marxy's musing on technology

I've been doing some iOS programming recently and needed to load a UITableView with images from a web site. You don't want to load...

Bouncing off the Megauploads story, I had an opportunity to reflect on RNBreakfast on why there is a widespread problem with people obtaini...

For many years we've headed north to Coffs Harbour at this time of year for the radio expo. Alas, this year it wasn't on - but we de...

Rob, VK2ZNZ, showed me a marvellous catalog of old Ericsson telephone handsets. These are drawings but many look photo-realistic and show gr...

Dave, VK3ASE, tipped me off to this one. There's a, now obsolete, video camera from Kodak (soon to be obsolete too), called the Zi8. It ...

Old friend Jennifer Lewis has just returned to Australia after working in London and Indonesia. She's been doodling in a sketchbook too ...

An informative, entertaining, tasty, thirst-quenching meeting of the Sydney Python group was held last night in a pub in the Sydney CBD (in...

The weather has turned in Sydney and we have very pleasant sunny days with a refreshing wind. Today I woke early and went for a brisk wa...

In this age of tiny computer speakers, or worse - laptop speakers, it's easy to forget just how good music can sound in a decent set o...

Dave came to check out the shed. Unfortunately during coffee he was struck by a car... Seems OK now. Incidentally, WSPR on 20m is th...

It used to be that I was in a tiny minority who used a Mac. I've always regarded this as a competitive advantage - I got on with my wo...

A new ham radio is about to become available and like too many others, I'm waiting to find out the price and place my order. The Elecraf...

Stephen, VK2BLQ, sent around an email pointing to a great archive of scanned issues of a popular ham radio magazine from my childhood, ...

My wife's 24 inch iMac recently started exhibiting an annoying fault - it would, seemingly at random, just switch off. Not a crash, ...

Today I visited the Australian PV Solar Energy Exhibition at Darling Harbour in Sydney. There were a lot of Chinese PV Solar cell manufa...

At Sunday's Amateur Radio NSW Home Brew Group meeting I gave a talk about what I've learned about low voltage solar electricity syst...

I have an MSI U-200 netbook that dual-boots Windows XP and Linux. For a long time I used Ubuntu but when I upgraded to 11.04 wireless networ...

When I need to do a bit of Cocoa programming I normally turn to the excellent books from Big Nerd Ranch. iOS 5 and Xcode 4.2 has changed n...

A note to myself really. We have an old but reliable HP Laserjet 1022n laser printer but ever since Snow Leopard it has been printing every ...

Just returned from a weekend away, four hours south of Sydney at Fisherman's Paradise. Here's my QRP portable station: My anten...