Sunday, December 29th, 2013
I discovered this show by reading one of Travis Talyor’s non-fiction books, A New American Space Plan. While this post is about the TV show, pick up this book as well. It’s a well laid out case of why American should be serious about getting into space again and how to do it.
Also take the time to watch the show, Rocket City Rednecks, either by streaming or on optical disk. This show is about five self-identified Rednecks from Huntsville, AL, two of which are actual rocket scientists from NASA who actually build working gear. Really cool gear that works. OK, it works most of the time, but even when they fail, they learn from their mistakes so then can do it better the next time. That is really one of the important lessons. It’s OK to fail, as long as you learn from it. Most of the gear is built in Travis’ father’s garage. Charles Travis is a retired NASA machinist who worked on the Apollo program, and one of the five Rednecks who star in the show.
I’ve watched about a third of the first season so far, and they have built some really nifty gear so far. These include a still in order to build a moonshine fueled rocket, the actual rocket, a balloon based observation platform, a working submarine, a radio telescope array using 18″ satellite dishes, under vehicle armor capable of withstanding an IED blast (they drove the pickup truck away afterwards), and a working “Iron Man” suit, that had armor capable of stopping 9mm handgun rounds, lifting over 100 pounds with a single arm and fired rockets!
Just to add to the overall coolness of this, most of their projects are done over a single weekend with a budget of about $1000. Keep in mind that three of these Rednecks are current or former NASA employees. The two active ones have eight advanced degrees in science between them (Travis has five post-graduate degrees. For those of you who know me, yes, that is one more than Amy currently has). Rog (Rednect #4) doesn’t have any advanced degrees, but he does have a genius level IQ, and Michael (Travis’ nephew) is mechanically inclined and studying to be a machinist. Still, if you know basic work working, basic welding, how to solder two wires together, and some basic programming, you and your friends could try some of this stuff.
Which is kinda the whole idea of the show. To get kids off the XBox and out there building go carts, rockets, radio sets and other cool gear.
This is the kind of show my dad would have loved. He was 22 year veteran of the Army Corps of Engineers, and would have been out teaching kids how to to build the things the Rednecks are building.
Originally published at Urbin Technology
Tags: Gear, Redneck, Science, Technology, TV
Posted in Space Tech, Technology | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010
I have been looking at iPad apps for usability issues for the past few weeks. Here is a quick list of the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The good: IMDB, Scifi Wire, Adobe Touch
The bad: The buggy WordPress app
The Ugly: AP News
About the iPad itself, very slick, very cool/fun to use. On the down side, no SD slot, no USB, and Apple’s “walled garden.”
Originally posted at Urbin Technology
Tags: Apple, gadget, Gear, iPad, Technology
Posted in Gear, Technology | No Comments »
Thursday, April 29th, 2010
HP has been on a buying spree. They bought 3Com, and now they have just purchased a former 3Com company, Palm Corp. for $1.2 billion.
The article I linked talks about what HP could do with Palm’s webOS for mobile devices, including using it in netbooks and tablet devices.
What it doesn’t talk about is Palm’s patent portfolio, which could be worth the price of the sale alone.
Originally posted at Urbin Technology
Tags: gadget, Gear, Palm, Technology
Posted in Gear, SmartPhones & PDAs, Technology | No Comments »
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
An actual Film Camera spotted in the wild! The person with the camera was taking a photography class, and some of her assignments required an actual film camera to be used.
Originally posted at Slices of Life
Tags: camera, Gear, Photography
Posted in Gear, Photography | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
I found this interesting post on cleaning your coffee grinder.
If you aren’t drinking freshly ground coffee, you should be.
Ok, here is the tip from weeklyroast.com’s coffee blog, uncooked white rice.
A really great way to clean out your grinder is to use uncooked, white rice. If you use a blade grinder (and we highly recommend upgrading to a burr grinder!), fill it with white rice up to the blades. If you use a burr grinder, put about 2-3 teaspoons worth of white rice and set the burr grinder to a fine grind (espresso) setting and start grinding.
After you’ve finished grinding, you’ll notice immediately that large clumps of previously ground coffee are now clinging to the powdered, ground white rice and after dumping the grounds out, you should see spots you could never clean before coffee-ground free. The inside of the grinder should also be a lot cleaner than before as most of the old, rancid coffee oils also attached themselves to the white rice (they’re attracted to the starch in the rice – that’s why this technique works so well).
Repeat this process until the ground rice no longer has any black particles in it.
I was cleaning out my grinder fairly regularly, but this clearly did pick up some coffee particles that my regular cleaning didn’t get.
Tags: Coffee, gadget, Gear
Posted in Coffee, Gear | 3 Comments »