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Fun with passwords; also a bit of a peeve...
Let me get my [very brief] peeve about an annoyance out of the way first ( Read more... ) -
A More or Less Edible Laser
I recently found Stephen Wilk’s article “Edible Lasers: What’s the Next Course?” (which appeared in Optics & Photonics Magazine) and got into email correspondence with him about it, during the course of which I realized that I couldn’t actually recall having lased a dye that was dissolved in glycerol. (I probably did lase Rhodamine B in glycerol a ( Read more... ) -
Baby-Steps in Welding: My First Actual Project
Every week, Chas. Colburn (3D Metal Parts) runs an open house that he calls “Maker-Tech Tuesday”. Chas. has been doing welding for at least 35 years, and it is something he is happy to teach people. I’ve been wanting to learn to weld for even longer than that, so even though I didn’t have any applications in mind I jumped at the chance. (The fact ( Read more... ) -
Tenebrescence...
...is a form of photochromism that occurs in a few minerals; the ones I’m aware of are forms of Sodalite. The piece I show here is Hackmanite, which is probably the best known, and was the first type I learned about ( Read more... ) -
Duck and Hubbard; Let's Hear It for Latvian Rye
A while ago I bought a small Hubbard squash. With Hubbards (and various other kinds of winter squash, if I understand that term correctly) “small” is a relative term. This particular critter probably weighed less than 10 lbs, so it really was quite modest, as such things go.
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More Moving Experience[s]
For those in the general area around Washington, DC who may want to lend a helping hand: it looks like we will be doing another move of technical gear (and possibly supplies) on Saturday. If you are interested, please get in touch with me. Text is good (my phone number is at the foot of many of the pages at my archive of the Joss Research site ( Read more... ) -
The Baktun Has Ended; Welcome the New Baktun
There has been a lot of silliness about the Mayan calendar lately. Supposedly it ends today, and some people thought that would (magically) cause the world to end with it. Just like all the other times the world has ended, right?
I have a nifty application on my telephone. It is called MayanTime, and it’s from SwampBits. It tells me that today is ( Read more... ) -
I Ate Date Palm Flowers for Lunch
There is, in Laurel (Maryland), a stretch of Route 198 that is hard on restaurants. It is one of those dead zones where drivers may see things on either side, but they tend not to stop. Even the 7-11 moved, though I think that may have been to get a larger parking lot and/or a larger building ( Read more... ) -
Setting Up Multiple Static IP Addresses with Verizon FIOS (A Brief How-To)
I am moving. I’ll post about that later; right now I want to do a wee bit of a public service announcement ( Read more... ) -
Followup to Murphy: some success, some Murphy.
Yesterday I fired several glaze tests, one of which ends up being a mildly silly story: there is a potter in England named John Harlow. He has a Rutile Blue glaze that he calls Opal Blue, and he provides a recipe on his page of glazes. Unfortunately, it calls for “Wood Ash” which would be wildly unspecified even if he said whether he washes it; “ ( Read more... )