marxy's musing on technology

Here's some video impressions of the Wyong field day: The numbers were clearly up this year, probably a combination of good weather...

Our old HP Laserjet 1022n has run for many years but since about the time of Leopard a bug appeared in the driver, that still hasn't b...

I've enjoyed the Ensemble RXTX kit build but I'm having a devil of a time with audio under Windows XP. There's not a lot of ham ...

I'm pleased to report that the build of the Ensemble RXTX kit is complete and I've hacked it into a box. While there is a purp...

We mostly use Apple Macs here (except for a Windows XP netbook for some ham radio software). We love Apple's iWork suite but my wife i...

I'm all for going paperless and have switched to paperless notifications of most things, (although I do find myself printing a lot out...

On the bench at the moment is the Ensemble RXTX SDR. I've built a Softrock receiver in the past but never tried transmitting so this sh...

Since doing some research on audio quality this week for a RN breakfast panel responding to Neil Young's comments I've been hunting...

Old mate Ross, VK1UN, is currently stationed in Somalia and Mogadishu where he runs WSPR. In calls via Viber he described an HF loop bui...

Here's a demo of a morse decoder that works pretty well. MorseDec . A new version, 1.2, came out today that fixed a bug in the sp...

Musician Neil Young's interview with Walk Mossberg at the recent All things D: Dive Into Media conference last week is worth a look. ...

The weather in Sydney has flipped back to sunny again. On the bench in the shack is an Ensemble RXTX software defined transceiver. Progress...

My daughter decided to get some new ear piercings a few weeks back. One went through cartilage near the top of her ear. The ear went red...

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...