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What If I Had Bought Bitcoins Instead of Backing Kickstarters?

Bitcoin is red hot right now. Like everyone, I’m full of silly regret for not having put all my savings into it when it was super new and dirt cheap — even a small investment at the start would be worth a fortune now. Instead, I waited a few years and bought 0.1 bitcoin for $100 when its price was at a then-peak of $1000. It promptly plummeted.

Then, years later, it skyrocketed.

With Bitcoin’s price flirting with $20,000 over the past month, I got curious to what could have been in various scenarios, mostly one where, instead of putting money into another platform that launched around the same time, Kickstarter, I had put the same amount of money into buying Bitcoins. Read More

One-Minute Build: Weber Spirit E-210 Grill

My wife’s been asking for a propane grill for a long time, specifically the Weber Spirit E-210, so I surprised her with one for mother’s day. She loved it! Here’s the assembly, which took about two hours, condensed into a one-minute timelapse video.

The instructions are straightforward and easy to follow, although I chose to ignore their warning to not use a powered drill for connecting the nuts and bolts. If you do the same, make sure to stop it as soon as it starts to torque so as to not break anything. I used a Bosch 12V impact driver (which I absolutely love) but was very soft on the trigger — it’s deceptively powerful despite its tiny size and I’ve stripped plenty of screws with it.

Now that it’s built, all that’s left is to test it out.

Music: Nitro — “Noise Crush”

Garage Quarter Pipe: Building a Micro Skate Ramp

I’ve been skateboarding frequently over the past year, with a new park opening nearby that finally gives me access to a small halfpipe. I skated a lot as a young teenager, and built a fun launch ramp that was popular at our local playground, but at that point, all local communities were terrified of the liability a proper local skatepark might produce. The only one in the Bay Area that I knew of was the old Benicia skatepark, which was amazing to go to but overall really wasn’t all that great. Read More

Fixing a Broken Power Plug on the MicroDrone 2.0

The Microdrone 2.0 is a pretty sweet little quadcopter. Surprisingly stable and cautiously responsive for its small size, it’s also able to whip around outdoors in a bit of a breeze, high in the sky.

The unit I have, however, has an overly tight socket union for the powercord to the battery. So tight that a while ago, I accidentally yanked the wires out of the plug on the quadcopter.

I’ve had this on my desk with intentions to fix it for some time, and finally found a few spare minutes this weekend to do so. Read More

How to Shrink Cosmic Bodies into Virtual Scale Miniatures

Galactic structures a billion, billion miles wide look like squirts of food coloring into a bowl of water with these tilt-shift photos.

Typically used for architectural purposes, tilt-shift (or perception-control) lenses move the plane of focus from being parallel to the cameras’s sensor or film, and instead places it at an angle by physically tilting the lens itself. Read More

1974 Land Rover SIII Restoration Video

Fantastic documentation of a 1974 Land Rover Series III restoration. Anytime you’ve got a heavily used utility vehicle that’s pushing close to four decades in age, you’re likely going to have a fair amount of rehabilitation work on your hands to get it into a reliable and comfortable state. Firman Ni of Indonesia chronicles the complete teardown and rebuild, with some after-restoration mud fun. Makes me want to loosen some bolts.

Arduino Uno and Due Size Comparison (with Raspberry Pi and Fio, too)

Earlier this week, the much anticipated Arduino Due microcontroller was released. Improved in almost every regard, the prototyping community is thrilled with the possibilities that it creates.

The new boards are already shipping, and Jon Gottfried sent me some photos that compare its size with the ever-popular Arduino Uno.

“Just got my Arduino Due from @adafruit — pretty neat, much larger than the Uno,” he tweeted, following up  that it “Looks like the layout is similar enough to fit old shields.”

Gottfried, a Developer Evangelist at Twilio, has put together a few interesting Arduino projects of his own, including setting up a home automation system that let him control his AC remotely.

He also sent photos of the new board with the Raspberry Pi and diminutive Arduino Fio for further size comparison.

GoPro Hero3 and Hero2 Width Comparison

In addition to amazing specs, an improved lens, and cool new connectivity options like wifi control (that seem to actually be arriving this time), the GoPro Hero3 shaves 30% from the already svelte body of the Hero2. It actually makes the older Hero look like an outdated, clunky dinosaur.

Check out this side-by-side pic for a comparison. This camera just popped onto the top of my “must have” list.

Celebrate this Weekend’s Curiosity Mars Landing with a Peek At Mechanix Illustrated’s 1975 Profile of the Viking Mars Landers

One of my favorite magazines to skim through at vintage bookstores is Mechanix Illustrated — a now-defunct Popular Science/Mechanics-style periodical that oozes with charming nostalgia. On a recent store visit, a headline about the Mars Lander caught my eye, as I’ve recently been monitoring the upcoming Curiosity rover’s approach to Mars. I plunked down 50 cents and headed home to read the article.

The write-up is fascinating piece of 37 year old history. It shows our uncertainty about the unknown Martian world that we were preparing to land on for the first time. It also gave an overview of Vikings I and II, stationary research platforms that were highly advanced for their time, but a far cry from the mobility and power that the latest Mars rover, Curiosity, is taking to the red planet. Read More

Never Shop at Harbor Freight Without a Coupon – Links to their best deals

More Harbor Freight online coupons, to save you a ton of money on their weirdly low tool prices – sometimes concerningly low (remember, “you get what you pay for”).

Take advantage by printing the best ones before you drive to your nearest location, or have stuff shipped if you don’t live near one of HF’s many stores.

So what’s the story? Harbor Freight sends out at least two coupon mailings each month – their general monthly specials, and a batch of coupons for members on their coupon mailing list (which seems to expire if you don’t use it often enough). Often times the coupons’ discounts are significantly deep, so this is a good list to be on for those with a penchant for dirt-cheap tools.

I had missed one of the big Harbor Freight sales last weekend, but needed some project supplies (at their prices, the tools are useful for repurposing into unrelated projects – palm sanders make great vibration tools for helping settle concrete). I checked the HF site to see what general specials they’re running this month, but wasn’t blown away; after being on the mailing list for a while you start to get an idea of what the real prices you should pay for these tools.

Still hungry to save some money, I did a searched online a bit and found something interesting: pages and pages of  printable coupons – the member’s stuff, the “Inside Track” stuff, and more. Each grouping I found has its own batch of items, and there were a variety of useful deals for most of the things on my list.

I didn’t want to print out each page’s full list of coupons (taking about 6 pages of regular printer paper per group), so I copied the coupons I needed and pasted the image of them into a Word document. Six coupons, two pages, and I was ready to shop. I spent $69 and got two bags of tools and supplies; I’ve got 90 days to think about how much I need them and decide if a return is needed.

These sections seem to be used and updated monthly for their common specials — if you’re going tool shopping, check these before you leave and print out what you need.

Digital Savings http://www.harborfreight.com/digitalsavings.html
Extra Savings http://www.harborfreight.com/extra-savings.html 
Clearance http://www.harborfreight.com/clearance 

They almost always have a 20% off coupon, in case the specific item you need doesn’t have a coupon that month – and make sure to bring the free flashlight coupon too.

Now, to just get them to stop requiring a print out. It’s wasteful, and most companies these days let customers scan the image from their smartphone.