Are 'smart' objects the future? People certainly like so-called smart phones, and almost every home in America has a computer, and making everything 'smart' might be a future trend, say humanities…

Elsevier and the Integrated Earth Data Applications facility at Columbia University have announced a competition to improve preservation of and access to research data in the earth sciences. …

The following is a reply to Patrick Lockerby's "AC, DC: What's The Difference ?" Direct current (DC) In a DC (direct current) circuit where the electricity flows in one direction, we can think of…

Second-hand stores like Goodwill, Salvation Army, and local mom&pop shops are treasure troves of things to hack or repurpose. When you hack something you’re probably using it in a way in which it…

Instagram, a popular photo-sharing application, is used by millions of people to show photos of their wedding cakes and pictures of themselves they took in the mirror with their cell phones.  Or…

When we say "off the grid," we often mean off the power grid. "Off the grid," however, can also mean off of any interconnected network including the Internet. Back in the day before the World Wide…

With 25,000 journals in existence today, thanks in large part to the open access movement which charges a fee to print a study, keeping up with current scientific literature is a daunting task.…

Some people just don't know how to put patterns and colors together. Or anything about style. Some of that is cultural, of course. No one really wears corsets any more, for example, and good…

If you're not a researcher, you probably don't use Mendeley a lot, I don't have an account there even though I have written lots of pieces about their stuff.  But it's popular among researchers…

In my previous blog post, How I Solved My 555 Timer IC Frequency and Built a 555 Guituner, even though I tried several different combinations of resistors in series, I was unsuccessful in finding…