A motley collection of ideas
In 2014, the Csepel spark telegraph station turned one hundred years old. The equipment transmitted messages from both Béla Kun and Lenin. I decided that for the 105th anniversary, I would build a spark transmitter myself. Csepel spark telegraph radio station The construction of the Csepel spark telegraph radio station, which marked the beginning of … Read more
Format: EPUB. You can purchase it on Like.fi The Hungarian edition was published by Typotex Publishing Ltd. in 2021 and can be purchased at Typotex. You Are Never Alone! There are always guests inhabiting the human body—perhaps the most unsettling realization that most of us would rather ignore. A person can carry over 100 different … Read more
I found a handful of pocket calculators in a drawer. I haven’t used them in ages—Excel, MathCad, the software called Derive, and smartphones have taken their place—but I thoroughly enjoyed rediscovering their science! Once upon a time, they were important and expensive tools, and even today, machines with similar capabilities aren’t cheap. Yet they seem … Read more
Crickets are part of the pleasant atmosphere of summer evenings. And if there are no crickets, the engineer makes… I found this switch in an old electronics magazine, originally powered by a 9 V battery. Thought I’d try a solar version.
This is a very old piece I wrote, even before the release of OpenOffice 2.4. I’m bringing it back because people often ask me for quick text editing tricks. I’ll show you how to do it using RegEx. The OpenOffice RegEx engine is quite usable. Microsoft Word can do similar things too, but it handles … Read more
Cutting foam or polystyrene sheets with scissors or a saw is an unpleasant task, but with a hot wire, these materials are easy to slice through. You can buy hot wire cutters for just a few thousand forints, but it’s also easy to build one yourself using the transformer from an old reading lamp, a … Read more
Architects have been interested in mobile buildings since the end of the 19th century. In nature, most things move in some way, whereas traditional architecture creates rigid, static things out of stone, wood and, more recently, steel and glass. There have been various attempts to bring buildings to life in some way, one trend being the revolving house.
Anyone working with electronics will eventually hold a component that you need to identify—what it is, how its legs connect, if it’s the right value, or whether it works at all. Testing with a multimeter A knowledgeable person can learn a lot even with a basic ohm-meter. Some multimeters include diode-test or transistor current gain … Read more
The JYE Tech DSO 068 is a do-it-yourself oscilloscope kit that’s easy to assemble. Anyone who can solder well, has some basic electronics knowledge, understands a little English, and owns a digital multimeter can confidently take on the task of building it. The kit’s list price is $79 (around 23,000 HUF at the time of … Read more