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Odd Lots
- I regret to report that Robert Bruce Thompson has left us, at age 64, of heart problems. He's best-known for his books PC Hardware in a Nutshell and Building the Perfect PC, but he's also written several books on astronomy ( Read more... )
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Odd Lots
- Solar cycle 24 is crashing, and we're still three years from Solar minimum. 24 really does look to be the weakest cycle in 100 years or more.
- And if you don't think the Sun influences Earth's climate, read this, about the Sun's indirect effects on climate and why they make climate so hard to predict.
- I doubt the payback would be more than the cost of ( Read more... )
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Odd Lots
- I had some fairly sophisticated oral microsurgery about ten days ago, and it kind of took the wind out of me. That's why you're getting two Odd Lots in a row. I have things to write about long-form but have only recently found the energy to write at all. Promise to get a couple of things out in the next week.
- Some researchers at UW Madison are ( Read more... )
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Odd Lots
- Author Nick Cole has his finger on what's wrong with print publishing. A big chunk of it is Barnes & Noble. He says what I've been saying for some time: The fate of the Big 5 print publishers is tied to B&N's. When B&N goes under, there will be blood in the streets of Manhattan.
- Great article on that 1920s curiosity, spinning-disk television, with ( Read more... )
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Odd Lots
- Take a look at Visuino, which is a visual development environment for the Arduino embedded processor family. This is a beautiful thing, and makes me wish I still ran a certain magazine.
- And there's a new default OS for the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3. (Don't try it on the earlier boards, nor the Pi Zero ( Read more... )
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Odd Lots
- The Army Corps of Engineers turned off Niagara Falls in 1969. It was surprisingly easy to do.
- One of the reasons Americans got so fat starting about 1980 may be the explosion in the use of vegetable oils from about that time. It's not simply solvents left over from ( Read more... )
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Odd Lots
- The xenon flash problem with the Raspbrry Pi 2 board has been explained reasonably well on the Foundation site, by Liz Upton. Key seems to be that U16 is not a typical SMT chip encased in black resin, but a naked BGA (Ball Grid Array) chip, which allows light to hit the chip's silicon directly. HackaDay's Brian Benchoff says that a cheap green ( Read more... )
