News and Views
April 20th, 2008: Radio Cat
The cat often hangs out with me when I on the air or working at the bench and obviously harbours a deep interest in computing and radio. I have decided that she deserves here own page on Radio Wymsey, so here is
RadioCat.
Comment
April 6th, 2008: Browsing With What?
With new versions of both Firefox and IE on the horizon and Safari released for Windows I thought it might be interesting to see how browser use has changed over the past year. I have compared March, 2007, with March, 2008. (I gather that the new version of Firefox promises to be even faster and that the memory holes have been sorted. I also gather that the Beta testers of IE8 are not too happy with the browser.)
The figures are taken from my server stats for all the sites I maintain and show that over the year Internet Explorer, usage went down by 5.2 per cent, over the same period Firefox usage increased by 5 per cent to 29 per cent against IE's 64.3. Over the same period the use of Safari rose from 2.2 to 2.7 per cent, this probably reflects the increased use of the Mac. Opera seems to have lost some ground over the same period, dropping from 2.1 to 1.8 per cent.
Comment
April 5th, 2008: Goodness Me!
I have just received the Spring edition of Sprat which is the journal of the
GQRP Club
GQRP club (for anyone interested in low power operation the Club, journal and Yahoo! group is a must). Imagine my surprise when reading the Members' News section to find a rather flattening review of the BITX20A section of this site. Even the Station Manager was impressed!
Comment
March 22nd, 2008: Easter Updates
I have started constructing a 2 metre Moxon rectangle which eventually will be mounted on a rotator in the loft, there is a page for the project here.
There is a newly created projects section for various small pieces of homebrew gear, these are adaptations of commonly available circuits and can be found here.
Comment
March 22nd, 2008: Easter
 The Station Master's Simnel cake (click image for a larger version), my only input was "Yes, include Judas." (Blooming liberals!) The twelve balls of mazipan being the deciples.
The weather has been pretty awful so far this Easter so it's been a good time to stay indoors and play radio.
Comment
February 24th, 2008: Vista Stats Re-visited
It's six months or so since I first looked at the operating systems of visitors to my various web sites, the purpose being to see how fast MS Vista was appearing in the real world.
Currently the operating systems used by visitors are as followed:
Windows XP = 72 per cent
Vista = 8 per cent
Linux (all versions) 7.5 per cent
Mac OS = 4.7 per cent
Windows 98 = 1.7 per cent
It looks as if the increase in Vista use over the past six months is much the same as the decrease in the use of Windows 98 and 2000, it makes sense as these are likely to be older machines falling over and being replaced. There again it could by that the Vista users are mostly new computer users and the more experienced XP users are replacing their systems with Linux and Macs. Whatever is going on XP is nine times more popular than Vista
The operating systems that have increased their share since August are as follows:
Vista by 2.3 percent
Linux (all versions) by 1.7 percent
Mac OS by 1 percent
Windows XP has fallen by 2 per cent, 2000 by 0.4 per cent, Windows 98 by 1 per cent.
Comment
February 24th, 2008: At Last The P.A!
I have now assembled the PA stage of the BITX20A and hope to start setting up the drivers shortly. I am also working on the mechanical assembly of the transceiver which is going to be pretty tight in places.
The Cumbria Designs MiniCounter is a neat, but not cheap, readout which is built and tested. Your can see it here.
Comment
January 13th, 2008: Farewell Windows!
I blame my mother! It was she who gave me the W H Smiths gift token that I spent on a copy
of Practical Wireless and Linux Magazine, the one with the Ubuntu
7.10 on the cover. Put up or shut time! I was already dual booting
SUSE Linux and XP quite successfully and wanted to keep XP for the
radio programs, such as HamRadio Deluxe, plus a couple of web
programs that I like.
The installation of Ubuntu went like a dream, about 15 minutes and everything was up and
running and I mean running! Ubuntu is snappy. My only inputs were
language, keyboard, time zone, nothing technical. All my hardware was
detected, network card, scanner,video card (the latter needed to
download a proprietary driver) but that went like dream. I told
Ubuntu to find our network printer which it did and offered to
install the correct driver. The OS was happy with my MP3 player and it
told me the make of my digital camera before I had time to tell
it!
So now, in theory, I had a triple boot system. SUSE booted up fine
from the boot menu (GRUB) but XP was quite happy just to cycle repeatedly through the boot up
phase. Suspecting problems with master boot record (MBR) I tried a
fixmbr which resulted in more XP boot errors. It was, as the station
master would say, borked. I was now between a rock and hard place as
a re-install would loose all the programs and data on the XP
partition plus I could not trust the XP installation not to wreck the
other OSs. Luckily most of my data is on a dedicated data drive which
Ubuntu can read and import from. So I was able to import my log from
HamRadio Deluxe and read it in MDB Viewer from where I will be able
to export to a Linux logging program.
Comment
top
|
|
