Collaborate Disseminate
Last year, as my Corona Hobby™, I took up RC plane flying. I started out with discus-launched gliders, and honestly that’s still my main love, but there’s only so much …read more Continue reading You Can’t Fix What You Can’t Measure
If you’ve taken a physics class, you’ve doubtless heard tales of mythical beasts like the massless string, the frictionless bearing, and the perfect sphere. And if you’re designing something new, …read more Continue reading The Devil is in the Details
Get yourself a decent stereo inspection microscope, preferably optical. Something that can magnify from maybe 4x to 40x is fine, anything outside this range is icing on the cake. Some …read more Continue reading How Did I Live Without a Microscope?
My son is growing up with computers. He’s in first grade, and had to list all of the things that he knows how to do with them. The list included …read more Continue reading Growing Up With Computers
How is it possible that there’s a geek culture? I mean, it’s one thing to assume that all folks of a nerdy enough bent will know a little Ohm’s law, …read more Continue reading What Every Geek Must Know
Every five years or so, I think it’s time to review my e-mail flow. (Oh no!) I run my own mail server, and you should too, but this means that …read more Continue reading Wreck Your Mail Before You Check Your Mail
You’re hit by the global IC shortage, reduced to using stone knives and bearskins, but you still want to make something neat? It’s time to revisit BEAM robots. Biology, electronics, …read more Continue reading Living Robots: Revisiting BEAM
The big kerfuffle in the open source world this week surrounds the biggest IRC server operator, Freenode. Wherever the dust settles, myriad important open source projects that use Freenode’s IRC …read more Continue reading IRC Will Never Die
The short answer to the question posed in the headline: yes. For the long answer, you have to do a little math. How much total time you will save by …read more Continue reading Should I Automate This?
You’ve got a perfectly working software library to do just exactly what you want. Why aren’t you using it? Some of you are already yelling something about NIH syndrome or …read more Continue reading Reinventing the Wheel