marxy's musing on technology

We spent Xmas at Fisherman's Paradise (presumably AKA "Fish Hell") so I was keen to enjoy some ham radio reception without al...

Eye tests are pretty cool these days. This week my eye test involved a photo being taken of my retinas and the guy got a nifty image which h...

Old mate John Beeston was upgrading the radio gear on his yacht and kindly passed the old manual antenna tuner to me. It's a Wagner AX-2...

It was nice to see Nick Hodge at the PHP Unconference and he gave out some nice 8GB USB sticks with the slogan "Windows+PHP Platform of...

I attended the Sydney PHP group 's unconference last night held at Google. It's my first "unconference" although it's...

I have an irrational desire to see MacOS running on alternative hardware. It's always disappointing but never the less I was boggled to ...

This morning on ABC Radio National Breakfast , now with the Chaser's   Julian Morrow , I had a chat about some of the technology behind ...

I wanted a low cost digital watch and a bit of research turned up fascinating information about an old favourite, the Casio F-91W which firs...

The last ARNSW Home Brew group meeting at Dural for the year and quite an entertaining one at that. Stephen VK2BLQ stole the show with the b...

Sadly, it looks like wsprnet.org is down and has been for an hour or more at the time of writing. I notice that it has been struggling a bi...

Just posting this for my own reference really. I find that spreadsheets don't really cope with lots of data to plot so gnuplot is the w...

I've been lying in the hammock reading my ARRL Handbook and noticed the CD Rom in the back. It turns out they give you a complete copy o...

I just got this Google preview display next to my search results. (click to enlarge). It pops up quickly as you roll over the result lin...

I like to listen to the VK2WI Sunday broadcast. It's part of my weekly routine. This week I was able to listen to it lying in a hammock ...

Sony kindly sent me a loan PRS-350 for review this week. The PRS-350 is a small e-ink book reader, less than the size of a novel (5"),...

Not sure what this is called but it's fantastic.

It's hard to measure one antenna against another on HF due to the huge variations in conditions even minute by minute. Recently I bought...

I've never played the QSL card game, where you send a card off to people you talk to on Amateur radio to confirm the contact. Recently a...

A half size commercial G5RV just arrived from ebay seller capitalstoresaustralia. It seems well constructed, certainly better wire than the ...

I picked up a few of these excellent plastic wire dipole centre pieces from Tet-Emtron at the last Gosford field day and I'm now starti...