Indeed, it is a funny old world. When I was slogging my way through math lessons at high school, and cursing the folks who invented things like logarithms, I would never have dreamed that I would one day read a book on equations "Just for the fun of it!"

But things change as you grow older. I just finished reading In Pursuit of the Unknown – 17 Equations That Changed the World by Ian Stewart, and I have to say that – on the whole – this was a very good read.

I would dare to say that the majority of us have at least a passing familiarity with history's g......

I have a degree in control engineering. When I was at university (way back in the mists of time), the most sophisticated control techniques we had were bang-bang control, sequence control, and proportional-integral-differential control (PID).

PID control
Just to refresh our memories and set the scene... unlike a bang-bang controller, which is either on or off, a proportional or P controller calculates an "error" value as the difference between a measured process output variable and a desired set-point. The controller then attempts to minimize this error by......

Early last year, my computer crashed (just as I was supposed to complete and deliver a killer project) and I almost lost all of my data.

So I started looking around at various alternatives, including SugarSync and Carbonite, and I ended up going with DropBox. I have to tell you that I have never looked back. I LOVE this tool.

The idea is that you install DropBox on your computer. As part of this you create a DropBox folder somewhere on your system (I put mine in the My Documents folder). Then you drag-and-drop any other files and folders you want to take care of into your DropBox fo......

I like the Reader's Digest so much, perhaps because I am into nuggets of knowledge and tidbits of trivia. First of all there are usually a few "funnies" that make me smile, such as the one I just read in the May 2012 issue: "I love being married. When I was single I got so sick of finishing my own sentences." Comedian Brian Kiley.

There was another good one in a previous issue, but I can't recall who said it. That one went something like "I was one of seven children. I didn't know what it was like to sleep on my own until I got married." (grin)

......

I must admit that I am overwhelmed with admiration for the way in which John MacCormick tackled his book Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers.

Of course, it's no surprise that computer science is replete with algorithms for all sorts of things. Consider a relatively simple undertaking like sorting things, for example... perhaps we wish to sort a list of names into alphabetical order, or a list of numerical values into ascending size. In this case, there are textbooks that will present you with so many different types......

The world-famous design laboratory in Bytom, Poland, Digital Core Design, has developed the world's first processor made of graphene – the BYT-ON.

Discovered in 2004, graphene is an allotrope of carbon. Its structure is one-atom-thick planar sheets of carbon atoms that are densely packed in a honeycomb crystal lattice. Graphene differs from most conventional materials. Intrinsic graphene is a semi-metal or zero-gap semiconductor. The E-k relation is linear for low energies near the six corners of the two-dimensional hexagonal Brillouin zone, leading to zer......

I just received the following query from a reader:

Hi there Clive! I don't want to give a 'How to' at this stage, I would like to ask 'how to?'

While officially retired, I cannot stay away from MCUs. The design and programming is simply too intriguing.
I have this line of soil moisture data loggers. The 'how to' I have yet to find is the transport of the data from the loggers to the computer.

Physical connection is not the best. Weather and geckos and spiders and such like really make plugs and sockets not the ideal. GSM is also out, no si......

I read Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs as soon as it came out (I really need to write reviews on this book, along with reviews on the biographies and memoirs of Steve "Woz" Wozniak, Bill Gates, and Paul Allen ... it's just finding the time that's the problem).

During his discussions about the creation and deployment of the iPad, Isaacson notes that it became common for people to question each other along the lines of "What's on your play list?" Another aspect to this phenomenon was that people would talk about what songs were on famo......

A few days ago, my current alarm clock awoke me with its usual screech. Whoever was in charge of the sound portion of this device had an unusual sense of cruelty. One suspects that this is not the sort of person you would want to hang out with (unless you wanted to instruct them in the error of their ways by strapping them to a chair and making them listen to the insane warbling of their alarm call for an hour ... or three).

Of course, it may be that he (or she) was intending something much more pleasant, in which case they are simply not very good on the engineering front and – once again &n......

To be sure we are all tap-dancing to the same drum beat (my dear old dad was a tap-dancer on the variety hall stage, so I know whereof I speak), NoC stands for "Network on Chip".

My chum George Harper from Bluespec just emailed me to say "Hi Max, I thought you might get a kick out of this Automatic NoC Generator."

George was right ... I did.

When you bounce over to this website you discover that you can select the type of topology you wish to implement, the number of routers, the number of virtual channels, the allocation type, the Flit buffer depth an......