A year ago today Boston authorities completely overreacted to a creative ad campaign promoting the Aqua Teen Hunger Force animated series. The people who made the promotional LED signs faced very serious criminal charges for a harmless decorative act. Let’s all try to make technology a little more open, friendly, and familiar to the world. We need to keep all this rampant fear in check - our rights really do depend on it.

While looking for substitution tables I ran into this pic of the first transistor. Amazing, It could easily pass a work of art in a modern gallery. I find the zig-zagging lead particularly interesting (I’m assuming it’s the base junction). I was assumming the shapes purpose was to increase capacitance, but it turns out the odd shape acted as a spring to suspend the large plastic triangle very gently over a germanium crystal.

It consisted of a plastic triangle lightly suspended above a germanium crystal which itself was sitting on a metal plate attached to a voltage source. A strip of gold was wrapped around the point of the triangle with a tiny gap cut into the gold at the precise point it came in contact with the germanium crystal. The germanium acted as a semiconductor so that a small electric current entering on one side of the gold strip came out the other side as a proportionately amplified current.

- http://www.cedmagic.com/history/transistor-1947.html

Damn, that’s cool.

further reading:
http://www.pbs.org/transistor/science/events/pointctrans.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor

Some years back I was in the habit of taking requests. You made the title, I made the tune. I’d almost forgotten about that era til someone sent me a very kind email asking if those songs were still available for download. Well now, yes, they are . . . once again:

airlock.mp3
amotion.mp3
ancientholiday.mp3
applesmoothcrescent.mp3
asongaboutfredgraver.mp3
bannerbabes.mp3
bedisagraveyard.mp3
bigwork.mp3
boxturtlesdemo.mp3
cantbreathe.mp3
Chemroom.mp3
chokingsound.mp3
circuspicnics.mp3
cityhall.mp3
damned.mp3
donna.mp3
dontconvert.mp3
drinkingfountain.mp3
faggyassbottoms.mp3
feetdown.mp3
Forensics.mp3
fortgreenery.mp3
frothywhores.mp3
glasseye.mp3
globalterror.mp3
golfpunk.mp3
Hardplace.mp3
herecomesbrilliance.mp3
icouldntfindherheart.mp3
infiniteterror.mp3
itissodifficult.mp3
karmicumbrella.mp3
kidssayyeah.mp3
largearthur.mp3
larry.mp3
Lone.mp3
lovetheme.mp3
lovetheme_remix.mp3
maggyexists.mp3
Moles.mp3
moononfire.mp3
Mother.mp3
muscleup2bars.mp3
myskin.mp3
nationwideclyde.mp3
nightlife.mp3
onlyflashlights.mp3
optimusprime.mp3
partsandall.mp3
redman’sfine.mp3
riverrhymes.mp3
schoolgirlblues.mp3
Shotgun.mp3
smacktheface.mp3
specials2.mp3
specialsdemo.mp3
takecareofyou.mp3
takeherhome.mp3
theatre.mp3
tormentedchild.mp3
tremblinglock.mp3
TruthandReact.mp3
vacuumcleanersatellite.mp3
weexplode.mp3
yourwhitethum.mp3

thanks
for
listening.

Aww, take a gander at the “Lil’ Captain”. Although I was unable to put in most of the finishing touches I intended (check out the hovering gain knob), Dad still loved it. Hey he’s the one who taught me how to solder in the first place. He was an electronics engineer in the US Navy. I told him how frustrating I found resistor color codes and he agreed. Due to slight color blindness he almost wasn’t admitted into the service. He explained,
“They had to give me a special test to get in. A guy held up a yellow pencil and a blue pencil and asked - ‘Which one’s yellow?’ I pointed to the bright yellow pencil, and he said ‘Fine, you’re in.’ ”
Ah the rigorous scrutiny of military enrollment. Happy Father’s Day, Captain Mel!

Did you ever notice when you think of puzzle games you often think of tile-matching games specifically?
Check out A History of Matching Tile Games from jesperjuul.net.