brainwagon

Okay, here’s a strange little project that is pushing the limits of what I understand in a couple of ways, and I thought I might write it up and also ask a question from those more knowledgeable than me. Here’s the idea: in our upstairs bathroom, we have a Litter Robot. This is a commercial […]

Back around 2016 I had a tough time. A vertebrae in my neck began to pinch on the nerves that run down my left arm and began to cause pain and weakness. In the end, I had to have an injection into my spine to calm the pain, and spent months in physical therapy. I […]

I didn’t accomplish much in the garage on Sunday, but I did manage to take down some old, flickery and generally unreliable flourescent lights and replace them with some very inexpensive LED lights. I had previously tried to continue to use two of the old fixtures, including their old fluorescent ballasts, but in general that […]

So, today I had a list of a few simple tasks in my garage that I thought would be good to get to. It’s now 2:30 in the afternoon, and I’ve… gotten some of them accomplished. Just to the left of my door as I enter my garage, I had assembled a fairly rickety looking […]

I think maybe twenty years ago when I was in the height of my telescope-building mania I started acquiring books about lathe work and machining from Lindsay Books. Lindsay Books made a business out of finding old out-of-print books in the public domain and republishing them cheaply. Such books were usually centered around machining and […]

When I was a kid, I went through a phase where I was really interested in model railroading. Like most boys, I had an inexpensive toy train set that ran around on the carpet until someone stepped on it, swore, and then I had to pack it away, perhaps making another appearance around Christmas. But […]

Previously I had written up a bit on my project that I have called my “solar satellite station.” I used quotes around the word “solar” in the title because for the past couple of months, it has mostly been sitting on my workbench in my garage, occasionally powered up by a 12V charger rather than […]

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 […]