In early 2018, I got myself a Brompton with the primary intention of taking it with me when I traveled. To support that goal, one of the first additions I wanted to make was putting together a small tool kit that could easily travel along with the bike, but also have everything I might need to make adjustments, tighten loose bits, or repair a flat tire while away from home. ...

A while back, I ran across a two old rotary telephones from my childhood and, with a couple of analog telephone adapter boxes and an Asterisk Docker container, I set them up as a sort of retro intercom in the house. WirelessCouch Bell, if you will. Fast forward a couple of years to June of 2024, and Los Alamos STEAMlab and Samizdat Bookstore both thought it would be fun to have old phones in their spaces that they could set up for kids and customers to use to listen to prerecorded stories or other messages. Having gained some experience with Asterisk, I figured I could help create some self-contained Dial-a-Story boxes for them. ...

It’s October, and that means one thing: as with previous years, it’s time to build an over-the-top entry for Los Alamos Arts Council’s scarecrow contest! And, as with past entries, this one’s not really going to be a scarecrow either. This year’s theme is “Into the Woods”, so I wanted to build something big that would evoke “the woods”, but would also be interesting to design and easy to store. After considering a few ideas, I decided to do an up-scaled version of those lasercut balsawood models you can get in museum gift shops. Only instead of a little dinosaur skeleton, I was going to make two six-foot tall trees. ...

In downtown Lincoln, Nebraska, on 13th Street just south of O Street, there’s an awesome historic building that stands out from the others near it. The name carved into the stone near the top of its from simply identifies it as the “Telephone Building”, but it’s been the home of lots of non-telephone-related businesses during the time I’ve known about it. Its Wikipedia page states that it was built in 1894 for the Nebraska Telephone Company, which explains its name. ...

Los Alamos Arts Council does a yearly scarecrow contest, where businesses and individuals build scarecrows to decorate the lamp posts along Central Avenue in downtown Los Alamos. This year’s theme was “Movie Monsters”, and Lis thought it would be fun to do an entry for STEAM Lab. But her idea was relatively simple, so I had to jump in and make it much more complex. Construction We had an old trash can laying around, and Lis initially thought about making it into a Dalek from the Dr. Who series. Since the trash can already provides half the shape, the original idea was just to build a simple dome head for the top and call it done. But as I started to plan it out in my mind, I realized I had the time and supplies to take it further. ...