A great way to learn a language is through songs. They are usually repetitive, often (but not always) a bit slower than regular speech, and have a catchy tune. This helps to cement words and structures into the head.

I was watching an anime called Bleach , and maybe a season into it they had a song at the end of each episode named Houki Boshi (ほうき星) by the singer-songwriter Younha . She’s actually Korean, but released an album Go! Younha in Japanese, and Houki Boshi was one of the hit singles on that album.

When we connect an LED to to a battery, we often need to connect a resistor is series to limit the current. I saw this question come up in a facebook group, and thought it might be useful to use this as a simple illustrative example of doing circuit design.

The basic circuit we will be considering is shown below:

We have a current \(i\) leaving the battery/voltage source, passing through the resistor giving a voltage drop of \(V_R\), then passing through the LED with a voltage drop of \(V_{f_{LED}}\) before returning to the battery. So, how can we work out the value of the resistor we should use?

On the Australian TV Series Doctor Doctor, there’s a recurring piece of music that is playing using fingerpicking on the ukulele based on Bonnie Tyler’s hit song It’s a Heartache. A quick search on YouTube discovered that it comes from the lead-in of a music video by the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra:

I was keen to learn how to play something like it on my own ukulele, and a further search turned up a tutorial by Helmut Bickel , where he has some hand-written tablature in the background of the video. To have the tab in a more convenient format, I wrote it up using the lilypond music typesetting software, and the resulting PDF is reproduced below:

Last night I spoke about Digital Photography at the Manly Warringah Radio Society , a club for ham radio operators. I decided to structure the talk in such a way that it drew parallels between digital photography and ham radio.

First I compare a digital camera to a ham radio station based on a software defined radio (SDR). Just like we use radio antennas to collect ravio waves, a camera lens collects light waves. Both digital cameras and SDRs contain an analogue-to-digital converter to convert waves into a digital signal. They also have digital processors to convert the received signals into a form perceivable by human ears and eyes

When I was studying Japanese at TAFE, our teacher Masa-sensei taught us a silly song to remember how to produce the 〜て form of a verb, given its 〜ます stem or its dictionary form.

He told us that he designed the song to be sung to the tune of “Santa Claus is coming to town” so that every year at Christmas time we would hear the tune and be reminded of how to make 〜て form.

One of the common complaints about the Sony A7 series of cameras is that they do not have a flip-around screen that allows you to frame the shot when you are taking a selfie. I managed to put together a solution for this out of some parts I had laying around.

It consists of:

• Sony A7 series camera- Hotshoe adaptor with 1/4” screw
• Smartphone holder which accepts 1/4” screw
• Joby Gorillapod with Arca-Swiss mount to accept the plate on bottom of the camera (I use a Peak Design dual plate to make the camera compatible with both Arca
• Swiss and Manfrotto RC2 mounts)
• [optional] micro-USB shutter release cable (otherwise just use the self-timer on the camera)
• Smartphone with Sony Imaging Edge app installed and paired to the camera

In this way, the camera can be placed on the Joby gorillapod which acts as a “selfie stick”, and the remote view on the Sony Imaging Edge app on the smartphone allows you to frame the shot and you can tap it to release the shutter.