My Kinect is a very cool toy, but it was not lost on me, as I was plugging it in, that I’d given the Microsoft hive-mind a pretty sophisticated set of eyes and ears straight into my living room. Sure, I suppose I could only plug it in when I’m using it, but I’m kind […]
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My aunt gave me a knot-tying set this Christmas (2010). I constantly played with it and within 2 days, the rope was badly frayed. That shows how quickly rope frays and how much you need our technique. Frayed rope is difficult to use, but it’s quick and easy to repair the damaged ends so you […]
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We started renting our house a couple of months before our son was born. My friend Humberto had painted a beautiful Sendak-esque tree on the walls of his son Horatio’s room. I wanted to have something similar but didn’t want to repaint when the landlady retires and comes back to California and we have to […]
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I’ll show you how to create a charging station that fits right in with your other plants.
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Modern commercial igniters can send a rocket soaring with just a touch of current. When inserted properly they’re very reliable. Unfortunately, they are fragile, and folks new to the hobby sometimes ruin them by inserting them improperly. Packs of spares are expensive, and not all outlets carry them. There’s a cheap alternative: hand-wound Nichrome igniters. […]
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This tutorial shows how to take apart a spent zinc-carbon dry cell of the common household type. Besides making for an interesting object lesson in electrochemistry, taking apart a spent D-cell, for instance, allows you to salvage many materials which can be of use to amateur chemists–materials which would otherwise probably end up in a […]
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