Recent & not so recent additions & corrections
2021
2021–Aug–30: I have created a stylesheet for the whole site (root.css) and am now in the process of upgrading the pages I edit to HTML 5.
In this matter, I must acknowledge my son Steve, who is an expert coder, and who has helped me and tutored me up to a passable standard in a matter of 3 very intense days.
I now feel moderately competent, and am very pleased with the results.
For the removal of deprecated code I have been using Microsoft Visual Studio Code. This is a very powerful program, but it lacks a true WYSIWYG mode. Producing and maintaining a website such as this without WYSIWIG is not a practical long-term proposition, and so for a CSS aware WYSIWYG editor I have been tentatively using BlueGriffon.
When using BlueGriffon to edit a scientific or
tecchnical website, the Tools / Preferences menu must be set to output all
HTML 4 special characters. Until I did that, I found that nearly all menu
entries were greyed-out, and the less common html special characters on existing pages were
corrupted on saving the document. Even so, there was still an issue with UTF-8 characters. This type of encoding is obvious to browsers, but apparently not to BlueGriffon.
To get UTF-8 to work, it is necessary to place a meta-tag in the document head (see source to this page), but even then the behaviour is disconcerting.
UTF-8 characters seem to appear in both the page view and the source code (where they should preferably appear as &#[number]; ), but not always,
and sometimes the character is replaced by '?'. The UTF-8 charset definition in the page header seems to be necessary to make browsers
recognise such characters when they occur in the html code. Mercifully, Visual Studio Code also renders and outputs the characters correctly.
2021–Jun–27: I have started adding to the Discharge Tubes section,
particularly with a view to expanding the information on Spectrum Tubes and preparing the way for a Spectrometer Article.
2021-Jun-4:
This website finally has an SSL certificate. The server has been set to force browser-cached pages to be updated to the https:// version. 
2021-May-30. Added links and additional discussion to the Inductor Self-Resonance section.
See particularly Additional Comments and Further Work.2020
2020-07-16: e-bike
section, started an article on steering dampers.
2020-06-22: Dr Denis
Jaisson has pointed out flaws in the theory section of my diode detectors article.
Dr Jaisson gives new closed-form formulae suitablle for direct entry
into a spreadsheet. A link to his paper on Researchgate is given on the
page.2019
2019-Dec: More added
to the e-bike section,
including legal matters and a discussion of issues relating to electric
motorcycles.
2019-Aug-09. My email address has changed to: 
2019-Mar-17.
Correspondence
between DWK and John Crabtree, KC0G on the origin of Wheeler's inductance formula (includes new references).2018
2018-Dec-24.
More has been added to the article on Converting an existing bike into
an e-bike . The article first appeared on
2018-05-06. 2018-Mar-17.
The camerasunderwater info collection has been
transferred to this website. See the Photography and Optics
section. 2018-Feb-08.
For those who notice such things, it will be apparent that I
have decided at last to bring my HTML writing methods into the 17th
Century. I started writing this website in
around 2000, using a piece of software called 'Adobe
Pagemill.'
Pagemill produced terrible HTML (what the hell is a
'naturalsizeflag' ?), but it had some very clever features that were
not replicated by later programs. Particularly, it had a link
checker and manager that allowed files to be relocated; i.e., a file
could be moved to a new folder and all the pages linking to it would be
updated accordingly. That allowed the maintenance of a
logical data hierarchy, which is a serious bonus in a site with as many
files as this one.Pagemill was never updated to keep abreast of new HTML standards because Adobe first replaced it with a horror called 'GoLive', which wanted to kidnap the victim's website and imprison it in a databse, and then acquired a piece of software called 'Dreamweaver'. Giving GoLive a miss for obvious reasons; I tried editing my website using Dreamweaver, but quickly discovered that the dream was a nightmare. I had produced many of my page layouts by using tables. Dreamweaver however insisted that all data in every table cell needed to be contained within a paragraph, so would insert <p> at the beginning of each entry and </p> at the end. This was not required by the 4.01 rules, but any attempt to delete these spurious tags would result in them being reinserted when the file was saved. So, opening a file in Dreamweaver and then saving it had the effect of utterly destroying the layout.
At the time of mein Kampf mit Dreamweaver, there was talk of new browsers that were not going to support old HTML standards. The idea, in the minds of the individuals promoting this approach was, presumably, that people would be able to come back from the dead to re-edit their work. I started to panic, and tried out various other editors, but there seemed to be none capable of editing pre-existing pages without wrecking them. All insisted that the user had to do it their way, and the orthodoxy seemed to be that no web page actually needed to have any significant content; so it was obviously necessary to force vast amounts of blank space.
So eventually, I gave up and carried on using Pagemill, while slowly converting pages into pdfs and dreading the point at which browsers would cease to parse my HTML. That problem, of course, never happened; firstly because all of the people who had died since the beginning of the Internet proved to be disinclined to update their markup, but mainly because the idea of excluding legacy code is idiotic. To do such a thing would be software project suicide, because it results in a browser that can't browse. Deprecated coding methods are not secret, and so it's obvious that a browser just has to render what it gets. The rather wonderful Internet Archive Wayback Machine, for example, somewhat depends on that facility.
But there comes a point at which even I have to admit that a piece of software is too old. Indeed, by 2008, Pagemill had to be run under Wine, or in an XP Virtualbox. So I started looking around and reading software reviews, and discovered that the horrors of the early 21st Century had mostly gone away. Checking for broken links, for example, can be accomplished by means of an online link checking service (e.g., brokenlinkcheck.com) and, better than Pagemill, these services check both internal and external links. Furthermore, there are now HTML editors that don't wantonly destroy pages they didn't create.
One such editor is Nvu, a free WYSIWYG for Windows, Mac and Linux. It gets good reviews (with some reservations - see, eg., sitewizard), but the real $64k question that reviewers fail to address is: "What happens when you open and save a 20 year old page?" In the case of Nvu, the software corrects any glaring errors and declares the code, somewhat optimistically, to be HTML 4.01 Transitional (i.e., in this case, very loose). Also, having performed this automatic conversion, it does not assume that the page needs to be saved unless the user also makes a change.
By making a minimal non-rendering change in (say) the page header, it is possible to save the file and see what the conversion has done; and the glorious and unprecedented result is that the page looks exactly the same as it did before (in Chrome and IE at least). Now, suddenly, I find that it is possible to update old pages without re-writing them from scratch. It's a wonder that other development teams had not thought of this. Moreover, should you go into source mode and delete changes made by the software, they actually stay deleted (provided that the code remains internally consistent).
So, with thanks to the Nvu team, the pages in this site can now be updated as and when they need editing; and the source will then be seen to declare (in the sense of 'Lies, Damned lies, and statements of conformity') that it is HTML 4.01.
Update, 2019-Feb-23. Nvu is discontinued as of 2008-09-12. It was replaced by KompoZer, which is essentially the same as Nvu but with some bug fixes.
2017
2017-Aug-17. Started porting optical &
photographic articles
from the Cameras
Underwater Info website.
2016
2016-05-13.
The English translation of Paul Drude's 1902 paper "On the
construction of Tesla transformers: Period of oscillation and
self-inductance of the coil." Can now be downloaded from
arXiv.org and cited accordingly: arXiv:1605.04196
.
2016-05-09.
Self-resonance
and self capacitance of solenoids. v 1.00 Coils terminated by a parallel impedance behave differently from coils operated with one or both ends open circuit (vertical antennas, Tesla coils, helical resonators). The troubled history of self-resonance and self-capacitance modelling is due to the unrecognised impossibility of analysing these two very different situations using the same formulae. This article demonstrates that standard helical transmission-line theory does not apply in the uniform current case, and that it also needs considerable extension if it is to be applied properly to free coils. A new semi-empirical free-coil model is based on an Ollendorff helical transmission line terminated by its own axial field and fringe field capacitances. The author's well known 2008 update of Medhurst's formula (CL-DAE) remains valid.
2016,
Mar 9th: Solenoid
self-resonance measurements by Alex Pettit, KK4VB. Added information on the use of a neon bulb array to visualise fields. Some changes to the discussion in view of work on the main self-capacitance and self-resonance article.
2016,
Mar 6th: Bob Weaver has a new article on
the Geometric Mean Distance
method for calculating inductance, including the first ever estimation
of the error inherent in using it. He also introduces the use of Monte
Carlo methods as solution to the mathematical intractability of many
GMD determinations. 2016,
Feb 14th: I have issued a new version of Notation
Symbols and Abbreviations
(1.09). Despite the IOP guidelines, I have not (yet?) made the decision
to put all mathematical variables in italic type,
but I am in the process of eliminating any difference in meaning
between plain and italic symbols. All articles with version dates after
Feb. 14th 2016 will reflect this change (although few are actually
affected). The main issue was that in some documents I had used an
italic form to represent a quantity per unit length. I had thought of
creating new symbols to get around this early bad decision, but
actually it is easier and less confusing simply to put length into the
equation, e.g., resistance per unit length becomes R/ℓ.
2016,
Feb 4th: A new version of Solenoid Inductance
Calculation is available (v 0.20). There are some
minor additions and a partial re-write of the introduction. Most of the
changes are to the typesetting and layout of equations. The work is
still unfinished. 2016,
Jan 1st: A new (still unfinished) draft of Diode detectors for RF measurement is available (v 0.09).
2015
2015, Nov 27th: A reworking of the complementary follower detector by
Patrick Turner. A full discrete component op-amp circuit with long-tailed pair for NFB gives -3 dB @ 10 MHz. 2015,
Nov. 16th: Updated version of Inductor resonance experiments article.
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