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…
It Costs What?! A Sounding Into Hearing Aids
We are accustomed to medical devices being expensive, but sometimes the costs seem to far exceed reasonable expectations. At its most simplistic, a hearing aid should just be a battery, microphone, amplifier, and speaker, all wrapped in an enclosure, right? These kinds of parts can be had for a few dimes, so why do modern…
The Cost Of Moving Atoms In Space; Unpacking The Dubious Claims of a $10 Quintillion Space Asteroid
The rest of the media were reporting on an asteroid named 16 Psyche last month worth $10 quintillion. Oddly enough they reported in July 2019 and again in February 2018 that the same asteroid was worth $700 quintillion, so it seems the space rock market is similar to cryptocurrency in its wild speculation. Those numbers…
Bespoke Storage Technologies: The Alphabet Soup Found In Modern Hard Drives And Beyond
It seems like just yesterday (maybe for some of you it was) we were installing Windows 3.1 off floppy drives onto a 256 MB hard drive, but hard drives have since gotten a lot bigger and a lot more complicated, and there are a lot more options than spinning platters. The explosion of storage options…
Dealing With A Hacked Brain: Let’s Talk About Depression
This post is different from normal Hackaday fare. I don’t want to presume anything about you, but I’m pretty sure the story I’m about to share resonates with at least some of you. I’ve been having a tough time, exacerbated by this age of social distancing. This all crept up on me at first, but…
I’m Not OK: An Update
An update: over the last couple days there has been an outpouring of support, and I am extremely grateful to everyone who has reached out to me. It will take me a while to catch up with everyone, and though I am fortunate enough to still have a full time job with some flexibility, the…