Introduction Recently I upgraded my ham radio station with a new antenna I bought at one of our local club’s swap meets. The antenna is a fan dipole which came wired to cover six bands: 6…

Introduction With the continuing trade war between Canada and the USA, an effective weapon in the Canadian consumer’s arsenal has been Canadians boycotting US products and US travel. The US governm…

Introduction The USA randomly decided to break the free trade agreement and put 50% tariffs on many Canadian products reigniting a trade war. These tariffs came out of nowhere, are probably illegal…

Introduction AI is vacuuming up investment dollars like never before. There are thousands of AI companies vying for attention. For instance, this list of the top 100 AI companie…

Introduction I’ve blogged recently on running AI models locally using open-source product such as LM Studio or ComfyUI. Many AI models are released as open-source, and anyone can run…

First Look at LM Studio Bionic Introduction Agentic AI is the new in thing, and we see it built into Microsoft Office and Visual Studio via Microsoft’s Co-pilot feature. These allow AIs to edit you…

Introduction A couple of weeks ago, I talked about LM Studio that lets you run AI models like ChatGPT locally on your laptop. LM Studio is great for text-based AI models but doesn’t suppo…

Introduction AI dominates the news both good and bad. The only reason the US economy hasn’t completely collapsed under Trump is due to the ongoing AI investment frenzy. There is a huge building boo…

Introduction There is a lot of opposition to tech companies building data centers in various communities around the world. The objections have to do with the data centers taking all the water and e…

Introduction The C string library is compact, fast and efficient. However, if not used correctly and carefully, it leads to buffer overrun errors which either cause programs to crash or worse allow…

Introduction ARM is best known for providing the CPU chips used in smart phones and tablets. Its CPUs are power efficient allowing longer battery life while still providing a lot of processing powe…

Introduction The Virtual OS Museum is literally a museum of 570 distinct operating systems. Check out their website for screen grabs and a list of everything included. You can’t physicall…

Repair Cafes are part of a new brand of anticonsumerism. The cafes and other efforts try to offer an alternative to mass-produced, disposable goods that have dominated the economy for the last half-ce...

Introduction Apple has changed CPU architectures for their desktop and laptop computers several times. The original Apple II’s used the 8-bit MOS 6502. This CPU never transitioned properly to …

Introduction Bill C-22, also known as the Lawful Access Act, aims to modernize Canada’s legal framework for law enforcement to investigate digital crimes, including provisions for accessing d…

Introduction I reviewed Ubuntu 25.10 late last year on my M1 Apple MacBook Air using UTM virtualization software. Ubuntu 26.04 was released last month which is an LTS version, t…

Introduction A couple of weeks ago, I asked ChatGPT to give me a list of blog topics. “Writing Your First ARM Assembly Program (Step-by-Step)” was one of the topics, so I asked Copilot embedde…

About 100 search and rescue members attended from across the province

Introduction In my last blog post, I asked ChatGPT for a list of blog topics. This is the first one it suggested, which I fed into ChatGPT to get a blog post. The interesting thing is that I cover …

Introduction I started MS Word to create today’s blog posting. When you create a new blank document in Microsoft Word, above the blank document is a dialog that says: “Describe what you’d like to d…

Introduction Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft offer single sign-on solutions to simplify signing on to a variety of websites and other services. If you are already signed on …

Introduction AI companies such as OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Anthropic and Google have been in the news a lot recently for all the wrong reasons. None of the AI products are profitable and all require huge…

Introduction US Tech companies are Trump’s biggest supporters and seem intent on doing harm to everyone’s democracy and freedoms. All in the fear of regulation and taxation. Most US tech companies …

Introduction Today the Supreme Court of the US ruled that most of Trump’s tariffs are invalid and illegal. This doesn’t affect Canada so much as most of our exports are covered via CUSMA and some o…

This week’s #𝗙𝗲𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗙𝗿𝗶𝗱𝗮𝘆 shines the spotlight on Stephen Smith, author of “𝗥𝗮𝘀𝗽𝗯𝗲𝗿𝗿𝘆 𝗣𝗶 𝗔𝘀𝘀𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗹𝘆 𝗟𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴, 𝟮𝗲: 𝗔𝗥𝗠 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗿 𝗖𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴.” 𝗤: 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝗽𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘁𝗼 𝘄𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸? “The fir...

: No worries if the US doesn't want to be friends with Europe anymore

Introduction There has been quite an explosion of Generative AI programs recently including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Facebook’s Llama, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, Anthropic’s Claude, and xAI’s G…

Introduction Over the past couple of days Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta have seen their stocks plummet when they released generally good earnings, but gigantic plans to each spend about $200 b…

Introduction I’m with the Sunshine Coast Amateur Radio Club Society and one of the goals of this club is to offer communications resiliency. What happens if during an earthquake, forest fire …

Introduction I recently finished reading “Science Under Siege” by Michael Mann and Peter Hotez. Michael Mann is a climate scientist who writes extensively about global warming and hence has been at…

Big skies, bold cities and iconic prison islands: these destinations offer a familiar feel with a global twist.

Introduction I recently read the book: Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works for Us by Gary F. Marcus. This is a quick review of the book along with some thoughts on how things hav…

Introduction The USA continues to threaten Canada’s sovereignty with both invasion and trade bullying. We aren’t alone in this as the USA is also threatening Greenland, Venezuela, Panama, Nigeria a…

Introduction Last time we looked at replacing GMail and Google Apps with equivalents from Proton. However, Google’s main source of revenue is advertising, mostly driven by Google Search. In this ar…

Looking for a secure email option? Proton Mail prioritizes privacy with its encrypted, feature-filled application.

Introduction Last time, I was looking at alternatives to US tech companies. I’ve subscribed to Proton with their unlimited subscription which replaces quite a few Google services plus adds a …

Introduction The USA has started requiring social media history and other personal information for travellers entering the USA. Although this doesn’t currently apply to Canadian citizens, border ag…

Introduction Recently, I had a look at Ubuntu 25.10 running in a virtual machine running on my old Windows laptop. I chose this as I figured VMWare was the easiest way to get running quickly. When …

Introduction The first edition of Raspberry Pi Assembly Language Programming was published back in October of 2019. Since then quite a bit has changed and this book requires a major revision to sta…

Introduction I just finished the second editions of two of my books: Raspberry Pi Assembly Language Programming and RP2040 Assembly Language Programming, where one of the goals was to update the sc…

This book provides you with starting points for your own projects while you develop a working knowledge of Assembly Language programming on Raspberry Pi

Introduction Ubuntu released 25.10 back on October 9. Now that I’ve sent my two books off to production, I can have a look at a few non Assembly Language things of interest. I’ve always liked Ubunt…

RP2040 Assembly Language Programming: Including the RP2350 and Raspberry Pi Pico 2: Smith, Stephen: 9798868822018: Books - Amazon.ca

Introduction I haven’t posted a blog post since April, mainly because I’ve been working on the second editions of both my Raspberry Pi Assembly Language Programming and RP2040 Assembly Language Pro…

Raspberry Pi Assembly Language Programming: ARM Processor Coding: Smith, Stephen: 9798868818738: Books - Amazon.ca

Downtown street closure invites residents to celebrate sustainable transportation with music, food, and family-friendly fun