Vanquishing those pesky Torx screws

Vanquishing those pesky Torx screws 4

We live in an age of throw away technology, and for me, the silver lining of this has always been to take old products apart before trashing them. It’s fun, and it’s instructive to see how computers, home electronics, even the occasional appliance are built inside. And of course, you may bring to light gems … Read more

Gotcha, Google translator!

I was checking some French using Google translator, and discovered that – contrary to my French teacher’s insistence  back in high school – “La langue Francaise” means “English language”! Of course one doesn’t expect perfection from machine translation, but this was different than the usual silly mistakes: a translation program ought to know the meaning … Read more

FameLab again!

Last year I posted about FameLab, the science communication competition organized by the British Council in the Jerusalem Science Museum. Well, here it comes again, and today I’m a judge again. Like before, we get treated to a group of fine young students presenting diverse scientific subjects in only 3 (yes, three!) minutes each. Fascinating! … Read more

A proud Wikipedian!

Yesterday I was at a meet of the Israel Innovation Forum hosted at IBM, and over coffee I notice this guy whose name tag reads David Shay Wikipedia At first I thought he must be one of the few people who actually work at Wikipedia as employees; but he assured me there are only 15 … Read more

Web site redesign!

My loyal readers know that in addition to this blog I maintain Nathan’s Possibly Interesting Web Site, where I share my history of computing collection, software, and various articles. I built it some years ago as a personal web site, and am happy to have it as just that. However, now that I am starting … Read more

Blast from the Past

Blast from the Past 13

Today I had the pleasure of attending the opening of the Computing and Communications museum of the Israel Electric Company. The IEC has been around for almost a century and has kept pace with computing advances since its early days; curator Dlila Shapira did a great job rounding up some lovely vintage pieces from the … Read more

Semantinet’s headup

Well, many friends asked to stay current on my adventures outside the cubicle farms, and though it’s early days, here is one thing I’ve been up to: I spend one day each week working with a start-up called Semantinet. It is an attribute of start-ups that they both empower and expect every person in their … Read more