Working on improving the lighting for Jacki’s Slide Lamp. I got some PCBs a while back from here. They are made to run LED arrays. If you don’t want to run a ton of LEDs you can cut the board in half and use jumpers to fill empty holes. At least that’s what I did. We’ll see how it works in the long term.

Here is a board I did with half bright white and half soft white….

Not asleep yet? More after the jump….
Read the rest of this entry »

I finally created a Twitter account. Maybe I’ll be better about using that than this blog.? Blog posts just always seem to take me a long time.

In other new vacation was good and stuff. Check out the flickrs if you care for pictures. I think we took about 60gig worth of digital pics. So we’ll probably be putting up pictures for a while :)

I made a solar system for the camper. I started this really not knowing what I was doing. I got it all done and still probably don’t know much :) It’s kinda ugly, but works great. Ran the first big test yesterday and came no where near killing the battery. We ran stuff on it all day and the battery only dropped to 12.5 volts (dead is 10.5). Stuff we ran all day: stereo, mp3 player, RF transmitter, and LED christmas lights. For part of the day it was charging my phone and then I put on a table lamp with a CFL in it. I’ll post the full test at the bottom of the post. The battery is an Optima D34 deep cycle battery. That damn thing cost as much as the rest of the system put together, but it looks like it was worth it. The only thing Amongst the things that we wont be able to run are the electric space heaters, toaster oven and electric skillet. They just draw too much juice. Most of them use from 1000 to 1500 watts and I don’t have an inverter large enough to handle it. Anyway on the the pictures….

This is the battery, charge controller, inverter, and LED lights from before I installed it in the camper.

If your still interested more after the jump….
Read the rest of this entry »

Jacki and I were outside playing with some cameras and I was all like OMG my hops are coming up. Ok so maybe it wasn’t quite that valley girl, but it was close. Anyway here they are….

That is the big Fuggles plant that I have.

Jacki has been doing a ton of film developing in the last couple days so keep on eye on her blog and flickr for lots of fun pictures.
Read the rest of this entry »

I picked up this totally awesome Civil Defense Shelter V-777-1Shelter Radiation Detection Kit at an antique mall while I was home over the holidays. Check it out!

I don’t think this stuff has ever been use. The batteries even still had tape over them. The box showed as being packed in 1971, but the books are all from the early to mid 60′s.

Drop below the fold for more pictures and PDFs of the books. :)
Read the rest of this entry »

Some pictures taken either of me wearing my Dr. Horrible goggles that Jacki got me for Christmas or taken with the Nikon through the goggles so that everyone can know what evil sees. :)

More pictures and stuff to come from the holiday family trip.

So I finally have my new laptop working right. Not thinking that I’ll be buying a Toshiba again anytime soon or ever. This thing would lock up at reboot almost every time and I’d have to us the restore disk to get it going again. After trying everything else I could think of I finally formatted the drive and reinstalled everything. That just by itself took about 11 hours. It does seem to be working better now. At least the crashes are unpredictable. The one thing I do like about Vista is the stupid little widget thing. I keep it on the right side of the desktop just for fun….

Ellie loves this laptop! This laptop belongs to a guy I work with. I was trying to fix it for him to no avail. Ellie loves it tho. There is a bit of a dead spot on the audio that I clipped out myself swearing. :)

We made it! Camp is set up for the most part. We are at Kettle Moraine State Forest – North Unit. We are thinking about staying here for the whole two weeks. We’ll see how it goes.

Toby and Bela seem to like it ok :)

A big thanks to Carly for taking care of Ellie while we are gone. We love you!

View from the campsite….

More pictures and maybe some video if I can get it uploaded before I run out of interest. All under the fold….
Read the rest of this entry »

Got the new video card up and running and man is this thing great. Shouldn’t have any problem playing Fallout 3 on this :) Now if it would just come out already. I ended up putting in an EVGA GeForce 260 GTX. I just managed to squeeze this monster into the case. Check it out…

Just fit under the RAM chips…

SWEET! Now just need mai game!