Awhile back I wrote a review of my portable digital audio player, the Fiio X3 2nd generation (Amazon US, Canada). The summary of that review was that this is a bare bones audio player, with a simple UI, that is beautifully-built with an attention to sonic quality. It sounds fantastic but has a few UI […]
Biases. Preformed opinions. The conditioned response to feel a certain way about a specific stimulus. We all have them. We’ve been training our brains since birth to help us make sense of the world we live in. Many of them are innocuous. Some are not. “I don’t like tuna fish sandwiches.” “I like barbecued hamburgers.” […]
For the final week of 2016, I’m selling Trajectory Book 1 for $0.99 in the US, £0.99 in the UK. And we have a new addition to the product page. Trajectory Book 1 is now available in Paperback for the first time! It’s a 5.25″x8″, glossy cover from Kindle Paperback. I spent a couple of […]
This week, you might have seen a number of Twitter or Facebook ads show up in your stream for Trajectory Book 1. While I didn’t pick friends directly, it means the ad targeting “sciency, tech-savvy, smart-looking people” found you and included you in the population. There just aren’t that many of you on the planet. The […]
a CD or “Compact Disc”, is a small, shiny round surface containing optically-readable, microscopic bumps used to encode music or data. They are an obsolete technology that existed in the latter quarter of the twentieth century and enjoyed a brief metamorphosis into the DVD (“digital versatile disc”) and Bluray formats at the beginning of the twenty-first […]
(featured image, Seasonal Streaks, Mars HiRISE, NASA/JPL/U.Arizona via Astronomy Picture of the Day) Sometimes it really does feel like we’re living in the future. As a kid, growing up, I remember reading Astronomy magazine back in the late 70s and early 80s. The eggheads at NASA and the JPL (mad hearts!) had our future all mapped-out […]
A few years ago, around this time in September I’d have to write some emails with subject lines like the one above this post. It was always a teeth-gnashing exercise in frustration that made me question the rightness of a universe where difficult engineering tasks needed to be broken up into easily-digestible, 3-month chunks, then further […]
Right now, my twitter stream is full of people enthusing about the new Apple iPhone. Some are excited about the new camera. Others are lamenting the loss of the headphone jack. Come on @apple, be honest. Headphone jacks are just a standard you couldn’t control. — Dave Mason (@dcm) September 7, 2016 I’m finding it […]
Just a quick note about Trajectory Book 1: You can now read it for free on Amazon (US, Can) with a Kindle Unlimited subscription. If you’ve been curious, now might be the time to check it out. In order to make this happen, Amazon demands exclusivity. That means pulling my book off of Wattpad where it’s […]
I’ve been meaning to write a post about how I make my night sky photographs for awhile now. With the Perseids moving through our orbit, this seems like a good opportunity to write about how to shoot them, weather-permitting, of course. I’m writing this from the perspective of using a mirrorless camera system like the […]
