Category Archives: General Tech

The death of the paper publishing

Posted on May 10, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

Amazon has announced the ‘Kindle DX‘ portable document reader. Much larger screen and native PDF support. Starting to look very impressive, and makes electronic books and magazines a real possibility. To seal the deal, it needs to be thinner still, … Continue reading →

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Back up, and thanks!

Posted on April 29, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

I’m back. An excellent Telsta/Bigpond tech guy came around first thing this morning and got me going. Something was definitely wrong at the other end. He provided a new Bigpond two wire gateway for my ADSL connection. My old Alcatel … Continue reading →

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Know It All

Posted on March 24, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

Since 2004 I have been writing a column for Geare magazine called ‘Know It All’. In each column I endeavour to explain how some bit or other of technology, or other working thing, actually does work. I’ve uploaded the first … Continue reading →

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Posted on February 26, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

In the last item on today’s ‘Best of the Web Today’ column in the Wall Street Journal Opinion Journal, the writer draws attention to a gaffe by the US Vice President in which he made reference to ‘a website number’. … Continue reading →

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Yay for Eastman Color!

Posted on February 13, 2009 by Stephen Dawson

My brother has drawn to my attention a truly fascinating article published (perhaps, republished) in the Journal of the National Film and Sound Archive, an Australian government body. Entitled ‘Crying in Color: How Hollywood Coped When Technicolor Died‘ (PDF). In … Continue reading →

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Audio calculations

Posted on August 18, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

The editor of Australian HI-FI, for which I write, has just emailed me a link to the most incredible and useful set of calculators I’ve ever seen at Sound Studio and Audio Calculations Online – Acoustics Conversion Engines. Okay, they’re … Continue reading →

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Cuil pride

Posted on July 31, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

A month or so ago I sent an email to prominent conservative newspaper blogger Andrew Bolt, expressing my pride in my son, who had recently graduated as an Officer in the Australia Army from the Royal Military College, Duntroon, Canberra. … Continue reading →

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A-Weighting, the saviour of many a poor piece of equipment

Posted on February 21, 2005 by Stephen Dawson

The aim of makers of high fidelity audio equipment is — or at any rate, ought to be — to produce equipment that does not modify the signal, other than convert it (from a digital to analogue representation, or from … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio, General Tech, Imperfect perception, Testing | Leave a comment

The Real Starship Troopers

Posted on March 11, 2004 by Stephen Dawson

There were many, many disappointments in Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 movie Starship Troopers. Those of us who love Robert A Heinlein’s novel object to the political re-orientation in the movie, the idiotic ‘science’ and the unbelievable contrivances used to have the … Continue reading →

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‘RMS Power’ — an inappropriate term

Posted on September 3, 2003 by Stephen Dawson

Electronics professionals cringe when they see the terms ‘RMS Power’ or ‘RMS watts’ in publications. This new article explains why.

Posted in General Tech, Testing | Leave a comment