As the 2024 solar eclipse dimmed the United States on April 8, 2024, every solar installation in its path experienced a dip in production. For me, the most exciting part of the eclipse wasn’t the actual eclipse, but rather watching the energy output on my solar panels dip and then rise, not only EXACTLY when…
Author: Bob Baddeley
The Multiverse of Future Bobs
I have a problem. I spend a lot of time on projects, whether it’s house projects, electronics projects, hobbies, cooking, even in preparation for social events. I research the heck out of everything. And I do it because I’m taking care of the multiverse of future Bobs. It’s exhausting, and I need to stop and…
Installing Solar
I installed a 4kW solar array.
The Wacky Dancer Army
I’ve always wanted to create an army of Wacky Dancers. I still have quite a bit of inventory left from when we sold them commercially, and a couple of each color, and I thought it’d be amazing to have a bunch of them dancing down the street in a parade. I posted to the Madison,…
I learned the Rubik’s Cube
I’ve always known that it’s a matter of learning the algorithm. It’s not that people who can solve it are geniuses, it’s just portrayed that way on TV. I came into one and really wanted to say I knew how to do it. So I went to a tutorial and practiced. Over and over. There…
Competitive Jigsaw Puzzling
In December I started doing competitive jigsaw puzzling. This is a sport where people are all given the same puzzle, and none of them know what it is before the competition starts. At the same time, everyone opens the puzzle and it’s a race to be the first to complete it. Categories include individual 500…
Building My Bed
Since moving in, I had planned to have a Murphy bed, and style it in the same theme as the rest of the room; spacey without any specific branding. Here are the after photos. Continue on for the full process. To start, I modeled it in CAD, and here are some renders: When I purchased…
Things Are Looking Brighter! But Not The Stars
Growing up in Montana I remember looking out at night and seeing the Milky Way, reminding me of my insignificance in the universe. Now that I live in a city, such introspection is no longer easy, and like 1/2 of humanity that also lives in urban areas, I must rely on satellites to provide the…
The Many Ways To Solve Your Enclosure Problems
Most projects around here involve some sort of electronics, and some sort of box to put them in. The same is true of pretty much all commercially available electronic products as well. Despite that, selecting an enclosure is far from a solved problem. For simple electronics it’s entirely possible to spend more time getting the…
Something’s Up In Switzerland: Explaining The B Meson News From The Large Hadron Collider
Particle physics is a field of extremes. Scales always have 10really big number associated. Some results from the Large Hadron Collider Beauty (LHCb) experiment have recently been reported that are statistically significant, and they may have profound implications for the Standard Model, but it might also just be a numbers anomaly, and we won’t get to…