I bought a cheap GPS on EBay. I got a Palm Vx with a Magellan GPS Companion attachment for ten dollars. By PDA standards the Palm Vx is completely obsolete, but it works fine as a GPS data logger.

I've recently come across two interesting projects and web sites: openaerialmap.org and openstreetmap.org. These two projects are efforts to collect and share freely-available map information.

I received a Baldor metal grinder with 10-inch wheels, with a motor wired for three-phase industrial power. Three-phase power is not provided in U.S. residential homes, so I needed to power it from normal single-phase power. My solution was to build a balanced static phase converter, requiring only a few relatively inexpensive capacitors. (Much less expensive than that nuclear reactor I was considering.)

When I fixed up an old drill press, I found that the switch plate for the on/off switch was fairly worn. The original paint and lettering was worn away, so that the start/stop wording was almost unreadable. Even though I am clever enough to figure out that the big red button means "stop", it needed a clearly readable switch plate label.

I received a Baldor metal grinder with 10-inch wheels, on its own pedestal floor stand, discarded from a school metal shop program. Several owners before me did not know what to do with it, mainly because the motor is wired for three-phase industrial power which is not found in U.S. residential homes. My job was to fix it up and get it working.

There were two major tasks to the restoration: cleaning/repainting, and making the three-phase motor work.

My new grinder needed some task lighting for the grinding wheels. I decided to build a dedicated lamp for each side, controlled by the grinder power switch. This worked in perfectly with my latest obsession, I mean interest, which is LED lighting.

Any trained machinist will tell you that a drill press with a cheap jig is no substitute for a proper lathe. I'm not a trained machinist, so now that I've said that, let's get on to accomplishing something interesting.

In my quest for high-efficiency lighting, I came across a new idea for small household lights.

In our bathroom, there are two sconce lights (one on each side of the mirror) in addition to the main lights over the top of the mirror. The side sconce lights are not really necessary for adequate lighting, but they look nice and add some visual charm to the mirror. Therefore I saw them as good candidates for lower-energy substitutes.

One of my contributions to Project Gutenberg was proofreeading and formatting of the Radio Amateur's Handbook by Frederick Collins, 1922. You can read the entire book here, including all illustrations.

Older books like this are great for learning from. Since everything about radio was new to everyone, the book does not assume that you have a lot of knowledge to start with, and explains everything starting with the basics.

Experienced people tell me that you should always get the best tools you can buy, because there is no substitute for the proper tool for a job. Don't be fooled into buying cheap tools, because you will be disappointed when the tool doesn't provide precision results or it breaks down on you.

I agree that in home improvement, woodworking, metal working, and other pursuits, it is always important to have the proper tool for the job. But what is the proper tool for the job, and how much should you spend on it?

Compact fluorescent light bulbs, or CFLs, have been generally available and affordable for consumers for quite a few years now. I've been using them for about ten years, and they have steadily improved during that time. Needless to say, they aren't perfect, but there are many ways to use them successfully.

It is not simple to make a new kind of light bulb which can replace the simple incandescent bulb in all situations and still provide significant energy savings. Some tradeoffs are necessary.

I have an old laser printer which does not have a decent standby power-saving mode.  I built a computer-controlled power switch for it, so the computer turns on the printer when there is a print job, then turns it off again later.

JPEG images are a good data format for photographs because they contain data that is compressed in a manner optimized for the human eye. However, it is a "lossy" compression, meaning that if they are unencoded and re-encoded several times, the image will lose quality.

Sometimes all I want to do is crop a picture, to chop off uninteresting areas of the photo. Several tools can do this by working on the native JPEG data, meaning there is no loss of information from re-encoding the image.

I recently borrowed this book from a friend, and found it very useful. I was already a fairly fast reader, but I had never investigated "speed reading".

I found that by following these techniques, not only did I read faster, but my comprehension improved. The book covers speed reading techniques and also related improvements in study skills for students.

I have Linux running on an IBM ThinkPad T41 laptop. I recently upgrade from Fedora Core 1 to Fedora Core 4. Several things broke from upgrading, including sound.