple of nights camping at Coolendel near Nowra in NSW. I took along some battery operated ham radio gear and constru...

I've been attending the Amateur Radio New South Wales Homebrew Group meetings recently, both on air and in the flesh. Most entertaining...

Yeah, I know, not statistically significant.

I'm as happy as everyone to see that it's going to be possible to buy music without DRM. I've only purchased a few tracks as I r...

My Apple TV just arrived here in Sydney. Not much I can say so far except the box is pretty nice. It shipped on the 20th and just arrived no...