On my way to work, I ride my bike along a path that goes behind a number of small industrial buildings. From the bike path you can see the back entrances to all of the buildings. The other morning I noticed this interesting doorway, labeled “Secret Entrance.” I don’t recognize the company logo or know whose building this is, but it must be an okay place to work!
Update, 8/12/2006: Reader mongux recognized the logo as that of Infoblox. Thanks!
The Supercapacitor Contest ends at midnight on Monday night, July 31. The end is near! This is not eBay; there is no advantage in waiting until the last minute. It’s your last chance to submit an entry and possibly win fame and/or fortune, in the form of ten sweet supercapacitors. To recap: submit your best idea for what to do with a bunch of 2.5 V, 1.5 F carbon aerogel capacitors with ultra low equivalent series resistance. To enter, leave your entry as a comment here or E-mail it to us. Keep reading to see some of the cool ideas that we’ve already received. Can you do better?
Continue reading Supercapacitor Contest: The End Is Near.
As Marty McFly says, “You don’t just walk into a store and buy plutonium.” Actually, all I was after was neodymium, but the principle still applies. I needed a pile of rare earth magnets in a hurry. Neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets are cheap, extremely strong, and surprisingly ubiquitous. Despite this, most corner drugstores do not carry sets of rare-earth magnets, and it can be hard to get them unless you have a few days to wait for a package.
It turns out that you can get NdFeB magnets at the corner drugstore, and they’re cheap. You just have to extract them from the toys that they come in.
Continue reading How to extract magnets from plastic toys
Flickr went down today. There was some sort of data storage issue that required them to transfer twenty terabytes of data. To cope with the downtime, they put up a message that said (in a stroke of brilliance) “Arrggh! Our tubes are clogged!”, and announced a coloring contest: print out the web page and color in the dots– a pair of circles in the shape of their logo. Take a photo of your creation and post it to Flickr, and (when the site returns) post it, tagged with flickrcolourcontest.
We printed out the page and sent Christian to get his crayons. We instructed him to scribble thoroughly between the lines with red and brown. That completed, Lenore donned the Flying Spaghetti Monster crown for our contest entry.
As of this writing, about three hours since Flickr came back online, there are about 450 entries. Ours is one of them.
New EMSL shirt design at our vanishingly-small CafePress store.
Get them while they’re– well, whenever you want. $9-17.
(We don’t make money off of sales; we just want more people to join the resistance!)
Besides the eight project ideas that have been listed as comments to the original contest announcement, I’ve received 39 pieces of contest-entry E-mail, some of which contain more than one project idea.
I’m counting each entry that I’ve received as a separate entry. One piece of email contains a list of thirteen (but number 13 reads “i couldn’t think of anything else, i just like the number thirteen”).
Some of these ideas are just great! Keep ’em coming!
From 2002-2005 I worked in the NIST Time and Frequency division on a next-generation atomic clock.
The clock is based on a single trapped mercury atom. The most significant result of my work on the clock was a dramatic improvement in its precision, and the report on this progress was finally published this week.
The NIST Press Release compares the accuracy of the mercury clock to the NIST-F1 cesium fountain standard: “The current version of NIST-F1—if it were operated continuously—would neither gain nor lose a second in about 70 million years. The latest version of the mercury clock would neither gain nor lose a second in about 400 million years.”
Read an article from Science News about the paper, or one from Seed Magazine.
Continue reading The mercury ion optical clock
What can you do with a lot of supercapacitors? This is no idle question. I picked up a bag of 100 on eBay. These are sweet: Cooper PowerStor Series A carbon aerogel capactitors with ultra-low resistance. Specifications: 2.5 V, 1.5 F, with nominal equivalent series resistance of 60 milliohms at 1 kHz. I recently saw these at Digi-Key for $9.60 each. These aren’t the wimpy memory backup caps that aren’t rated for enough current to drive an LED. These are power caps, meant for high current charge and discharge.
Obviously, these are meant for great things. It only leaves one question: What great things should I do with them? To help answer that, I’m holding a contest: Come up with the best use for a pile of supercaps, and you’ll get ten of them to play with.
Continue reading Supercapacitor Contest!
Graduate school can do funny things to your head. Sometimes the urge to procrastinate becomes so overwhelming that you strike out in a great burst of creativity; determined to do something, anything, to avoid that which you’re supposed to be doing. Like the time that I painted my bicycle purple (with green polka dots) to avoid studying for my qualifying exam– but I seem to digress.
Where was I? Oh, yes: hard drive wind chimes. I used to disassemble hard drives, whenever possible, both to extract the magnets and to see how the different types worked. Different hard drives contain all kinds of wonderful components: voice coil motors, stepper motors, exotic bearings, electropolished machined parts, chemically etched metal webs, flexible circuitry, and my personal favorite: optical quadrature encoders for pivot arm position readout. The drive platters themselves are also quite remarkable: precisely made aluminum patters with a surface not unlike recording tape. The disks make a lovely clear note if you strike them, so it was only natural to make them into a set of wind chimes.
Continue reading How to make hard drive wind chimes
I am one of the evil mad scientists from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. I am approximately 11.75 years old. I am also one of the co-creators of the LED dining table. I would like to tell of my experience at the Maker Faire.
Continue reading Maker Faire 2006
