This thing is a mercury arc rectifier, a giant bottle of hot, ionized mercury that glows and sparks and buzzes and looks absolutely amazing! It was invented in the early 1900s by a fellow named Peter Cooper Hewitt to tear … Continue reading The Saturday Night Thread is a big bottle of glowing mercury
Hi all, let’s share some pictures of our holiday decorations. Traditional or original, subdued or positively griswaldian, if you or your neighbors have built a festive and photogenic holiday display, I wanna see some pics of it in the comments. Continue reading Avocado Holiday Lightstravaganza!
Hi all, and welcome back to another in a very occasional series about native wildlife wandering around this bush in my front yard. Earlier this week, a small pack of coyotes briefly loitered around the bush before resuming their patrol … Continue reading Under This Bush
Hi all, welcome back! In part two, I built the lantern’s LED light source. Now that it’s finished, I’m ready to build and program the microcontroller device that manages it. This article is going to be pretty theory-heavy, concentrating more … Continue reading Let’s Build An LED Lantern! Part 3: Controlling It Part 1: Too Many Colons
Hi all. In part one, I laid out my idea for the lantern’s basic design; what I want it to do, and what I plan to build it out of. Today, I’m going to begin putting the thing together, starting … Continue reading Let’s Build An LED Lantern! Part 2: Assembling The Light Source
Hi all. A sudden, and rather unwelcome spare time surplus has left me bored out of my head lately, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to finally knock out an electronics project I’d been tinkering with for a while, … Continue reading Let’s Build An LED Lantern! Part 1: Planning The Thing
Hi all, and welcome to another in an occasional series featuring videos of urban wildlife stalking each other by this bush in my yard. It’s been a long time since I rapped at ya. So I got a lot of … Continue reading Under This Bush
Hey there, sports fans! Guess what? The Avocado now has its very own Folding@Home team. The TL;DR version for folks already in the know: Our team code is 249704. Folding@Home is a “…distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, including … Continue reading The Avocado Folding@Home Team
Hi all, and welcome to another in an occasional series featuring videos of urban wildlife beating the crap out of each other past a bush in my front yard. I’ve seen cottontail rabbits go full-Watership Down several times before, and … Continue reading Under This Bush
Hi all, and welcome to another in an occasional series featuring videos of urban wildlife wandering past a bush in my front yard. Tonight, we witness a hungry fox looking for an early morning snack, and a rabbit wisely choosing … Continue reading Under This Bush
Hi all, and welcome to another in an occasional series featuring videos of urban wildlife wandering past a bush in my front yard. Today, I present a day in the life of a mountain cottontail rabbit in mid-winter. Filmed from … Continue reading Under This Bush
Hi all, and welcome to the first in an occasional series featuring videos of urban wildlife wandering past a bush in my front yard. Today, we see two or maybe three red foxes on the prowl just before dawn. One … Continue reading Under This Bush
Hi, everybody, and welcome to the first in what I hope is a regular series on electronics theory, experimentation, demonstration, repair and project construction from a hobbyist’s perspective. I hope to occasionally explore topics in physics, chemistry, and computer science … Continue reading My Hideous Workbench: Smart Garage Door Opener Part 1
