brainwagon

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]