We took a chance on this $129 inner spring mattress from Walmart. It came vacuum-packed, flattened, rolled up, and stuffed into a bag. The packaging was so unique I decided I’d better set up the video camera so people would…
Here’s a hot wire foam cutter that I made from scraps, following a general design I saw in Make magazine a couple years ago. I picked up 20 feet of 30-gauge nichrome (nickel chromium) wire on ebay for $2.09, shipping…
Here’s a 20-minute video of the entire pen-making process — everything from selecting the wood to preparing the blanks, through to turning the pen on the lathe, finishing it to a shine, and assembling it. Virtually none of the process…
Okay, let’s get some parenting concerns out of the way first: I believe that a rubber band gun is probably one of the safest ways to teach a kid a bit about gun safety, partly because it actually shoots something…
I have everything I need to keep tabs on my home IP address without signing up for a DDNS service like No-IP or DynDNS. My Synology NAS always knows its address when it’s online, and because it’s essentially a little…
KeePass is a free and utterly genius password management tool that has allowed me to leave the days of reusing passwords way in the past. Now all of my passwords are different, securely managed, and look something like “út8¥Äbë¬eqö«ûëU^Èm¯”. (Go…
My son got a set of plastic baseball players and a mat in the shape of a baseball diamond for Christmas. We had a 6-sided die on hand, and he wanted to make a game out of it. Here’s what…
Here are a few pens that I made for Christmas gifts this year. (I can post them now because everyone’s received them!) Click the image for a larger view. From left to right, there are two pens turned from holly,…
A friend recently proposed a bit of a puzzle: How many times does the time signature change in the Rush song Limelight? I hadn’t ever really tried to figure it out before so I thought I’d give it a shot,…
Here’s a great run/walk for neighbors of the Colony Woods community in Chapel Hill, NC. The loop is exactly 5 kilometers (3.11 miles), and it goes by most of the properties in the neighborhood with only limited overlap. Because it’s…