For those of the inclination to watch such things, the Secret Life of Machines can be watched here. It brings back memories of dismantling washing machines and TV when I was a child.  While others enjoyed playing football, for me the fun was in taking things apart to see how they worked.

Advertisement

Once again, a post for my own benefit…

http://www.everythingpcb.com/

Recently I registered as a user on a site that required me to create a password. The password I chose was rejected as the site required specific characters to be numeric; the position in the sequence was being defined. Furthermore two characters had to be “symbols”. The result was a password that I could not remember, so it is written on a postit note attached to my monitor at work. Fortunately the site is for technical support and if anyone were to use the password the worse they could do is raise a lot of support tickets in my name. This cartoon summarises the problem.

…the ability to make SLA models in the garage using a  Rapman 3D printer. Hopefully Mrs Young will see this post.

Follow this link for a very enjoyable bridge building game.

A conversation with AvdH about kites lead to a conversation about strain guages. This lead to mention of Philibrick Research Op Amps ultimately leading me to this interesting site:

http://www.philbrickarchive.org/

There’s even some early stuff by Bob Pease.

Android based mobiles are an exciting and powerful platform. They offer potential for doing much more interesting things than talking to people, such as this voice controlled roomba

Need to write an application to track objects in a video stream? Then consider:  http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/

(Again this is more of a note to myself to play around with this when I get time).

An interesting paper by Steve Furber and Andrew Brown. The SpiNNacker project – a step on the way to a supercomputer to understand the answer to life, the universe and everything.

http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/20985/1/PID871138.pdf

A few good sources of information:

EMC UK Journal

Compliance Engineering Mag

And a pool of experts can be quizzed on the SI group at FreeLists