A motley collection of ideas
Anyone who has ever prepared a technical article, scientific paper, or DIY tutorial knows the problem: diagrams are often perfect as they are, except for one thing—the labels are in the wrong language. Redrawing the figure takes time, manual editing is slow and complicated, and a careless AI image edit can easily crop the edges, … Read more
Among radio amateurs – especially abroad – fox hunting is still a fairly popular sport today. Here I present a simple fox‑hunting setup that can be used at home, in the garden, for play, for tracking animals, or even for hunting “flying foxes”. “Fox hunting”, or radio orienteering (Amateur Radio Direction Finding – ARDF, also … Read more
Scanned PDFs, screenshots, and old lecture notes often store equations as bitmaps (images), not editable text. That’s fine for reading, but terrible for reuse: you can’t search, copy, or cleanly paste formulas into a WordPress article or a Word document. ChatGPT can help you convert those bitmap formulas into LaTeX, which is the de‑facto plain‑text … Read more
In 1950, the Gilbert U‑238 Atomic Energy Laboratory appeared on toy‑store shelves as an educational kit. This oddity resurfaces from time to time on social media; Facebook just served it up to me again. Back then it cost $49.50 (roughly $650 in today’s money), but nowadays—when it very rarely turns up—it can fetch $4,000–5,000 at … Read more
Every day, dozens of tiny, invisible instruments rise above our heads. Weather radiosondes that collect data from the lower and upper layers of the atmosphere, then a few hours later quietly disappear somewhere above fields, forests, and villages. The signals from these sondes can be received by anyone — and that’s where the exciting world … Read more
I wanted a simple, inexpensive antenna for my Little Airshow Radio. The 108–137 MHz range is the VHF airband, where the wavelength is roughly 2.18 m to 2.73 m. That means any resonant antenna designed for this range tends to be physically large. If you’re looking for a small, portable solution, you’ll need to make a few compromises. … Read more
Radiosondes fall back to Earth every day. Most people never notice them. With a small, purpose-built receiver like the MySondy Go, you can not only notice them, but actively track, decode, and recover them. This article documents our build of a MySondy Go device, including a custom-designed 3D‑printed enclosure optimised for real-world field use. Why … Read more
I have a plasma globe that I received about 15 years ago to create illustrations for an article. One day I showed interesting experiments with it, but now I would like to write about why the globe broke down. As is well known, the plasma globe (or Tesla globe) is a decorative glass sphere filled … Read more
The journey to Mars is approximately 480 million kilometers long and takes seven to eight months to complete. This raises a multitude of challenges, one of which is the provisioning of food for the crew. If we cannot carry sufficient supplies with us, is it possible to grow plants in space? How do plants develop … Read more
Typotex Publishing, 2025304 pages, 5500 HUF Artificial intelligence is not a new phenomenon, but large language models (LLMs) have propelled it into pop culture. Today many people call themselves “AI experts,” even though no one yet sees clearly how this technology will integrate into everyday life; everyone is still experimenting with what these tools can … Read more