Recent Highlights

I have many electronics photos I want to publish but first I thought I'd show you some recent other shots I have captured.  This ladybug took off and with my fast DSLR and quick thinking I snapped this shot just at the right time.  This is not a stop action, high speed or burst photo.  When I have time and energy I have been spending most of it on my projects with plasma and high voltage devices.  For most of this year I have been working on ways to combine my electronics/experimental knowledge and interest with my photography in ways I have never been able to do before.

 "My Honey bee"
There are LOTS of honey bee shots since they are so common, however, I still try to catch a good one now and again.  It can be far more difficult then it looks.

This spider was making a very good living in the vacant lot next door.  She managed to catch everything from large moths to bees!  She is a web building species but in this case almost does not use one.  Rather she seemed to use a small amount of cob web silk and the plant as her web.  This may have been how species like the crab spider or yellow flower spider evolved.  

A look at her face on now, from lack of bulbs on her palps we can clearly tell she is a female.  You no longer have to use the back arrow to return to my site thanks to blog upgrades.  Now you can see all photos in a post at once as a slide show in full screen.

 Shooting RAW 16mp has been an awesome experience.  With my lenses, I have been able to capture better images and do tighter crops.  This fly stayed still long enough for me to take a closeup.

A Harvestmen. It was also walking around in the lot next door.  Harvestmen do not spin silk and have a single fused body.  They have two eyes and are not spiders.  They are however relatives of spiders, scorpions and mites.  They eat many things from vegetable matter to already dead insects as they search.  They have NO VENOM and are entirely harmless to humans--in fact they are a very beneficial species that often can be found together in large groups without conflict.

 This tiny fly is on the top of a typical metal fence.  It is only about 8mm long from wing tip to eyes.  I had to move very slow to get close enough to capture this shot even with a good lens.

 A dandelion.  I thought this looked nice and would make a good desktop background.

"3d effect"
 This is one of several shots I discovered how to take on my own with my TV.  Using a zoom lens and a very steady hand, I was able to give a truly strange superimposed 3d image.  I had to be quick to capture it before the scene in the show I was watching changed.

 Another 3d effect image.  No these are not double exposures.  That would not produce the lines as if one is moving towards the object on screen.  I was amazed that my TV and camera did well enough to produce these pictures. The TV is NOT 3D and obviously the old B&W TV show I photographed here is not either.

 I like this one the most since the sign in the top says "Electrical Engineering".  A subject I have been really into since I was 9 years old.  I built my first computer (similar to those used on the Apollo missions) when I was 11.  Many people mistakenly believe that the computers of that age were only as powerful as digital watch.  That is like saying an Iphone is as powerful as a super-computer! In a reverse sense.  The digital watch idea is totally false as digital watches cannot store data or crunch numbers, let alone multitask. Most of them just count and have a rudimentary micro controller for programming with only a four functions or so. Even calculator watches cannot store anywhere near the amount of data needed for a space mission!  In reality the computers used to fly the Apollo missions were about as powerful as a medium level good scientific calculator.  One that can be programmed and of course do math functions as well.  The computer was also very efficiently programmed and used--every bit of it's memory and ability was used.  Something we don't do today because technology moves too fast for us to even fully understand what we have and how far we can push both the hardware and software for highest potential.  We live in such a fast throw away culture it is very sad.  The computers I built and the Apollo computers used the 74181 ALU chips (predecessors to the CPU), diode matrix ROM and static RAM chips.  I used a 64k 6264 static memory chip to store programs as well as it's data (that's enough to store a large novel).  These computers were very complex with 1000s of individual wires and took hours to program by hand. When programed however, they can do several functions at once and also perform a surprising number of things.  With my unit all of it had to be programed in hex and binary using switches as I could not find the parts back in that time to build a better interface such as an octal keypad like the one on Apollo missions..  The output unit was one 7 seg. LED display per 4 bit data bus.  I could store 1000s of phone numbers and program the system to play them back when I wanted or program in math for the system to do with numbers limited only by how many ALU chips I used, such systems are great for controlling things as the clock speed can be slow and can even be stepped.  It was more difficult to make a mini-computer from scratch back then, or with the technology--as there were no easy chips that did it all for you.  I built ALU computers with as much as an 8 bit data bus and 2 64k chips, each 8 bits. One was used as ROM (as at the time I did not have an EPROM programmer) and was left on all the time with batteries on low power.  The other was RAM and used to store the functions and numbers in HEX I wanted it to perform.  For example I could program it to run a cycle of stored phone numbers indexed by memory so that I could use it as a Rolodex.  I could also store more then just 1-8 as there are 16 combinations of one nibble--which is 4 bits.  This included the octal letters and I could use them which were displayed as well to show what memory "bank" I was in.  It was an incredible accomplishment to build from scratch for a 12 year old and remains one of the most complex devices I ever built.  The Apollo mission system was about twice as big as mine in terms of processing power and had a better interface.  The most amazing thing was the fact that I did not get this stuff from anything more then a basic list of the functions in each chip. I had to crack each chip on my own testing one thing after the next and even had to figure out how to use CMOS chips such as the 6264 purely by experiments and not some book on how to do it.  Sometimes I only had pin-outs for the chips and a description of what it was.  I had been given a basic understanding of digital logic chips like the 7400 but my training at that point had not progressed any further.  I had no help on how to do this and of course this was way before we had any on line help or the internet either.  I was living in Hawaii at the time and got most of the parts from a local computer store that had a stockpile of older chips I was lucky enough to find.  It took me about a year to crack all these problems and my grades actually suffered for it sometimes--but I did it!  Sadly, all the notes and schematics were lost in our house fire in 2009 but one picture of one of these computers I built still exists and I plan to find and scan it in here soon.

I get tired of people who claim we did not make it too the moon.  Trust me--we did.  Even if I don't like the fact that we did, we did.  Skeptics have been invited to view reflectors the astronauts left behind and refuse to acknowledge that fact.  The most convincing evidence to me is that the Russians did not say anything. They monitored everything we sent to the moon and back via radio--and if there had been anything that was not coming from the moon or any spy with a leak, cold war tensions would have caused them to jump at the chance to make us look like fools for "faking" such a thing.  We could not have pulled off a hoax that good and have it last. We use mirrors left there to reflect laser beams so that we can tell how far the moon is moving away from the earth.  Currently, it moves away from us at about an inch and a half a year or so.  At one time, the moon was far larger in the sky then it appears today.  We must be VERY careful with what we do with the moon.  It is so important that I don't think it should be used for much and treated with great respect.  The moon is necessary for all life on Earth.  Without it, no life would exist due to many complex factors.

Here is the Buddha--all of them are thinking the same thing.  I shot these with a 50mm lens at f1.8 to get my depth of field very shallow and thus only show one Buddha in focus.  I have a few more but it was difficult holding the camera steady.

Back to electronics!  I got this AWESOME collection of tubes on line.  Finally I have a good number of tubes to experiment with.  I like building things with tube tech as a challenge and for better sound.  These are almost all from the mid 20s to early 40s.  It was an awesome find.  I have found several rare batches of awesome tubes for bargain prices in unexpected places.