Off the grid on Burgundy: things you'd wish you learned before AI took over.
Reading the sky, and what copper can do for you
Tonight: finding the planets by eye, growing a blue crystal over months, and the limits of a fanless PC.
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How to find the planets in October's sky by eye
Jupiter, Mars and Saturn at dawn, a moon that briefly covers Jupiter on the 6th, and Venus fading from the evening by month's end.
Growing a copper sulfate crystal takes months and a steady temperature
Saturation, a suspended seed and slow, patient conditions turn a common garden fungicide into a deep blue crystal.
What passive cooling with copper pipe and aluminum can and can't do
A fanless PC build shows how far conduction and rising warm air reach before one small fan has to finish the job.
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A working laptop built around a single 8-bit chip
It plays video, sound and a game on so little power it runs overnight without being measured.
The cookbook that still works is the one someone wrecked
On paper, annotated and worn to pieces, it keeps working when the internet is gone.
This 1960s oscilloscope came with its own spool of repair solder
Seventy pounds of tubes and glass, built to be opened up and fixed by hand in the field.
Tools Built to Be Repaired, Ruined, and Run on Almost Nothing
A 70-pound oscilloscope that carries its own solder, a cookbook meant to fall apart, and a laptop built on a single 8-bit chip.
Sewing a patch onto a hat by hand
A rusty needleworker shows that basic mending takes competence, not expertise.
A homemade plotter draws relief maps of the Moon
Elevation data becomes ink lines, the same trick behind any relief map you'd draw by hand.
Turn a soda can into a solder stencil with a clean cut
A rotating blade opens the thin can without kinking it, leaving flat aluminium a laser can cut to shape.
A common Wi-Fi chip can double as a radio receiver
An undocumented mode in the ESP32 exposes the raw signal stream, so salvaged boards can pick up radio.
How Delhi stopped losing half its power to theft and waste
Insulated cables, simpler billing and trained crews turned a failing grid around, with lessons for rebuilding one.
From a megacity's grid to a patch on a hat
Five makers' notes tonight, from a city's power distribution to a hand-sewn patch, and what each leaves you able to rebuild.
Think of a radio as a chain of simple blocks
Antenna, demodulator, speaker: a patch-cable tool lays out the stages you need to picture before building or fixing a receiver.
Why drying things in a vacuum still needs heat
Low pressure alone won't pull moisture from inside a material, and in a vacuum only radiation can carry the heat that does.
Sending a radio signal with no electricity at all
A maker's water-and-air transmitter strips radio down to its bare principles: modulation, a slotted disk, and a horn to listen.
Building a Radio When the Grid Is Gone
Three workshop notes on seeing a machine as parts simple enough to make by hand.