Popup (or contextual) menus appear when you right-click the mouse. They are a part of almost every Windows program. Nonetheless, it took me some effort to find out how to create popup menus in RealBasic with all the features that I needed. The examples supplied by Real Studio were either out-of-date or simplistic. The only other [...]
One of my all-time treasured possessions is a Gerber Variable Scale [1] (Fig. 1). It was an absolute must-have if you were doing science in the 60s and 70s. The idea was straightforward — the device was a ruler consisting of a precision spring that you could adjust to any length to match graphs or oscillographs [2]. [...]
We’ve added a lot of content to our website at www.fieldp.com in 13 years. In fact, there’s so much material that the site might intimidating to first-time visitors looking for software or educational resources. To help, we’ve added a short overview video on the home page. Here it [...]
On average, physical intuition is useful half the time and misleading the other half. As a case in point, a trial user set up what he felt was the most basic magnet problem to test Magnum. The program returned results that differed from his expectation by about a factor of five. He contacted me to find [...]
High-current electron-beam guns typically have the geometry of Fig. 1. The flat or concave cathode operates in the space-charge limited mode. A shaped focusing electrode compensates for the effect of beam-generated electric fields to generate a parallel or converging beam. The heated cathode is composed of a high-temperature material like tungsten. The focusing electrode is composed [...]