brainwagon

Warning, spoilers ahead for those who are still interested in doing the problems themselves. Part 1 of Day 19 was pretty simple, really. You could go ahead and read the specification yourself, but basically you have a relatively large number of text patterns which consist of jumbles of a relatively small number of characters (examples […]

As part of my daily puzzling in December, I’ve been engaged in the Advent of Code 2024 challenge. This is the kind of thing that sane people only do when prepping for job interviews (which I suppose I could be) but I do more for fun, in some hope that I’ll buoy up my ego […]

This will be a bit of a rambling technical ride on a particularly nerdy topic, so buckle up (or bail out now while you still can.) I’ve been interested in Meshtastic for quite some time. It promises to be a decentralized network that allows users to create a mesh network which is independent of any […]

After tinkering with making a 3D stamp yesterday, I thought that maybe I would tinker together a stamp for the QR code that would send you to my resume-ish site mvandewettering.com. I had used the qrcode library in python to generate them before, but it wasn’t clear to me how to use that to generate […]

Apologies to Hermes Conrad. Further apologies to those who won’t get this Futurama quote. During COVID, I spent some time in my shop doing more woodworking. At the time I was trying to figure out how I could sign the work that I did, mostly for fun rather than ego (my woodworking skills remain modest […]

I’ve been an on-and-off enthusiast for 3D printing for quite some time, but in the early days, it wasn’t what I would call “practical”. They used to be fairly unreliable. In particular, my aging Creality CR-10 had difficulties with bed leveling, and while I kept modifying it to add sensors like the BL-Touch to automate […]

So, part of my incentive on working on my WSPR beacon was one of my coworkers decided to try to do some operating from the local Emeryville Marina, and I thought it might be nice to use the opportunity to try to pack up my WSPR setup and see if I could get some spots […]

Okay, it’s not really a “shop”. It’s really just my garage. But then again, it’s hardly ever had a car in it in the last two decades, so calling it a garage is perhaps even a bit more of a stretch. But I’m trying to convert it into a place where I don’t mind spending […]

So, last night I didn’t actually get any woodworking done. Carmen actually did more than I did: she took the orbital sander to some (very rough) and cheap fence material that I’m going to use for the slats on the shelving and cleaned them up. They looked much nicer after this process. At just about […]

I got home from work today, and decided that the best way to lower my stress level was to go into the garage and make something. I didn’t really have a project in mind. I’ve been pondering making a drill press table and have been thinking about a couple of design options, some of which […]

Got home from work after seven last night, so didn’t have a ton of time in the workshop. I was also impatient to actually get the parts for my tool caddy actually glued up, so I worked rather more quickly than I should have. I taped the edges, spread some glue, rolled up the sides […]

A few weeks ago I was at a garage sale, and picked up a few old tools for just a few bucks. One of the things I got was a little tool caddy for $1. It basically is a box with a central handle, constructed from 1/4″ plywood and divided into a number of compartments. […]

After yesterday’s success in building a little garden stool, I wanted to get back into the garage to do a little more woodworking. Sadly, today was the last day of my “staycation”, and I still had quite a few chores. I spent part of the afternoon breaking out the pressure washer to clean the mold […]

Okay, after all the drought-ending rain we’ve been having, our yard has turned into a lush jungle of various kinds of weeds. Part of it is just grass which has sprouted above the black landscape cloth in the mulch, but other areas were more or less unimproved since we finished our retaining wall project last […]

I have been trying to do a bit more wood working in my garage, with the net result that a fine layer of sawdust is settling everywhere. I had started to use my aging Ridgid WD12000 4.5HP 12 gallon wet-dry vac attached to my table saw and my newly finished router table. But just using […]