Category: General

Game of Thrones Has Ended

…but A Song of Fire & Ice has not. I’m actu­al­ly sev­er­al sea­sons behind on the show so I did­n’t even watch the finale last night. While I’m some­what avoid­ing spoil­ers, I’m not too con­cerned about it. Because it became very clear to fans of the books series from about sea­son 2 or 3 that… Con­tin­ue read­ing Game of Thrones Has Ended

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I.M. Pei

The glass pyra­mid at the Lou­vre, designed by I.M. Pei. Usu­al­ly referred to as the “con­tro­ver­sial” pyra­mid. I was in awe, if you can’t tell by this photo.

Four­teen years ago, when Angela and I vis­it­ed Paris, I took this pho­to inside the Lou­vre pyra­mid. I post­ed it to Flickr with the attached cap­tion. Pei passed away yes­ter­day at the age of 102 after hav­ing for­ev­er changed archi­tec­ture around the world.

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Miter Saw Fix

One of my ear­li­est “nice” tools was a com­pound miter saw. I bought a “new“1 Ridgid 10″ miter saw about 15 years ago. It’s been pret­ty handy over the years, but I noticed last year (on my fin­ish­ing stor­age rack project) that the fence was bowed. As the blade would cut through he piece, the… Con­tin­ue read­ing Miter Saw Fix

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Soccer Goals

Wyatt & I went to the Nashville SC match with Mem­phis 901 FC tonight. We attend­ed with his Cub Scout Pack and got to sit in one of the field lev­el suites. The game was rain delayed an hour and there was rain on-and-off dur­ing the game, but we stuck it out. Most­ly because, as… Con­tin­ue read­ing Soc­cer Goals

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Electro-Harmonix Small Stone Mods

This project has been “in the works” for a while. I’ve had the ped­al work­ing for some­time but final­ly got around mak­ing the mod­i­fi­ca­tions to make it a mod­ern ped­al. Let’s start with a bit of back­sto­ry: Last sum­mer, my wife and I were help­ing to clean out my late father-in-laws tool shed. He had a… Con­tin­ue read­ing Elec­tro-Har­monix Small Stone Mods

The first trail­er for Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Sky­walk­er came out today. There’s so much to unpack and enjoy about it, but one thing that caught my eye from the trail­er & the Star Wars Insta­gram post about it was Kilo Ren’s helmet:

For the moment, CNN’s head­line is about grad stu­dent Katie Bouman who helped accom­plish some­thing extra­or­di­nary because she’s real­ly bril­liant. The world’s pret­ty messed up, but for its great to see smart peo­ple get famous for awe­some things.

Thank this grad student for first black hole image

[Adden­dum: Dr. Bouman gave a TedX Talk a cou­ple of years ago on how a com­put­er sci­en­tist such as her­self end­ed up work­ing on a globe-span­ning astro­physics project and how the her imag­ing algo­rithm would even­tu­al­ly help make the image possible.]

LED Wiring

This is a basic ele­ment of many elec­tron­ics projects: how to wire up an LED with a cur­rent lim­it­ing resis­tor. Most effects have a 5 mm LED and many wiring dia­grams show a 4k7Ω resis­tor. There’s a fair­ly wide range of val­ues you can use, depend­ing on how bright you want the LED (and what… Con­tin­ue read­ing LED Wiring

Amp Channel Footswitch

Most amps have the abil­i­ty to use an exter­nal footswitch to change between a clean and dis­tor­tion chan­nel. Of course, some have more sophis­ti­cat­ed options than this, but the chan­nel switch is a pret­ty com­mon fea­ture. My old­er broth­er recent­ly got an awe­­some-look­ing, orange Fend­er Duo-Son­ic and a small Fend­er prac­tice amp to play it… Con­tin­ue read­ing Amp Chan­nel Footswitch