The Rodent's Burrow

Over the past few years in idle moments I've noodled on the subject of making my own miniature steam whatzit with small reference to existing designs. That is, I want to invent the thing, not slavishly build something others have designed.

So over the past few months, our cell coverage had been getting worse, until it reached a point at which I couldn't even get a signal from within my own apartment nor its car park. (And we used to get excellent signal quality inside our apartment at one point.). We originally signed up with Bell South ...

I've got making a radius cutter on my fun things to do list, but
I'm not sure what style to make. So far I've found three basic
styles:

I've been wanting a drafting application for a long time,
but have been too cheap to buy one.
Someone on one of the machining groups I've begun
frequenting posted a pointer to
Solid Edge 2D
by Siemens. I wasn't able to install it, though, because
it requires Windoze XP and I didn't have anything running
that.

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a Maglite LED flashlight,
since I'm pretty fed up with the flakiness of my Coast ones.
It wasn't until after I got home that I noticed that the
package said, in REALLY BIG LETTERS, that it uses
a "3-Watt LED!"

Now that I've got the mill and lathe in usable shape, it's time
to start, er, using them. Of course the first things that come
out of them are tooling and improvements for the machines
themselves, such as an arbor for my diamond saw so I can cut
more meteorite dice, a chip guard for the lathe's carriage
handwheel...

I used to think a microsecond (µS) was a really, really
tiny interval, at least for purposes of any electronic doodads
I'd cobble together. That is, if you performed operations at
a 1MHz rate, you'd always have plenty of ticks available for
a task. Doing a little calculation based on a
project I'm considering has enlightened me otherwise.

I've finally gotten the mini-mill and mini-lathe installed and
running, though as a consequence moving around in the office
has gotten much more difficult — and doing so barefoot
more dangerous. I've started recording what I work on at
Flickr,
and the first actual product is a half-dozen 0.2" six-sided
dice made from a slice of nickel-iron meteorite. You ...

A bunch of months ago, I started getting an inkling of how short
life can be, and realised there were lots of things I hadn't
done but wished I had. Some of them I'll never do, but for others
I can correct the omission. Three of those are hacking with
chemistry, hacking with electronics, and hacking with machining.
I've...

Well, it's not a jukebox, and it doesn't load discs into a
drive, but it's a hell of a lot better than having loose discs
all over the place.
This little item
was on my gift list, and
the SBH gave me a gift certificate to buy one. So I did, and
I love it. I thought the capacity ...