Galleries, Menageries, and Obituaries
You’ll have to forgive the darker brain space I’m in today.Fresh off a week vacation “Babymoon” in Blue Mountain, Ontario, I’ve had a busy brain since 4am today and finally gave up and started my Sunday around 5:30.Saying goodbye to my last parent last October, and gearing up to have my first child at 50…
Low Cost High Tech
A few years ago, I saw a post by a fellow Youtuber https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUdro-6u2Zg talking about Laser-Diode Self-Mixing Interferometry and desperately wanted to experiment with the concept.I work at a university and besides the idea being ridiculously geeky cool all by itself, I know of a few students that wanted to do vibration measurements, and one…
Not seeing the Odes & Joys for the Individual Notes
When I first started dating my Choir Nerd / Singer / Music Student wife 10-ish years ago, I thought that would be a perfect push to finally REALLY start learning to play an instrument.* The first truth in this post is that the only person capable of steering your life is you. Thinking anyone else…
Make it work; Then make it better
Trying to be perfect is a fool’s errand.Perfect is an ever-moving target that actively runs away from you hand-in-hand with other people’s opinion of what constitutes perfect.If you attempt to make your first draft perfect, you will find yourself zooming in to the fractal edges of possibilities, forced to do far lower quality work as…
Seeing the Real World through Fake Eyes, Part 1
I was born with imperfect eyes. MYOPIA, aka “Nearsightedness” shifted my eye’s focal range closer than normal. ADVANTAGE:-That let me bring objects closer to my face, giving a little extra magnification without needing a magnifying device like reading glasses.DISADVANTAGE:-That prevented me from focusing well on things farther than a nearby wall, requiring glasses for most…
Budget-Friendly Acoustic Imager
I recently saw an ad for the Fluke II910 Acoustic Imager, marketed largely as a fast way to pinpoint air leaks. Air leaks and many other phenomenon are either very quiet and hard to detect with human ears, or in the ultrasonic frequency ranges that we can’t detect at all even when the amplitude is…
Hoarding is actually very wasteful for the human species.
There’s a very understandable drive with all animals to hoard things. Often, this is resources directly linked to survival of the species…food….water….mates…etc. But as a human, and a very lucky human at that, my typical hoarding behaviours come in the form of ideas. I have an idea. Maybe it will be amazing and make me…
Change happens naturally; Resisting change wastes energy; Direct your energy into guiding the change
For almost 5 years, I have worked in a bubble.The Mechatronics lab wasn’t well known, access was largely controlled by me being there or not, and this gave me a lot of control over how much time and attention I could distribute among people and projects and personal interests. The new EDC building is now…
The Two-Year-Long First Blog Post
Given the theme of “Not Perfect, But It Works”, here is my first official post. The major intent from this day forward will be to simply get my random ideas out into the world, develop the ideas as time allows, and possibly kick your imagination into high gear with my own take on a variety…
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MECHATRONICS dOt LIFE 