• I've mentioned this before in several places, but I will mention it again here and probably more than once again before it happens: On December 21, Jupiter and Saturn will be only one tenth of a degree apart. That's one fifth the diameter of the full Moon. I've never seen two planets that close, and I've been looking at the sky now for 63 years.
• As ( Read more... )

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• This stuff has been piling up. And I've been tired and perhaps a little grouchy. It's just a phase I'm going through.
• From the People-Whom-I-Had-Once-Known-About-But-Then-Forgot Department: Annie Jump Cannon, who mostly eclipsed Edward Pickering while helping to complete the Harvard Classification Scheme for stars. Annie made it into the slightly ( Read more... )

• 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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• Pete Albrecht sent a YouTube pointer to some riot footage in Warsaw taken by an RC helicopter. If we can't have flying cars here in the 21st century, well, this is better than nothing.
• Linux Mint 11 does not handle the integrated graphics on the Dell Optiplex SX270. Even the liveCD version doesn't detect video correctly and is basically unusable. ( Read more... )

• Printed book sales fall, and ebook sales rise by 115%. Something's Going On Here.
• I bought an iPod Touch from Jim Strickland and am currently figgering it out. Although I was surprised that it won't display .mov videos, this article makes much clear about Apple's video formats.
• Michael Covington's 2008 tutorial on reading email headers to spot phish ( Read more... )

• Our good president is creating czars right and left, to the point where you can't tell the czars without a program. So maybe we need a czar czar--I know a guy named Binks who could do the job...
• Jim Strickland sent me a decent video demonstration of superfluidity in liquid helium. Liquid helium had a starring role in my 1980 story "Cold Hands," and ( Read more... )

• While chasing an interesting "out of the blue" idea that came to me while exercising the other day, I happened upon an RV surplus shop. Not surprisingly, it's in Elkhart, Indiana (Ground Zero for the American RV industry) and it sells leftovers and ( Read more... )

Some years back I posted Jeff Duntemann's Homebrew Radio Gallery, and for reasons unclear it's become one of the most popular pages on my site. (Tube construction may not be quite dead...) So a while back I wrote up and (almost) finished a page about all the various telescopes I've built ( Read more... )