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Odd Lots
- My collection Cold Hands and Other Stories is now available to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
- Well, judging by its website it may seem a little wobbly, but Heathkit has a new owner, and is actually selling radio kits. Let us wish them the best and watch what happens. (Thanks to Tom Byers, Michael Covington, and several others for alerting me.)
- Smart ( Read more... )
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Odd Lots
- Jim Strickland found a site with some of the guldurndest CP/M-80 programming tools from the 80s and maybe earlier. Most of them aren't familiar to me, and I don't have a machine to run them on anymore. However, if you want any of the four releases of JRT Pascal, or Turbo Modula-2 for CP/M, well, dinner is served.
- And for dessert, here's the x86 DOS ( Read more... )
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Odd Lots
- I'm a day late and a shamrock short, but I want to endorse an obscure but wonderful animated film with connections to St. Patrick's Day: The Secret of Kells . It's a fantasy about the creation of the Book of Kells, drawn in the style of Medieval illuminated manuscripts.
- Granted that I'd prefer to achieve immortality by not dying, the notion of ( Read more... )
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Odd Lots
- Jim Strickland sent word that Lindsay's Technical Books is shutting down next year, not for financial reasons but simply because Lindsay is retiring. Their last print catalog has been sent. Order the stuff you've been prevaricating about for years--I will be. (Recommendation: Radio for the Millions.) Tip for those who haven't heard of him before: ( Read more... )
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Odd Lots
- I was wrong about Diesel engines being easy to make, as I suggested in my entry for March 5, 2012. Fuel injection, as it turns out, is a bitch. You're trying to divide oil into a multitude of very small droplets of (reasonably) consistent size. Gasoline carburetion, by comparison, is a snap. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht, an automotive engineer, for the ( Read more... )
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Odd Lots
- After being in the water for as many as four years, a broken camera turns up on a California beach with the SD card still in it...and still functional, complete with a hundred-odd photos taken before the camera was lost. I marvel first at the durability of these cards in a corrosive medium--and then at how little circuit board there actually is ( Read more... )
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Odd Lots
- Before we had CGI to draw animated pictures of the Solar System, we turned parts on our lathes and made orreries. Here's a gallery of 18 beauties, including one made in Lego (ok, injection molded) and two in Meccano. Some of them are pretty steampunkish, if that matters to you.
- And speaking of steampunk, here's something I've never seen before: ( Read more... )
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Odd Lots
- In my last very mobile couple of years, I've had some of my best ideas while driving across the featureless plains of Nebraska, including a way to solve a plot/tech issue that had prevented me from further progress on The Molten Flesh: How Protea sampled the powerful and very paranoid Sangruse Device. In looking back, this has been a pattern: In ( Read more... )
