Drill and drill bits

Pinhole Panoramic Camera

Pinhole Panoramic Camera

I bought a new scanner recently, and soon found myself spelunking through drawers of old photos from my many misspent years in photography. Some of the most interesting shots were the pinhole camera experiments I had done as a teenager. With ghostly outlines from multi-minute exposures, and shapes warped into boomerangs by curved film, these […]

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Simple Van de Graaff Generator

Simple Van de Graaff Generator

When I was younger, I spent hours perusing Bill Beaty’s electrostatics web pages. At the time, I didn’t achieve any real successes trying to build his high-voltage contraptions, and so my interest waned. Years later, I saw someone online use a soda can as a collector for their Van de Graaff generator, and all my […]

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Better Nerf Gun

Better Nerf Gun

Like most geek-filled offices, at my workplace we have several Nerf guns and similar toy weapons floating about. Not impressed with the performance of my colleague Lester’s Nerf Maverick, a mainstay of Nerf’s suction-cup-dart-firing “N-Strike” series, I decided to build a better Nerf gun myself. Here’s the result: a simple weapon, single shot only, but […]

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