In a modern world of wireless, battery-operated gadgets, efficiency has become more important than ever. With battery voltages rarely being stable enough or exactly the value required by your electronic components, some form of power conversion is necessary, which often...

While GNSS devices have become commonplace (e.g. GPS receivers inside modern smartwatches or smartphones), it wasn’t many years back when they were initially quite expensive, bulky and slow to acquire signals. Navigating in bush often meant relying on an old...

I thought I’d do something a little different for this blog – instead of reviewing something electronic, I’ll be looking at something a bit more traditional … … gasp! Yes, it’s a book, printed on paper. How old fashioned of me!...

Another short post for today – some readers may remember my earlier post where I tortured an old Samsung ICR18650-26F cell salvaged from a laptop battery after being stored for nine years at 100% SoC. To do this, I used...

Back in 2017, I blogged about the Xiaomi (Mi) Power Bank Pro. This particular unit, model PLM01ZM, supports Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 technology and became one of my favourite units to carry about because of its slim dimensions and generous...

It seems that it’s been a long road to the NBN. Looking back, I find it hard to believe that its origins date back to 2006 – a whole 14 years ago. Initially, I was one of the proponents, being...

The Mass Transit Railway, better known as the MTR, is public transport network serving Hong Kong using a combination of 11-rail lines, light rail and bus services. It holds the distinction of being one of the most profitable metro systems...

After writing about my experience with the MTR South Island Line and MTR Light Rail lines from my trip back in 2017, I decided to take a short break from MTR and visit some of the other public transport options...

Just before the new year, I dropped by to see my supervisors from my PhD program and one of them had a gift for me. Well, not quite – but seeing as I had my soldering iron out, I might...

Today’s another one of those special days – a Happy Chinese New Year to all. For me, however, I woke up to a computer that sounded a little strange to the point of being annoying. It’s hard to describe but...

Now that I’ve finally crunched all of the public-transport-related data from my trip to South Korea in 2017, I thought I’d go back and cover the system I call my second home – that of the MTR in Hong Kong....

I was a bit undecided after doing my last little HF “project”, what would be the next sort of station I would look at. But the answer was under my nose all along – I should do a posting about...

I had previously taken a lot of effort to catalogue the faxes from JJC Kyodo, my favourite radiofax station of all. Seeing as it was just again new years, I wanted to try receiving the New Year’s fax from Kyodo....

When there are sales on, I often can’t help myself but to buy things on an impulse because it was at a good price. Seeing as I have had less than stellar luck with Sandisk Ultra cards when it comes...

It seems the home automation IoT boom has really hit the mainstream, as the prices of smart plugs have fallen and the market has really opened to a lot more competition. Starting from the days of the Belkin WeMo, the...

The next stop on my tour around South Korea is Gwangju – the final metro system in operation in South Korea. Starting my trip from Daejeon, this would be a little more complex than the previous legs … … as...

If you’re a public transport enthusiast (such as myself) and you find yourself in Daejeon, visiting the site of Expo ’93 may not seem to be something worth doing. It’s hard to imagine, but in 1993 (24 years prior to...

Taking some time on my weekend to go through the many observations made on my holiday in 2017, we roll along to my next major destination on my tour of South Korea, the city of Daejeon. I rode the KTX...

On a visit to my aunt’s, I was informed that they had an oyster light in a room that was inoperative but they had some difficulty removing the shroud to change the lamp. I got myself up to the light...

The next stop from Busan was of course Daegu, which I managed to arrive via Dongdaegu station with my luggage just crammed into the top spot. Lucky me. It seems that Daegu’s Metro system was still undergoing some changes at...

After visiting the transit system in Busan, my next stop was Daegu, which has the distinction of being the third city in Korea to have a subway system operated by DTRO. I did take some time to visit the tourist...

In 2019, I spent some time receiving transmissions from various experimental radio projects including those of Lucy Helton’s Ham Radio Project. The first set of transmissions were received from Iceland, with a microsite set-up to showcase the images in an...

It’s been a few years since my holiday and it’s been a bit of a regret that I haven’t had the time to go through the data I collected and post about it. Now that I have another short holiday...

When I started taking an interest in HF radio over a decade ago, one of the things I lamented was my vantage point from Australia. Being in the “middle of nowhere”,  we rarely hear the same variety of signals as...

The first real post for 2020 is actually this posting which serves to finish something I had started in October 2019 in preserving the sounds of HF weather broadcasts. While I had successfully catalogued a good number of transmissions from...