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The Atomic Spectra Database (ASD) from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology is a well known tool which contains a large amount of precisely measured electronic transitions in atoms, i.e. spectral lines. Its data is a reference for many fields in science. So, is it possible to...
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After over ten years, my Rigol DS2202 oscilloscope’s Horizontal adjustment knob unfortunately started to behave erratically, randomly zooming in and out instead of what it was supposed to do. So I decided it was in need of a replacement. Part This part fits pretty well: Bourns...
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The Raman spectrometer we are developing has a high-resolution light microscope. For uneven surfaces, though, the small depth of focus often makes it hard to recognize what’s going on, since only a small part of the image is actually in focus, like this: A typical single-frame image of a...
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During the current Corona crisis, I find myself having a lot of spare time. Instead of using that for something useful, I ended up playing a lot of Dominion, a board game I can highly recommend checking out. It has very good replay value, and especially works well for two players (which many other...
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As I am writing this, I am sitting in a train home from Akademy 2018, KDE’s annual developer conference, which took place in Vienna this year. Akademy always is a great mix of some talks, some socializing with people you otherwise only communicate with through mailing lists or IRC, and some...
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Akademy, KDE’s annual developer conference, is over — and as always, it was a great experience! Thanks a lot to the local organization team, and of course to all the nice people attending and discussing things. A sequence of workshops writing their topic onto the blackboard, each replacing the...
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I started to implement multiple cursor and selection support in KDE’s famous text editor kate a while ago, but eventually didn’t quite have the time to finalize it. I am currently at Akademy in Spain, KDE’s annual developer conference, and decided that would be a good time to pick it up again and...
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Introduction This article compares some of the less obvious details of fourier transform spectrometers and classical grating spectrometers. It contains some apparently not-widely-known observations I made recently, but is probably not interesting to you if you are not into spectroscopy. This is...
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From my last electronics project, I had some leftover laser diodes. Because it would be very very sad to just have them lie around, I decided I should build something out of them. And since it’s a laser, it would be stupid to do something which doesn’t exploit the coherence properties of the light...
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Today’s network backbones don’t use copper wires any more — they use lasers to transmit information. The laser light usually propagates in a fiber, but while convenient, this isn’t strictly necessary; you can also send the laser light through the air in a collimated beam, like an ordinary laser...