An Advanced Cheat Sheet for Using a Slide Rule

The humble slide rule was one of mankind’s greatest mathematical and engineering inventions. It has long been surpassed by inexpensive electronic calculators and has been effectively been made completely redundant. However, that does not negate the fact that slide rules are still fun to learn and play with. You can no longer buy new slide […]

Modern Vehicles are Amazing Technology

I grew up a typical Canadian boy with an interest in everything technical, especially anything electronic. However, the male obsession with the internal combustion engine passed me by until I was about 22 years old. Until that time I found cars uninteresting, snowmobiles were noisy and smelly, motorcycles were death traps. My preferred method of […]

Gold discovered at Project Gutenberg

To a geologist such as myself the above title sounds like a major mineral discovery, but what I am talking about is the wealth of great books available for free download at Project Gutenberg (PG). I have been aware of the PG for a few years now, but only recently have been downloading books from […]

Facebook: a modern con job.

Facebook, the social media darling of the early 21st century is one of the biggest con jobs on planet earth. Why, you might ask, do I call it a con job? I do so because one of the most basic and long-lived cons is the “bait and switch”. This is exactly what Facebook does to […]

Digital HF Amateur Radio Modes: opinions

I have just recently rekindled an interest in amateur radio’s digital modes. I used to operate some RTTY in the late 1980′s and I have operated CW (yes, it is mankind’s first digital mode) for over 43 years now, but the past 4 weeks I have been experiencing the “newer” modes and have some thoughts […]

Simple Bash Cloud-based Backup Script for Linux and a Home Network

To carry on from my previous blog on setting up a very simple powerful home network with Linux only computers I now offer up a very simple bash script to backup the /home directories of all home networked computers using Dropbox. The premises of this script are such: each computer on the network has a […]

Fun and Games with Archlinux

Sometimes one does inadvertently shoot oneself in the foot. In previous blogs I have been singing the praises of the ArchLinux distro. But in the past 4 days my not paying attention to even the stuff I wrote about in those blogs has caused me about 5 hours of headache and work. At one point […]