Photos from 95,000 feet
In June, some members of Texas A&M’s AggieSat team went to the Student Hands-On Training I workshop in Boulder. There, we built “balloonsats” containing cameras with timing circuits. Some of these photos were taken from these boxes attached to a weather balloon that went to 95,000 feet. All of the boxes except Texas A&M’s “A-Team” box were cubic. The A-Team’s unique hexagonal design and the M-Team’s stunning bird’s-eye photos of it earned Texas A&M the design award at the event Link.
Moonshiners set up near creeks and rivers to assure a ready supply of water. All whiskey came from sour mash, but recipes varied. Commonly, the moonshiner mixed corn meal and hot water in separate “mash barrels,” later adding large scoops of sugar as well as yeast. After two days, the fermenting mixture began to bubble furiously and continued to do so for several days. When the mash quit “working,” it had the “kick of a mule colt” and was ready to be transferred to the still. [
This is insane, these folks needs to grab MAKE. On a recent Sunday morning when Lew Tucker’s Dell desktop computer was overrun by spyware and adware – stealth software that delivers intrusive advertising messages and even gathers data from the user’s machine – he did not simply get rid of the offending programs. He threw out the whole computer. 
It’s goofy, but I like to make these when I cook dinner. ROSE: Fold all 4 corners of open napkin to center. Fold new corners to center. Turn napkin over and fold all 4 corners to center. Holding center firmly, reach under each corner and pull up flaps to form petals. Reach between petals and pull flaps from underneath. 
Huh, I didn’t know this was going on…As you might know, Linksys released the source code of the WRT54G firmware under GPL a while ago. Sveasoft (as well as other projects like WiFi-Box) took this code, added some features and patches and released an improved version of the firmware. This worked fine until one day, Sveasoft decided to close their firmware from public access and to charge 20$ from anyone who would want to download the code. So far so good, however since the GPL allows free redistribution of the obtained program (in this case firmware), one of their customers decided to put the firmware binaries on a P2P network, making them available for everyone. I don’t know who this person is, but I thank him for his kindness and in order to help people out, I decided to mirror those files on this website. 
You’ve probably seen how that modern circuit boards are all made with the new (or maybe I’m just old?) surface mount technology, or SMT. Well, what’s a guy supposed to do when he wants to salvage SMT components from such “modern” boards? The commercially available hot-air tools are quite expensive, in the hundreds of dollars, some even thousands. Hmm. I wonder if I could make one…why not? The following is a not-yet-complete story of one in the making.