You want to let off some testosterone, wave to your mates, play chicken with reefs? Do it on your own (half a billion dollar) ship, when no one else is on board. Muppet.
Rule 1: Women and children off first
Rule 0: Captain and rats off before women and children.
Let’s not also forget the Muck-a-Rena that’s still washing up on our shores. Hope jail’s not being too kind to you, boys.
Just finished making the OhmArt 2012 calendar – a “best of”, perhaps. February was created by my son Finn – he thought up the cartoon and got me to draw and colour it. Not sure where the humour is, but it’s pretty cool for a seven year old nonetheless!
Other months include “Ham Radio”, “I see a sine”, “The PICAXE inventor” and “Currency”.
Link to it is here…
(Happy NewYear)
If you consume too much too frequently, over time your waist is where it hertz. So sayeth the Wideband Amplifier. And it was so, verily.
Well, goodbye 2011 with all of your crazy spills, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and Euro bailouts. What a year; full of news – and depending on what you’re drinking, the glass was half full or half empty.
In other news, let’s kick off 2012 with a cartoon – “Current Affairs”.
One of those crazy NY resolutions of mine? To produce a book of OhmArt cartoons by the end of the year. There, you heard it here first, on Channel OhmArt.
If you’re looking for the ideal op-amp or just something a little buffer, head down to the beach. Nothing to lose, unity to gain.
Son of a… no, this SOA stands for Safe Operating Area. We don’t want too many volts, too many amps, too high a frequency, too much heat. Too much this, too little that, the wrong amount of the parameter in between.
Stay in the SOA at all times, please. It’s a life-saver.
Forget the Hadron Collider. Forget Charlie Sheen. Forget everything, for the impossible, the unthinkable, the unbelievable has happened.
The New Zealand Cricket Team has won a test against Australia in the Lucky Country. We call that “Winning”.
That’s rarer than Charlie Sheen pimping a Hadron Collider so it can produce hen’s teeth.
When young folks start out on electronics, or even those on budgets, we love to scavenge and strip old components from unwanted circuit boards. Usually the resistors are more trouble than they’re worth and some of those electrolytic caps can be a bit suspect, but sometimes the occasional transistor is suitable for a trans-plant.
Sound like you’re on familiar soil?
If you were Michael Clarke, would you rather be seeing Bingle, or being single?
- Cricinfo.com
More than 28g of truth to this:
“Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right?”
You’ll notice that the cartoon galleries have been split into three sub-pages, with 40 cartoons on each. One hundred plus cartoons for the one slideshow were a bit too many.
The revised galleries are quite easy to click around, and over the coming few weeks I’ll “pretty” up the pages a little. Cheers!
Sometimes you come across circuits that are so simple, they… they… er… it’s like, you know, the light’s on but there’s nobody home, you know what I’m saying? Or maybe there’s someone home, but the lights aren’t on full-beam, huh? Kind of, like, a bit dipped… duh… not very bright, like.
Well, it’s election time in New Zealand again, and we get a reminder of why voters despair. First of all, the only time you hear from politicians is when they want to renew their job. Somewhat along the lines of the famous saying about bankers: folk who’ll lend you their umbrella but want it back when it starts to rain. Politicans promise anything, kiss babies, hug grandmothers, and spout rhetoric until they’re plain out of spittle. Then their spin doctors will take over in their mission to create holier-than-thou leaders while scouring the streets for dirt on the opposition. Policies? Not really necessary if you can spin it right, or just go hard on condemning the incumbent government.
To be fair, it’s hard to please most people some of the time and nigh on impossible to please everyone, even part of the time – despite our population topping a modest 4.5 million. And, we’re still in a tough recession and have had devasting mining disasters and earthquakes over the past three years, so the incumbent government – while they haven’t performed outstandingly – have made a reasonable fist of it, at least according to the recent polls (around 54% would vote them back in).
All of the major parties’ ideals boil down quite simply though, and it makes for depressing reading:
National – want to flog off the National assets, strip the fat out of Govt departments – then into the flesh
Labour – tax from middle incomes up – then spend – then hope, tall poppy syndromists
Greens – no policies except pollution is evil, “can’t we just all get along?”
ACT – extreme right wing joke
Mana – extreme left wing racist joke, who enjoys labelling 90% of the population “white motherf*ckers”
NZ First – reasonable ideas, run by a liar who’s been caught out over and over again – great at fooling the elderly
Maori – a party mostly campaigning in seats set aside exclusively for Maori. If that’s not racist, what is?
United Future – an old guy (just one) in a party that does whatever he’s told.
The worst part is under MMP there’s a strong chance one or more will get in, and be making policy concessions that many of their voters didn’t want. The result – half-baked, watered-down legislation and direction. MPP is definitely more representative, but the flaws are too substantial.
New Zealand needs a better style of government and voter representation. It needs one that is fair. Where everyone is on the same level playing field.
It is my goal in the next 10 years to document how that might be achieved.
I’m going to do this because our country can’t keep going on this way. Without a decent change New Zealand will implode within the next 20 – 30 years. And I don’t want to have been one of the ones who sat back and did nothing.
This one is dedicated to the humble BC547 and his twin sister BC557, just quietly beavering round handling their small signals, dreaming of the day when they might be asked to carry over an amp of current, or take their place against the mighty MOSFETs as serious semi-conductors.
This lil’ guy is putting down his thoughts:
“Dear Mum, by the time you read this I will have left. I know you think that the world is a big scary place for small signal transistors like us, but as it turns out, I got a job…”
True to my word, only about… ooh… five days later… “Voltage Follower” appears on CafePress.
Get your VF-CP fix here.
Voltage follower
Number 103. The surreptitious voltage follower, sticking closer to that voltage than brown mucky to a blanket. Never straying more than a few milli-volts at a time. Tighter than two coats of paint.
I think this one is on an undercover operation… perhaps code-named Op-Amp.
*cue loud chorus of groans*
p.s. this design will be on the CafePress store in a day or so….
Ampere’s 4th Symphony in gee, that’s sharp. Played with relatively low resistance by the 2nd Order Harmonic Orchestra.
Pom, pom, ta-rah, ta-rah, ta-da! {cue grand finish}
Delivering you more get-up-and-go when yours has got up and gone. What you want, when you want it. Buy Electro-lite. Far less surge! Stay ripple-free and bright, with Electro-lite!
While waiting for the Rugby World Cup final to start (8 hours away still), I decided to design another Durutti Column cover, for a theoretical album. The artwork is by me.
And of course, it comes in T-shirts and 15 ounce mugs, with proceeds to the band themselves… they’ve earned it. Enjoy!
Well, and here we have it. One hundred OhmArt cartoons. Number 100 features the humble TO-92 cased transistor, a little BC547 I suspect, alone on a current sea.
In the next few months I hope to have a book for sale featuring 100+ of them, through Blurb.com. It will be a good quality, colour print book and I feel this will be a popular way for folks to enjoy all of the cartoons.
I hope all of the folks reading the cartoons have enjoyed them. If you are a lecturer, publisher, or otherwise interested in the cartoons and electronics, I’d like to hear from you.
Time now to get busy on Number 101!
Well, the Rugby World Cup is drawing to a close in New Zealand. Thankfully, our team, the New Zealand All Blacks is in the Final, and we have a better-than-good chance of winning it. I hope we do. This country is nuts about rugby. It’s one of the few things that we’re good at. We don’t have star tennis players or soccer players. Our cricket team is average on a good day. We’re second best at netball, and rugby league. We had a good swimmer, once.
After the Pike River mining disaster, multiple fatal earthquakes, a recession, and now a container ship spewing oil on our shores, we could do with some good news. Hopefully, our boys in black will deliver the goods on Sunday evening.
To close, a quote from Joe Theisman:
“Rugby is great. The players don’t wear helmets or padding; they
just beat the living daylights out of each other and then go for a beer. I love
that. “
An alternative would have been to perhaps have a fish in the shape of the ‘f’ frequency symbol, with ‘Hz’ shaped scales flying off as it was being scaled.
Instead, we have a more pisci-friendly mountainic version.
9 latest designs
