The Xiegu GSOC, marketed by Chongqing Xiegu Technology Co., Ltd, under the retail name Radioddity, gets billed as a “Universal controller” for ham radio. It boasts some impressive hardware, including a high-resolution touchscreen, dual-core processor, two different audio processors, and a custom-engineered control wheel smooth as butter. So naturally I had to tear it apart.
Author: mdubinko
I’m not a UX expert, but I have opinions. Weather Underground is one of my most-used apps. It gathers data from thousands of neighborhood weather stations run by individuals. Here’s the new front page: The first thing you might notice is the large circular dial. That’s taking up a LOT of real estate here, and…
I recently joined LinkedIn as a Senior Staff engineer–an individual contributor role more senior than any of my previous roles. As such, I’ve been inundated with every manner of request for my time. Part of my journey toward handling this situation is writing up my thoughts. Let’s go. Does time work differently for “senior” engineers?…
If you haven’t been following Ted Nelson on YouTube, you’re missing out. Recently, he’s been posting a series of informational videos on the Xanadu architecture and concepts. Even more recently, he hosted a live Q&A session, taking questions from Twitter. Ted Nelson’s Channel What’s Xanadu, you ask? It’s the original concept for a hypertext system,…
If you played pinball in the 80s, you know about 16-segment LED displays. They existed in the narrow technology window after mechanical switches and alarm-clock-style 7-segment displays, but before full dot-matrix displays or full video were feasible with off-the-shelf computer hardware. There’s something geekily charming about these old displays. So naturally, I wanted to have…
I’ve avoided publicizing this until there was significant content out there. Announcing a new YouTube channel: Think LIke Tesla. This channel exists to celebrate a certain Serbian inventor/pop-culture figure and help YOU become a clearer thinker. In time, it will include everyday descriptions of Nikola Tesla’s patents and experiments, as well as fundamental ideas that…
I picked this up from The Plasma Channel on YouTube (which is worth more than a look) How to Measure High Voltage with Spheres A (somewhat) standardized way to measure high voltages is to see how big an arc can be established between two one-inch conductive spheres. The roundness of the spheres normalizes against surface…
When their hand was forced by hard evidence, Apple admitted what many people had suspected: they deliberately slow down older phones, in as little as a year. Their apology letter is a masterpiece of copywriting. But let’s have a closer look, shall we? A chemically aged battery also becomes less capable of delivering peak energy…
CQ, CQ, CQ. This is AJ6BD. I officially have a callsign. I can now legally broadcast on the amateur radio bands. I’ve been building radios since I was ten (really). I had plenty of help from my mentor, who taught me more than I realized there was to know about electronics, AC theory, signals, modulation,…
In the previous posting, I went over requirements for a DIY power supply build. Now on to the fun part–shopping! Case I wanted something fairly compact, but still nice looking. I ended up going with Jameco ABS Heavy-Duty Instrument Case. It’s a good quality build. In metric, it’s 200mm across, and 64mm tall, which is…
Building a power supply is a rite of passage for electronics experimenters. I grew up in an age where all power supplies, even “wall warts,” had heavy iron transformers. In the last decade or two, better power transistors have become available, making possible switching power supplies, which are much lighter. (Think of your laptop power…
Your shiny new iToaster complains when you plug it in: “This appliance has not been approved. Insert $0.25 to continue.” Net Neutrality explained.
Shall we speak for a moment about Amazon’s epic metadata problem? On amazon.com, search for “Bench Grinder”–a query with clear intent if there ever was one. Search by price low to high. Here are some items that appear in the results before a single piece of hardware you’d reasonably call a bench grinder… Water &…
Modern technology has exceeded my wildest dreams as a teenager struggling to build an electronics lab. With an Amazon.com order, one can have an entire electronics lab for next to nothing. As a teen, I paid a guy $100 for a used oscilloscope that took two adults to lift. These days, you can get a solid…
I’ve got a new book coming out. Check out some of the details in this short article. Overcoming Anxiety Join my mailing list for a free mini-course and be the first to hear about publication!
Here’s the manual I wish had been included with the 8x8x8 LED cube kit I picked up on Amazon. Technically there’s already a manual available if you know where to look, but it’s poorly translated and difficult to follow in places. There’s several very similar kits out there, but the LED assembly process is the same, as…
Another blast from the past, from the same era. This was a general-purpose gadget: a 5V power supply, plus bouncelsss switch, plus a variable frequency TTL square wave generator. This was one of my experiments with making my own circuit boards, starting with copper cladded boards, drawing on the circuit paths with an inert ink, then…
A blast from the past! While going through old stuff, I found this device, which I designed and assembled maybe 25 years ago. I never used it. I think it didn’t work on the first try, and I got distracted by other shiny things. Story of my life. I thoughtfully left my future self a…
Check out this post at its new home on Writing Through The Fog.
Lots of people are using Fitbit to get into better shape. But I haven’t heard of anyone using trackers to better measure what happens when you get sick. As it turns out, I’ve had a nasty case of bronchitis over the last week. This is the sickest I’ve been in a while, and I find…
In the previous article I described how antennae work in terms of EM waves. But EM isn’t exactly a wave. Quantum aspects require modeling as particles. Photons. But I can’t really figure out how a photon traveling through space gets converted into an electron current in a wire. There are some cases where treating EM as…
A layman’s description of how antennas work, plus some related experiments. Physics is strange when you think about it. I’ve been working with electronics since I was about five. (Not an exaggeration. I “fixed” one of my two-battery-requiring cars with one good battery and some wire.) I sailed through high school electronics, and went on…
Pop quiz. Why is the following Java 8 code unsafe? UPDATE: this code is fine, see comments. Still good to think about, though. Entity e = new Entity(); e.setName(“my new entity”); persistanceLayer.put(e); To provide some context, Entity is a POJO representing something we want to store in a database. And persistanceLayer is an instance of a…
According to Newtonian gravitation, the attraction between two bodies is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Einstein refined this somewhat, but as long as there aren’t crazy speeds or non-flattish spacetime involved, Newton’s formulation is accurate. As far as we know. I read this…
(From the archives: I wrote this over 2 years ago, but never hit publish. At last, the tale can be told!) If you haven’t seen it, the keynote at MarkLogic World 2013 is worth a look. I was on stage demonstrating new Semantics features built into MarkLogic server. Two of the three demos were based on…
I am trying something new with the GeekThoughts domain. Instead of pointing to my blog, it’s pointing at some cool geeky things on a CMS that’s easier to update. Won’t you check it out? geekthoughts.info
I did a thing. I am experimenting with machine learning and neural networks. To do so, I need a real-world dataset to play with. For starters, I am using a 5×7 pixel array, as common in many DIY projects, representing digits 0-9. Please help me my drawing a picture of the randomly-selected digit below. All…
I’ve talked about this before, but I don’t think I’ve ever written it down. As more of my day-to-day involves leadership, I think about this stuff. To run an effective team, you need to think in vector sums. As the great poet A. Yankovic once said, “Do vector calculus just for fun.” But this isn’t…
I’m running a Scrum project, and doing things a little differently than the classic method. I’ve done this at two different companies now, and it seems to work out well. Before a traditional standup meeting with The Three Questions, I schedule 15 minutes of intentional downtime. Since this happens at the start of the day,…