Curing Boredom with Solenoids

...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcgFfY4fVqU Sixteen year old Brandon Switzer came up with a way of dealing with boredom: build a player piano. The project uses a humble Arduino and a whole lot of solenoids. It took six months to finish. I’ve come to see the value in taking on a project that’s out of your comfort zone and this is a great example of learning while making....

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Cat Litter Compost, Installment #3

...when it meets moisture, expands and crumbles into sawdust. This dust just builds up in a regular box, but in these perforated boxes the dust falls through to the bottom bin. You help it along by giving the box a shake when you’re scooping. This construction isolates the pee-soaked dust from the poo–and the clean, intact pine pellets. Once you scoop the poo out you’re left with clean, whole pellets. The following photos will probably explain this...

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Make a Pepsi Can Stove

...s a number of solutions. Our favorite is the Pepsi can stove which you can build using these incredibly detailed instructions. [Editor’s note 7/27/08: looks like the author of that Pepsi can stove site failed to renew the url and, sadly, the link no longer works. We’ll try to find an alternative.] [Editor note 10/5/11: The instructions are back! In PDF form.] The stove uses denatured alcohol solvent, sometimes called shellac thinner which is avail...

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A viewing suggestion from the media arm of Root Simple

...outside world, to the electric light burning beside me. Bless the BBC for making Tudor Monastery Farm (a title which I believe would not fly on American television). This is a quiet series showing three historians/archeologists at play in the Weald & Downland Open Air History Museum, trying out some of the skills they’d need to be tenant farmers to the local monastery. It has some of the structure of a reality show, but it seems that no one reall...

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2013 in Review Part I

...it should rain. It didn’t. The year was the driest on record: 3.6 inches, making it a desert not the Mediterranean climate it should be. It seems to be a dry winter again this year and I’m worried. March A texting music video producer totaled our car and thus began a six month experiment in living without a car in Los Angeles. That experiment ended in September when we bought a car. Living in LA without a car was easier than I thought it would be...

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