J. Peterson's Writing About Electronics, Reviews, 3D Modeling, etc.
I’m reviewing two books here with their origins in the mid-1970s microcomputer revolution: These two companies – Apple and Sphere – started at around the same time with similar products. Yet the two corporate histories are quite a contrast. Apple is a wild success, becoming one of the largest companies on the planet. Sphere vanished read more »
A little over ten years ago, I started on a software project that was part hobby, part work-related. What it actually does isn’t relevant here. Instead, let’s talk about the components it has, and the tools to create it. It started out as a web page with some JavaScript code that loaded images and operated read more »
One of the cool things modern tech has made straightforward is the ability for gadgets to balance themselves. Spinning reaction wheels allow a device to change its position and hold it in place, even if it’s balancing on a point. Last century, this would have been a major (and expensive!) engineering challenge. Today inexpensive nano-tech read more »
Forty years ago, Moore’s Law was on a tear when it came to personal computing. Every year or two, CPU clock speeds doubled, RAM prices fell by half, and the compute power your OS and applications expected increased accordingly. You really had to buy a new machine every 2-3 years, or else your computer was read more »
Back in the mid/late 1980s I wrote a couple of cool (to me at least) Macintosh Applications. Macintosh Pico This is an image processing language demo based Gerard Holzmann’s book Beyond Photography – The Digital Darkroom. The app lets you interactively type expressions in Holzmann’s language and see the results in another window. Wallpaper for read more »
Many years ago, I repurposed an ageing Dell tower PC into a household server named “Attic.” After the fire, we had to move out of the house for a while, and it no longer made sense to keep it. So I kept the hard drives, and junked the aging PC hardware. The original machine ran read more »
How Accurate is Your 3D Print?I Tested Several Services to Find Out Update January 2025: Added a few more prints from Jawstec and JLC3DP. Update September 2024: Several of the entries in this post referred to services (e.g., Shapeways) that are no longer in business, or 3D printing tech that is now obsolete. I’ve archived read more »
On a recent trip I picked up a art-glass marble for my wife. She liked it so much she bought a nice lighted display stand for it. The stand wasn’t designed to display that particular marble though, so it didn’t work too well. This was a problem easily solved with a bit of 3D printing. read more »
The original Apple Pencil, in addition to its phenomenally bad charging method, has no means to keep it with the iPad. The nice leather Sena case we keep the iPad in doesn’t have a loop for the pencil. I solved the problem by coming up with a clip that’s easily tucked into the case when read more »
Apple’s recently introduced Mac Pro features a distinctive pattern of holes on the front grill. I’m not likely to own one anytime soon (prices for a well configured machine approach a new car), but that pattern is very appealing, and re-creating it is a fun exercise. The best clue about the pattern comes from this read more »