…even if it sometimes means getting up at 2:30AM to sling dough and effect impromptu rearrangements of the fridge:
‘Nuff said.
In 1947, the Heathkit company – a formerly-bankrupt aircraft manufacturer – introduced its first electronic kit. The $39.50 oscilloscope became a best seller, a dozen years after the company’s new owners bought Heath for a whopping $300. Back then, hobbyists built ham radios, black-and-white TVs and hi-fi sets from vacuum tubes, soldering fiberglass circuit boards together with glowing guns from Radio Shack, hunched over basement workbenches, surrounded by a haze of blue-gray flux smoke. It was long before the days of microscopic surface-mount components, squirted from machines at tens of thousands of parts per hour.
Not long ago, I wrote here about the atrophy of amateur radio, and inquired (unsurprisingly, unsuccessfully) if there was any hope for that pastime. Most things ham trigger a lot of nostalgia in me – recollections of dad-chauffeured car trips to the city for radio classes with Jason; of my “Elmer”, Ed, N2EH (now a silent key); of good times spent with the other hams at the RIT Radio Club, who were among the best of my college friends; and of countless growing-up hours spent tinkering, building things, and un-building things. For a long time, I thought this spirit of geek tinkering was similarly waning, but recently I’ve had a few reasons to change my tune…
First off, the pieces and parts. In the golden age, resistors, capacitors, coils, tubes and transistors were the parts du jour – and you could do some pretty cool things with them. The 70s and 80s brought integrated circuits – and my generation of tinkerers dove head-first into logic gates, op-amps, newly-commodified microprocessors and LED displays. But as the demands of the tech-buying public called for more miniaturization and richer feature sets, things got more difficult. Ball grid array packages – unsolderable by all but the most-dedicated and well-funded (or craziest?) hobbyists – ushered in an age of inaccessible parts. But now, thanks to projects like Arduino, and companies like Bug Labs and Gumstix, pluggable modules and microcontrollers are becoming basic building blocks in themselves.
But more than just the evolution of what’s available to build with, there has been a renaissance in the builders, too. People like Diana Eng and Jeri Ellsworth, and groups like the recently-formed Interlok Rochester – or, hell, the entire readership of Make Magazine – remind me that the spirit of tinkering is alive and well. Maybe hobbyists aren’t exactly making the next iPhone – though they’re certainly trying and in some cases, succeeding! When you’re faced with the immense complexity that’s possible via today’s gadgets, it’s easy to get discouraged about the potential for electronics as a hobby. But it’s also easy to be hopeful and inspired when you look at what these folks are doing. To the tinkerers: keep up the good work! And to those who’ll bring us the next generation of electronic building blocks, I can’t wait to see what you’ve got in store…
I have never flown a plane. On instruments. With a failed artificial horizon. But Bill Whittle has, and in the midst of his stellar essay on civilization, he has managed to write about doing so in what amounts to the single most-inspiring piece of literature I have ever read.
After too-long an absence, The Web of Trust is back online. Go. Read. It.
While I may not have ever had a life-and-death experience like the one Bill describes in his essay, I have encountered plenty of scarily-stressful times, many involving others’ life-and-death experiences. Times when I could feel those “tearing claws of panic” working their way into my shoes, threatening to derail whatever endeavor I was pursuing unless I took control. In each of those times, recalling The Web of Trust has helped give me the resolve to press forward. The words of Bill’s flight instructor – “Kick Its Ass.” – echo in my ears, simultaneously providing focus and motivation. There is no ambiguity, no subtlety of strategy, simply an imperative: You know what to do, you have the capacity to do it, so Do It. Now.
Laundry time! (image source: sxc.hu)
Not too long ago, I saw a television commercial that touted the energy (and, hence, money) saving abilities of some-brand-or-another’s high efficiency washers and dryers. I wondered… Could dropping upwards of a grand and a half on high-efficiency washers and dryers really save enough coin to make up for the cost?
I toyed with the idea of calculating the cost of running a load through our good ‘ol Kenmore washer and dryer, but never really ran with the idea until this week, when my shiny new Kill-a-Watt energy meter arrived. With Kelly at work for the day, I shut off the furnace, emptied my bladder and set up my newly-unboxed gizmo to measure how much electricity the washer was pulling out of the wall. I figured I’d run a worst-case test – a bleach load, warm wash, with towels, and a double rinse. The results?
- Electricity – Washer: 0.32KWh ($0.018)
- Electricity – Dryer: 0.49KWh ($0.056)
- Gas – Total: About 0.3ccf, or 0.30555 Therms ($0.30)
- Water – Total: 60.3 gallons ($0.15)
- Detergent – 3.2 ounces ($0.32)
- Bleach – 4.2 ounces ($0.115)
- 1 Dryer Sheet ($0.05)
The grand total? 73.94ยข. Worst case. A smaller load, with colored clothes (hence no bleach), and no towels? I’m guessing less.
So even if that magical high-efficiency washer and dryer could clean our clothes with no energy or water at all, it would still take almost 1,900 loads of laundry to pay for them. If we assume that they cut our usage in half (still, a pretty tall order) then doing about 4 loads of laundry a week (which we do), it would still take over 18 years for them to pay for themselves.
Those old ceramic-white Kenmores are looking better and better…
Just testing…
As of about 90 seconds ago, Wordpress.org and Automattic have announced their official Wordpress app for Android!! Yay!!!
Check it out over at http://android.wordpress.org/ … and watch here for more info soon.
If you want a cookies that makes you want to close your eyes, chew slowly and say “mmmmmmmmmm” for a really long time, go to Levain Bakery in Manhattan, and order one of their Chocolate Chip Walnut cookies. Unless you’re this [very disturbing] guy, one will be enough.
If you don’t happen to live in New York City, or would perhaps like to make such a cookie at home, then take a gander at My Brother’s Interpretation of these taste-bud-gasmic cookies. And do rate it highly, won’t you?
And, if reading his instructions and making them for yourself just isn’t enough, you can watch him prepare them – in 3 different shirts – over at Veoh.
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