marxy's musing on technology

I'm working with SOAP and WSDL at the moment and golly that xml can be hard to read. In the past I've used GraphViz to draw picture...

Acting on a tip from a work colleague, I dropped in to " Smith & Smith " Pty Ltd, also known as The Sydney Horological Centre ...

Microsoft makes really great mice. Apple just can't seem to get it right. I've bought four "mighty" mice since the launch,...

Just built a nifty little kit, the Pixie 2 from KennComm , a company that sells some very interesting bits and pieces.. A nice little kit, ...

Ever since I attended a workshop on stepper motors at Dural conducted by Peter VK2EMU I've been watching for the site of an inkjet print...

In this episode we chat about: Ben's Time Capsule experience OmniFocus 1.0.1 review Safari 3.1 Bicycle news from Ben (he didn't get ...

Here's a simple sine wave audio generator. It generates a nice looking, and sounding sine wave by using a resistor A/D converter connect...

There's a lot of interest in ham radio circles around the new DDS chips which can act as a high stability VFO over a wide range with ver...

Baby steps here folks. I've just got my Atmel ATMega8 to drive an HD44780 LCD using the 4 bit parallel interface. (Previously I've b...

iPhone 2.0 This week we talk about: About the podcast Change of name? Suggestions and Feedback? Perhaps we shou...

99% of my Ham radio activity is now on PSK-31. This interesting mode is very efficient and lets me chat, keyboard to keyboard, with interest...

Over the past year, I've given up on the PIC micros and have been getting up to speed with the AVR ATMega processors. My favourite is th...

A sequence of computer hand-me-downs here left us with an old PowerPC iBook with no owner. Leopard won't run on it and I'm so in to ...

I had the great pleasure of attending a seminar presented by the author of one of my favourite photo web sites, the Luminous-Landscape . Des...

This weekend is the North Shore Railway Modeller's Association 36th Model Railway Exhibition at Forestville. I always enjoy these shows ...

I've heard about the amateur satellites for years but never tried to listen in. I guess my assumption was that a directional tracking an...

Saw this little FM transmitter for the broadcast band on the Make Blog . I often want to listen to the Sunday ham radio broadcast but it wo...

WiFi Balloons! This week we talk about: Microsoft opening up? They’ve published the file formats for Office documents Now they’ve publishe...

I ordered the PSK-20 kit, a PSK31 crystal locked transceiver for 14.070Mhz (the most active spot for PSK31) from SmallWonderLabs back in Oc...

An exciting day! I've just received my first ever payment from Google for AdSense revenue from my blog. Oh sure, it's only $12 but i...

A New Trend in Openness. This week we chat about: Follow up HFS: The Good & The Bad No More Tasting: It’s a Bad Year To Be a Registrar X...

Just returned from another excellent Wyong field day. I'm sure attendance is going up again - despite a rather threatening sky. This yea...

I'm using a laptop at work and have been searching the shops for some contraption to lift the laptop up so the screen is at eye height (...

Denis Price, owner of "The Picture Show Man" twin cinema at Merimula gave an insightful talk on ABC Radio National tonight, but I...

Kevin Rudd said sorry today, on behalf of all Australians. It was moving. Went very well, I was impressed. Now it's time to address the ...

'Utter crap' headlines. This week we chat about: Peter’s MacBook Air Ars SSD MacBook air review Sub-standard displays in the Macbook...

Started playing with PSK31 on my mac last year as reported earlier. As I said, I'm running the excellent CocoaModem software. Until la...

Since I discovered this series, about a week ago, I've become addicted to the BBC series by Louis Theroux - "Weird Weekends". ...

My MacBook Air arrived this morning. Shipped direct from Shanghai. I do love it - light enough to carry around every day but with a lovely f...

Microsoft! attempts! to! acquire! Yahoo!( sorry El Reg ) In this episode we chat about: Aboriginal archive offers new type of “DRM” BBC stor...

Like many who have worked on large software projects, I have been following the failure of the NSW State Government's unified transport ...

Musharraf is everwhere. In this episode we talk about: Disabling PT_DENY_ATTACH in Leopard Fixing ptrace(pt_deny_attach,…) : http://tinyurl....

I'm very inexperienced at home building radio projects. Inductors, in particular, seem rather mysterious to me. Microprocessor projects ...

Pete's ham radio holiday. This episode we chat about: The Coffs Harbour radio expo Apple cripples DTrace Mac OS X and the missing probes...

Attended the Coffs Harbour radio expo on Sunday. While a lot smaller than the Wyong field day I'm looking forward to in a few weeks, it ...

Might be a little slow to respond this week as I'm on holiday at Coffs Harbour. Catching up with some friends and family and most import...

04:22 (local time) Engadget seems down. 04:23 Techcrunch is doing a fine job, a wireless backup device. 04:24 Macrumourslive has a feed th...

CES, Wikia and more. This week we chat about: Low cost laptops. Has the OLPC project created a new category? Everex Cloudbook : http://tinyu...

Here at marxy.org I make printed circuit boards using the rather low-res iron on technique so I went looking for a single sided board design...

I've been learning about the Atmel AVR microprocessors recently and ordered a very nifty little demo board called the AVR Butterfly . I ...

Scoble’s fuss about Facebook and more. This week we chat about Facebook locking out Robert Scoble for trying to extract his contacts, using ...

I mentioned in a previous post that I've been interested in learning about the Atmel AVR microcontrollers. To get started I purchased a...

Here's some video from the ARNSW Home Brew meeting last night at the children's party room at McDonalds at North Paramatta. Hopefull...