brainwagon

Okay, this doesn’t really count as a hack or anything, but it is a tiny bit of virtuous behavior: I fixed an old Rigid 12 Gallon shop vac that I had sitting around. I hadn’t used it in a while, probably a few years when I had a water leak in my garage this summer. […]

Okay, I never have been much of a woodworker, and haven’t done anything significant in a decade or so. But as I’m trying to clean my garage workshop and get things tidy and in order, I have decided that it would be both cost effective and fun to construct some crude workshop furniture. I got […]

Okay, as part of my ongoing attempt to clean my garage (“Project Virtue”) I called up some friends from the Chabot Telescope Maker’s Workshop. I had a pile of telescope making supplies that frankly I’m not going to live long enough to use effectively, and I thought that I would try to get rid of […]

Merry Christmas to all, and best wishes for the New Year! I’m in the middle of the “Winter Break” at Pixar. The studio mostly empties between Christmas and New Years, and they take the time to do some improvements and maintenance to the building. I thought it might be a good idea to continue my […]

I’ve been interested in low power beacon transmitters for a long time.  If you’ve followed my blog, you’ve probably read about my experiments with WSPR and QRSS operation.  Most of those took place on 30m using my FT817 transmitter, sometimes with software that I wrote myself.  But I’ve long thought that I should homebrew a […]

As part of my attempt to become slightly more virtuous, I’ve been trying to do four hours of work cleaning and organizing my garage workshop every weekend.  Last weekend, I got to the point where I was forced to address my cordless lawnmower. My mower is a fairly old Black and Decker model CMM1000, which […]

It’s not uncommon for me to find unusual, nerdy objects while cleaning or organizing.  I’m a bit of an eclectic pack rat, and have all sorts of weird objects, and some I literally have placed on shelves and forgotten about.  Since I am trying to tidy up my garage work area, I’ve been finding objects […]

This weekend I mostly did work on further organization and cleaning of my garage workshop.  This included taking out the old dog door and cutting a plywood cover to block it up, putting up a monitor mount so I could hang a new $80 22″ HDTV that I could use as a monitor, and then […]

I’ve been interested in optics for many years, ever since I started building my own telescopes at age 11 and began writing ray-tracing software in my early twenties.  But one thing that I haven’t experimented with too much is polarization, probably because my self-educated view of light is mostly in the form of little billiard […]

I was hoping to be a little further on writing up and making video of my solar energy project, but a blown power steering pup in my Expedition left me stranded for a couple of hours on Tuesday night, and I’m still scrambling to get some of my intermediate goals up to date. But I […]

Okay, I began this weekend with every intention of doing a video about my solar energy project. But in true usual “brainwagon” fashion, my attempt collapsed into a seemingly infinite regress of projects and subprojects, and the eventual goal of producing a video pushed beyond the horizon of the weekend. But still, I thought I’d […]

If you follow @HackAWeek (Dean Segovis) on Twitter, you may have seen this tweet announcing a new series of videos, shockingly including my name and twitter handle. This Saturday I’ll be posting the first in a series of videos on #HackAWeekTV for Nerd Thunder! #nerdthunder #hackaweek Watch for videos from @jeriellsworth @bekathwia @dmlandrum @joegrand @BenKrasnow […]

I haven’t got a lot of details about my solar project available, but Project Curacao has all the details of a much more impressive version of the basic idea to serve as inspiration. Basically, the guys at SwitchDoc decided to mount a small solar setup with some lithium polymer batteries, a Raspberry Pi and an […]

Yes, it’s me, back after a far too long hiatus. Sometimes life intervenes, and you just have to reset your priorities. But rest assured, the geeky stuff that I used to work on and chronicle in my blog continues, and on this long Labor Day weekend, I thought I might mention a project I’ve been […]

So, I got a new 3D printer about ten days ago, a Creality CR-10. While this printer requires a bit of assembly, it is in general a much nicer printer. It has a 300x300mm heated bed, a control box which is actually in a case that won’t electrocute you, and is constructed from aluminum channel […]