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Mike Olson
Mike Olson

104 Followers

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Jul 15

Cast iron electrolysis

A 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…

Electrolysis

5 min read

Cast iron electrolysis
Cast iron electrolysis
Electrolysis

5 min read


Feb 28

Primetime!

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…

Clock

2 min read

Primetime!
Primetime!
Clock

2 min read


Feb 2

My 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…

Clock

3 min read

My solar metric desk clock works!
My solar metric desk clock works!
Clock

3 min read


Jan 27

Beating the Wordlebot

Like 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…

Wordle

4 min read

Wordle

4 min read


Jan 13

My chat with Charles Dickens

I’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. …

Dickens

9 min read

Dickens

9 min read


Dec 23, 2022

Time, 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…

Clock

3 min read

Time, again!
Time, again!
Clock

3 min read


Nov 13, 2022

Me and Hal

I’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. …

AI

4 min read

AI

4 min read


Sep 5, 2022

About 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…

Clocks

9 min read

About time…
About time…
Clocks

9 min read


Nov 26, 2021

Tesla road tripping

We 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 Trip

4 min read

Tesla road tripping
Tesla road tripping
Tesla Road Trip

4 min read


Jul 14, 2021

Beating the Bee

Lately, 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 Bee

10 min read

Beating the Bee
Beating the Bee
Spelling Bee

10 min read

Mike Olson

Mike Olson

104 Followers

Berkeley-based techie with an interest in business. Worried about the world.

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