When the Palm Pre was released, Palm also sold a unique inductive charger called the Touchstone. Inductive charging isn’t new, by any means. Electric toothbrushes and many other devices have used them in the past. This was a first for cell phones, I believe. When I purchased my Pre and eventually many Touchstones, I didn’t have a good oscilloscope to play around with the signals. Now I do. With the announcement of HP’s new phones and an …
I studied for a month or so and re-learned quite a bit of electronics for AC circuits. Resistance, Reactance, Polar Impedance. I took the test on the morning of February 5th and missed 1 out of 50. So now I am an Extra Class Licensed Ham Radio operator. No more tests to take. This is as high as it gets. I am still working on what type of antenna to put up. I will probably do an 80 meter dipole that I can tune to higher frequencies. I have built …
The Bencode format is an interesting design. It is byte based, which makes it safe from big-endian and little-endian translations. Somewhere when reading about how torrents worked, I got looking at their file format. As far as I know, the Bencode format isn’t used on anything but torrent files. The format is pretty simple, with only 4 different data structures: Byte String, Integer, List, and Dictionary. Bencode Basics Byte String This is …
Years ago, Dad and I attended meetings for Amateur Radio at the local Red Cross building in Jeffersonville. We both worked through passing the 5 words per minute Morse Code and test to get our Novice license and then studied and passed the test for Technician Class. I was licensed in 1990 and expired in 2000. Just when I was starting work in the “Real World”, outside of college. I didn’t bother renewing.
This is the second book by Patrick Robinson I could get my hands on. I really enjoyed reading Kilo Class and I enjoyed this book as well. It is set a couple years into the future, so Patrick gets to play with some technology that isn’t around quite yet. The novel is an interesting story about a seriously skilled agent from Iraq. He infiltrated Israel’s navy and was trained as a submariner. His employer decides that he is too large of a risk and …
This book was an accident. I needed a new book to read, because I was going to be waiting for something. The cover looked like a decent military technological drama. Since Tom Clancy cannot write books as fast as I can read them, I thought I would give it a try. It was a decent choice. The premise is that Russia wants to sell Kilo class submarines to China. At $300 million a boat, it is much needed income for Russia. However, if China does get a …
Dark Chocolate Dipped Ginger Altoids. Yes, it sounds weird. I don’t understand how they made it through marketing. I don’t think they had any type of focus group for these. I have a rule that I will try anything once, as long as there isn’t a high likelihood of death. I think this is why blowfish is so expensive, for the malpractice insurance for those that die after eating it. I don’t plan on trying blowfish any time soon. But I’m game for Dark …
Recently I’ve started writing again. In the last few years, all my writing was on screenplay style for short films. Some of these we actually shot and produced, most just sit on my computer in final PDF form. Writing in screenplay format is different than novel, novella, or short story forms. Screenplay is all about dialog and character actions. There is no exposition of character thoughts. I think this experience makes you a stronger dialog …
Today I read of an engagement gone seriously wrong. Although, reading through the article I realized that had I been in that situation, things would have gone differently. Amy and I are a little different than the two in the article. The incident started with a man concealing his $12,000 engagement ring in a helium balloon, with the idea of actually ‘popping’ the question. I don’t understand why he had not attached the balloon to something of a …
Hurray for me. Today is my birthday. Last night, I decided to make a German Chocolate Cake. Amy thought I shouldn’t have to make my own cake, but I wanted to try one from scratch. The cake used real melted chocolate and I folded in whipped egg whites. The frosting was pretty standard fare with egg yolks, evaporated milk, sugar, etc. I didn’t have a piece until tonight. I cooked the cake a little too much and it was slightly dry. It was a little …
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