Today our dog Bode, the mascot of PitelSpot,  celebrated his 10th birthday. That makes him 70 in dog years, therefore he is now officially retired, and about old enough to be my grandfather.  To celebrate the occasion I decided to make him a nice breakfast of a few of his favorite ”people foods.” I must admit that […]

Battery Selection
Battery life is often measured by cycle life, the number of full charge/discharge cycles before the battery reaches 80% of its original capacity. Keeping the discharge current relative to the battery’s amp×hour capacity low and the discharge shallow improves battery longevity. Typical 12 V sealed lead acid (SLA) cells, like the ones found a […]

If you are reading this post, you probably are experiencing decreased range and speed on your Go-Ped electric scooter. I too have experienced these problems, but I am going to share some solutions I came up with. I purchased a Go-Ped ESR-750 scooter this summer for transportation in Mountain View, CA for a summer internship. […]

A few years ago my wife Sheryl and I were very involved with freshwater fish.  In our 120 gallon show tank we had what are refered to as the “King of the Freshwater Fish,” the Discus.  A couple of our discus are shown on the left.  One of the greatest pains in maintaining a Discus tank is their finicky […]

Since the beginning of Summer into early Fall, I’ve been compiling photos shot continuously during travel on numerous modes of transportation. All the photos were batch processed in Adobe Lightroom before being imported into NLE software. All the photos were taken on a high resolution digital camera versus my standard DV cam, allowing me to […]

Today Grant and I attended the Vermillion County Civil War Days, a Civil War reenactment held at Kennekuk County Park in Danville, Illinois. The two-day event recreates the Battle of Shiloh.  Near the battlefield, there was a large encampment of canvas tents. Some were only for sleeping, and others were blacksmiths and sutlers (traveling stores). […]

Ahoy, mateys! A year has passed, and you know what that means–my favorite useless holiday is back. Shiver me timbers, it’s International Talk Like A Pirate Day!
 You might be wondering: how does one celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day? You spend the day talking in pirate-speak to annoy all of your friends and/or co-workers, naturally! But first you […]

Well, a full year has passed and the PitelSPOT is still active.  Although post frequency is about half from what it was at the start, we are still going strong.  PitelSPOT got a very special gift for its first birthday - an UPGRADE!  It now had a more powerful Intel Q6600 Quad Core and 2GB of memory.  […]

Description
The attached zip file is a plot utility geared for scientific figures in publications. The plot utility sizes figures and text consistently and compactly; something the default Matlab plot function does do readily. Formatting rules were originally developed for IEEE publications and thus adheres to their specified conventions.
Capabilities
Figures can span one or two columns.
Multiple traces […]

Of the various people who know me, I doubt very many met Murphy. Which is a shame. Murphy passed away today, after spending nearly 14 years with our family. Murphy is special for many reasons. He was our family’s first dog. He was such a nice dog, especially in his senior years. But I like […]