Big Business Buffoonery

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No guests this week, but lots of rants and items! Suggest future guests you’d like to hear either in the comments section or on the Suggestions Page.

• Mike Cowgill is building an LCR meter. Looks like a really cool build!
• Welcome to Adam Ward, who recently started a new site and gave us a nice plug. Good luck with the new projects!
• Why did National Instruments do away with An Engineering Mind? We would have loved to see that continue and they wasted a good brand.
• Friends don't let friends go into finance. An article about how engineers started coming back to design, but are trending towards trading garbage CDOs.
• Dave has a bird problem, but doesn't like how Americans all want him to shoot the birds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMEAUXa3RAI

• Listener Patrick York writes in about a great site showing off all of the old RadioShack catalogs! Awesome bit of nerd history.
• Eduardo writes in about how HP open sourced one of their financial calculators. Dave already know about and talked about it way back in the fledgling days of EEVBlog.
• Who needs a calculator? Endolith on Electronics StackExchange writes about how Wolfram Alpha can easily convert between units. And give you some awesome bonus calculations.
• Hameg released a new scope weeks after the Agilent one Dave reviewed. Why do things seem to come out at the same time?
• Touchstone Semi, a new analog chip company popped up on Twitter and is pushing new niche products.
• Hackaday looking for a full time hacker, though not for much money! At least in California. Would equate to earning 9-12k in Cleveland.
  • MakerDino started a new site in response to show he'll do it for free: HackAWeek!
• Design Contests:
  • The 555Contest is wrapping up this week (judging)
  • Dave is judging the Renesas Rx Design Contest. They only got 30 entries, but it's a different type of contest.