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 …