Author Archives: Jim

About Jim

I'm a bit of a Renaissance man, with far too many hobbies for my free time! But more important than any hobby is my family. My proudest accomplishment has been raising some great kids! And somehow convincing my wife to put up with me since 1988. ;)

Blue Mandarin martini

Posted on 2011-08-28 by Jim

Add equal parts Absolut Mandarin (orange-flavored vodka) and blue curaçao over crushed ice in a cocktail shaker. “Shaken, not stirred.” Pour into a martini glass, garnish with a half-slice of orange.

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The RBN

Posted on 2011-07-04 by Jim

Bill Meara has a cool SolderSmoke blog post about the Reverse Beacon Network. Unlike regular (“forward”?) beacons where a station automatically transmits specially formatted messages, the Reverse Beacon Network listens for real operators calling CQ (“Does anybody wanna chat with … Continue reading →

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New HF propagation widget

Posted on 2011-07-01 by Jim

I modified the SonicChicken homepage today. The “weather pixie” links haven’t been working for some time now, so I finally removed all those. I may add some sort of weather widget back in later. But in the meantime, I added … Continue reading →

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New tumblr user

Posted on 2011-06-25 by Jim

Two weeks ago NPR did a story on tumblr. It piqued my interest, as it sounded like a cross between a blog and Facebook. Also the tumblr terms of service were attractive. So I decided to give it a try, … Continue reading →

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Bad synergy

Posted on 2011-05-29 by Jim

Mac OS X has some great features, among which are Time Machine (which allows recovery of deleted or overwritten files) and Mail.app. Junk mail filtering means I rarely see spam in my inbox, but I keep “junk” mail in the … Continue reading →

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Power supply project

Posted on 2011-05-28 by Jim

I built my 11-amp power supply a while ago, but I just now finished writing up the article about it.

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Home-brewed SWR meter

Posted on 2011-05-27 by Jim

I finished my home-brewed SWR meter last week, but this blog was down. (I failed to heed my hosting company’s warning about a PHP upgrade, doh!) So, now that the blog is back online, I’m posting it here as well.

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Blog updated

Posted on 2011-05-26 by Jim

Well, it’s long past time that I updated this blog! I was given extra incentive when my hosting company updated PHP, which broke the old software. The new version of WordPress doesn’t support my old tags plugin, so I’ve finally … Continue reading →

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PHP/curl proxy error

Posted on 2010-12-09 by Jim

Yesterday I ran into a tough problem at work, (i.e. Google didn’t return a web page describing the solution). I spent almost a whole day trying to figure this out, and the solution turned out to be incredibly easy. We … Continue reading →

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Sopa de albondigas (meatball soup)

Posted on 2010-11-22 by Jim

Our neighbors traditionally exchange homemade gifts (e.g. cookies, jam) during Christmas. Two years ago, we got some sopa de albondigas, along with this recipe. We all loved it, but never got around to making it ourselves until last night. It … Continue reading →

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