For quite a while now I’ve had the idea in my head to take a couple of solar garden lights and use them to illuminate an address sign. I’m not sure what sparked the idea since my old address sign wasn’t that hard to see, but since when did that matter. The catalyst for finally getting it done was a desire to make us of my…
Being a geek and a Boy Scout leader, when I read about doping a pinecone with various chemicals to make colored flames in your campfire, I knew that I had to try it. As with many projects, it took me quite a while to act on that whim, but if you spend 20 minutes every couple of months on something, eventually it will get done….
While not technically my Christmas present, just before Christmas The TechShop was running a Groupon for a month’s membership plus several hours of classes for a reasonable price. Heidi was almost as excited on my behalf as I was so I bought the membership and just before my time off from work began, I took my first class on the laser cutter.
I was hooked. For the next several weeks off work, while…
Image courtesy of [The Falafel](http://www.flickr.com/photos/xpontius/)
So I’ve been on a major electronics kick lately. Major in that I’ve been really excited about it. Not so major in what I actually know so far. But in the midst of my [Hackaday](http://hackaday.com/) and EEVBlog reading I came across an episode where Dave blows up some capacitors. This combined with the activity to blow up…
For Christmas this year, I was given a copy of Backyard Ballistics. Now all of the information in the book is widely discussed on the internet but there is value in having it pulled together in one place. And, with a genuine vacation from work, I was determined to make use of the information immediately since I knew I wouldn’t…
The biggest project (or program for you project managers out there) that has occupied my time over the past five years is fixing up the fixer-upper we bought in Nov 2000. All in all I’ve got to say I’m pretty happy with the way it has turned out. There are certainly some things I look at and wish they had been done a little differently, but I can’t tell if other people look at them…