$2 Hot Wire Foam Cutter
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…
Category Odds & Ends
Rubber Band Gun
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…
Making KeePass Play Nice-nice with Ubuntu, Mono, and FTP
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…
A Game of Baseball with Dice
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…
Time Signature of Limelight by Rush
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,…
Colony Woods 5K Loop
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…
A Video with Mexican Puppets
This is a video with some puppets in it. There’s not much else I can say about it, other than that it is quite possibly the greatest work of visual art ever to exist.
3D Printed Detail Test, Stainless Steel
Here are the results and a key for the detail test that I had printed by Shapeways in stainless steel. The detail is quite remarkable. If this interests you, check out the . First the scale, compared to a penny:…
3D Printed Metric Hole Test Pattern and Key
Below is the key for the Metric Hole Test Pattern object, which is available at Shapeways.com. It is a flat, 3 millimeter thick piece with standard metric drill bit size holes, and can be used just as a decoration, or…
A Very Intrusive Online Ad
I ran across this ad for Lufthansa today at Die Welt. It got my attention — the whole web page fell off the screen. I almost wish I’d caught it while the content on the site still matched the image.