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Hobbyist Electronics
I am sure I disappointed my dad growing up. He tried mightily to get me interested in electronics, even building many Heathkit projects with me. I remember an AM radio, and a few others, but for me it was boring, and as a pre-teen, I just didn’t get into it. He had a Heathkit oscilloscope,…
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Showing its age – or is it
My main computer since 2013, has been a rocking MacBook Air. It is the first generation of the system based on the Haswell chipset, and it has been awesome. It came with Mountain Lion (10.8), and has been upgraded thrice now, recently to El Capitan. When I got it, one of the huge benefits was…
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Project Time – Step 1 The Raspberry Pi
A few years ago, I got a wild hair up my hind-side, and bought a Raspberry Pi to mess with. A small, fully functional computer, running a Linux variant, built around an ARM SoC, it was a pretty nifty bit of kit. I connected it to my monitor, wired up a keyboard and mouse, added…
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A “new” streaming contender – Pandora
Early on when I began to listen to streaming music, I got a Pandora account. Probably 2011 or 2012. At first, it was the only solution, and I listened, but I found that the depth of their catalog “felt” weak. Radio stations would repeat songs often, and it just fell off the radar. Spotify, and…
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Saying goodbye to an old friend
Today is a sad day, but also a hopeful day. It is time to say goodbye to an old friend, my Fender Telecaster guitar. It is going to a good place, it will be under the tree for a friend’s high school aged son, who wants to learn to play guitar. Still, it is not…
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Let the Holidays Commence – What to do
Today, at noon, we started our holiday shutdown, so I am off work for a whole week. I am going to do plenty of reading, maybe some bicycling, fawn over my boys, and in general relax. However, I have the itch to do a project. Since our little Oregon Scientific weather station is getting a…
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Sick Again – A December tradition
Last Sunday, I cold feel the start of a cold or flu in its infancy. Felt out of sorts, and funky. Got some meds and Monday, I felt good enough to go to work, assuming that I had dodged the bullet. Ha. Tuesday, I had a trip to Boston for a tradeshow, and apart from…
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Damn NCIS
Last weekend I finished the 12 seasons of NCIS that are available on Netflix. Not quite a binge watching, but a pretty addicting stretch of TV. While this isn’t a surprise, I often watch old TV shows and series on Netflix, I usually get to a point where I give up. Either the story line…
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Visiting Family
Since we moved back from Arizona last year, we are a lot closer to our families, and we need to take advantage of that. Of course Barbara has been much more proactive than myself, but that is no excuse. Last year we visited my sister, Tracey and her wife in their home in Mountain Ranch,…
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Computer Repair Man
Earlier this week, I got a Facebook message from my sister. Their iMac was behaving poorly, lots of spin-y beachballs (the “I’m thinking” on the Mac OS-X), so I asked the usual questions. What model iMac is it? (from the about and system report) How much memory is there? How big is the disk, and…