Jul 15Cast iron electrolysisA little while ago, Benji was shopping at the Alameda Flea Market and came across a really neat rusty old waffle iron. The piece has a base that you can put over a small wood or charcoal fire. The iron itself is two separate pieces that sit on top of…Electrolysis5 min readElectrolysis5 min read
Feb 28Primetime!My pal Doug made a feature request for the solar metric clock: Add an indicator that tells you when the displayed time is a prime number. This comports with my obsession with primes and my desire to keep futzing with this project endlessly. So of course I did it. I…Clock2 min readClock2 min read
Feb 2My solar metric desk clock works!I’ve been working on this project, off and on, for most of a year, now. I’ve finally got the clock I promised myself! If you want some background, you can read about my obsession with metric time and how that turned into a fascination with solar time. Once I got…Clock3 min readClock3 min read
Jan 27Beating the WordlebotLike a lot of you, I discovered Wordle a while ago. I love the backstory — wrote it for his partner, opened it up to the world, game got bought by the New York Times for real money! I tend to get obsessed about stuff. Wordle’s no exception. I thought…Wordle4 min readWordle4 min read
Jan 13My chat with Charles DickensI’ve lately been paying attention to AI-based systems that create media for ordinary consumers. ChatGPT is all the rage just now, but there’s been a real explosion in the number of models trained up on large text, audio, image and other creative corpora. …Dickens9 min readDickens9 min read
Dec 23, 2022Time, again!A while ago, I wrote a longish post about a clock I built to keep metric time. I promised I was going to polish it up, build a case for it and make a pretty piece of desk furniture out of it. I haven’t done that yet. Instead, I made…Clock3 min readClock3 min read
Nov 13, 2022Me and HalI’ve been playing around with some of the consumer-accessible large-model AI systems lately. I have enjoyed making novel images using Stable Diffusion via DiffusionBee on my Macbook. I’ve played some with GPT-3 to explore text generation. It’s neat. …AI4 min readAI4 min read
Sep 5, 2022About time…We have lots of ways to describe distance: feet, furlongs, meters. You can measure volume in liters, quarts or cubic miles. We weigh things in stone, pounds and kilograms. Same is true for geometric angles, acceleration, power, torque and so on. It struck me a while ago that that’s not…Clocks9 min readClocks9 min read
Nov 26, 2021Tesla road trippingWe took a three-week, 3,857-mile road trip a month ago to visit eight US National Parks and to see friends in Colorado and Utah. Here are some Bryce Canyon hoodoos for you to look at: The parks visit had been on our list for a long time. Besides that, we…Tesla Road Trip4 min readTesla Road Trip4 min read
Jul 14, 2021Beating the BeeLately, I’ve gotten obsessed by the daily New York Times Spelling Bee. It’s a word puzzle with seven letters. Your job is to find as many words that use some or all of them as you can. Every word has to include the letter in the center. Words must be…Spelling Bee10 min readSpelling Bee10 min read
