mcnalu's musings

I've had to think about mortgages lately. At first this seemed like a boring chore, but it generated a bit more interest (pun alert!) when I noticed that most mortgages are based on a mathematical series. What's more, I found it hard to find a clear explanation of the mathematics …

Minecraft for the Raspberry Pi has been with us for about a year now. It's cut down quite a bit from the normal version, being much closer to the pocket edition available for phones and tablets. I wasn't particularly interested in it until I read recently that it comes with …

Last week my 8 year old son was tasked with making a robot for a school project, but one made from toilet roll tubes, aluminium foil and possibly an LED or a wee speaker to make a noise. I said unto him, "No, you shalt make a real robot!" and …

I was recently asked to speak on the radio about space debris. This was prompted by the release of the film Gravity (1), and the re-entry of the GOCE satellite (2). You can listen to the interview here (Copyright: BBC, broadcast on Radio Scotland, 16 November 2013). At the beginning …

Welcome to my new blog. All the content of the old blog, which was hosted on Google's Blogger, is now here (except for the comments). The old blog can still be found at oldblog.mcnalu.net until Google see fit to make me remove it, which may be never. This …

I was once told by a person I very much respect that I had an aversion to taking out loans. I suppose in the climate of free loaning (free as in loving, not as in beer) that persisted until about 2007 I did seem loan-averse to most. I thought it …

The other day I received one of the limited number of ZTE Open phones running the relatively new Firefox OS. The specifications of the hardware are limited, especially next to my Nexus 4. But, at £59 compared to the Nexus 4's £290 (and that's cheap for a top-end smart phone …

I've enjoyed writing since I was a small boy. At school I remember writing Dr Who stories on old computer paper from my Dad's work. I also wrote a series of Goon Show-like parodies of Star Trek which seemed to go down well with folk at my school. Later on …

I've been trying to set up my Linutop 2 box as a small server for a while now, but keep hitting a variety of annoying problems. The latest was that an intenso 32GB USB stick seemed to be the cause of achingly slow performance. I read in Linux Format recently …

In my previous post in this series I described some thoughts that came from reading book III of Keynes's General Theory. Before moving on to discussing subsequent books, I'd like to make some notes regarding the simple model I discussed in that post. The first note regards how a lack …