This is my latest vintage camera – the Kodak Duex. The Kodak Duex is a very unusal 620-format camera with a helical telescoping lens cylinder made from bakelite, creating photos with a negative size of 6×4.5cm. It was only made for a very short time from 1940-42 at a cost of $6, approximately $167 in [...]
Like many other authors I’m constantly thinking of new ways to promote my book – and one thing that I haven’t tried yet is to give it away! Shanghai Gold is of course still available at Amazon (including a Kindle Edition), Barnes & Noble and your local bookstores – and I very much would like [...]
Memories… is a random series of memories of my trips to Asia in the late 80s and early 90s. I’d been trying to go to Hangzhou not too far from Shanghai for several years, but had always been deflected by inconvenient bus or train connections. In the summer of 1993 I finally managed to make [...]
This will be a random series of memories of my trips to Asia in the late 80s and early 90s. Here’s a first installment…. In the early nineties it was still very common in China to see steam engines pulling freight trains. I vividly remember the first time I saw these huge, smoke-black trains lumbering [...]
…they just go on vacation.
OK, this is the very last post about the MJB Coffee company, I promise. For reference, here are my previous posts on MJB and their ads: Some Old Ads Never Die Again, Why? Why? Because. Now walking down Third street to the office I happened to look up and guess what I saw? “MJB”! I [...]
Thirty years ago today, the ZX81 home computer was launched in the UK. Nobody could have even guessed what an avalanche this little machine would produce – within a few years, every teenager in Europe would be playing computer games… The ZX81 can easily be credited as the milestone that launched the computer revolution in [...]
Wow – first of all an apology if you’ve been coming by every now and then to look for updates. It’s been a busy couple of months, mostly filled with baby-related activities. Luke is doing well and every now and then he even lets us write a blog post now. Life with Luke is definitely [...]
As it turns out, writing a novel is much faster than editing and eventually publishing it… It’s been a couple of years since I’ve successfully finished NaNoWriMo with a mostly completed novel, and it took me all the way through the rest of the 2000s to edit my work. There was also the subject of [...]
We are living in exciting times! The search for planets outside of the solar system has been heating up considerably over the last few years and we have now hundreds of planets in our maps in a slowly expanding sphere of several hundred light years from earth. However due to the current detection systems, our [...]