As part of the overal shop tidying efforts, I desperately needed to improve materials storage. I’ve acquired a wide variety of raw stock, most of it aluminum, and a bunch of plastics. This was mostly in several piles:

For a couple of years now I’ve been wanting to move to Los Angeles (I currently live in the San Francisco Bay Area). I’d like to make the move some time in the summer, so I’ve started looking now.

In the ongoing effort to enhance Podtique for mere mortals, I'm building a web server within the device to aid in configuration. I've chosen node.js (really, locomotive) for this. But the main code is written in C++, and I needed a way for the node.js code to communicate with the C++ process.

Last year I powered my camp entirely from the sun (with the exception of our ridiculous lighting on Pipe Dream). I built a solar power station that stored electricity generated from solar panels in two large gel-cell batteries, and provided 2 kW of pure sine wave power. It powered our camp’s Wi-Fi and lighting, as well as our toaster.

One of my favorite things in the world is The Thrilling Adventure Hour, a stage production in the style of old-time radio, performed live on stage, and recorded as a podcast. This got me thinking about what it was like before television, how people gathered around their radios to listen to radio plays. What if you could listen to The Thrilling Adventure Hour on an old radio?