Happy birthday to us! Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories is now two years of age. Collected below is a "Best of Evil Mad Scientist" for the past year: Some of our favorite projects that we've published over the last twelve months. Here's to the next year!

Quick projects:
Rubberbands made from old bicycle innertubes.	Light tent made from a lampshade.
Chip bugs	Bristlebots
Spool spinner from an old fan.	The $1.00 C to D adapter
Electronics projects
How to make a Joule Thief from Make: Weekend Projects.
How to make a dark-detecting LED night light.	The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronic Junk
How to make a Sawed-off USB Key AVR microcontroller projects
Using an ADXL330 accelerometer with an AVR microcontroller	Snap-o-lantern
Kit Projects
AVR Target Boards	Interactive Table Kits
Peggy	Peggy v 2.0
Crafty Projects
QuiltBert	Software Handbag
iPod cozy	Fimo Fractals
Mini Art Cars	Umbrella Bat Costume v 2.0
Food Hacking
Cooking hotdogs	Circuitry Snacks
Edible Googly Eyes	Fractal Cookies
CandyFab
Printing complex shapes: Sugar Chain	Candyfab improvements: higher resolution and edible output
Papercraft:
Rotary Fraction Adding Machine	Electric Origami
Observations & silly projects:
Volume of a cat	Pacman Halloween
Lego Projects:
Forbidden Lego review & build	Efficient Lego Storage
Reviews:
Obscure electronics tools	Lee Valley & Veritas Catalog Review
Teardowns:
LED Stoplight	pedometer
HP Color LaserJet 2600n

As of today, one thousand people have saved our little web site to their del.icio.us bookmarks. Everybody else is doing it, Shouldn't you? =D

Neat-o: our site was picked as one of PC Magazine's 100 Favorite Blogs!

One year ago today, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories went live. Happy birthday to us! We originally started this blog as a means to help us document and organize our various projects. Since then we've seen writeups about our projects on more than two thousand other blogs, and even in a handful of print magazines. We've contributed projects to an art show, sparked some interesting collaborations, and built some of the wackiest machines that we ever have. In the course of these projects we somehow found excuses to buy three old HP pen plotters, 2.4x10^4 LEDs, a Macintosh SE, Marshmallow Peeps, and three hundred pounds of sugar. What will the next year bring? Who knows! But, we're looking forward to it. Thanks for reading Evil Mad Scientist! - Lenore & Windell (Pictured above: An alphanumeric persistence of vision display. Source code, how-to and more photos coming next Wednesday.)

We've just set up syndication through FeedBlitz so that (if you like) you can get new evilmadscientist.com articles by E-mail when they are posted, typically 3-5 times per week. (Geek translation: It's a feed reader for people that don't read feeds.) To sign up, enter your E-mail address in the box and click the button: Preview | Powered by FeedBlitz It's free of course, but you'll have to wait for confirmation E-mail to arrive from FeedBlitz, which may take a few hours. We've had some inquiries about project E-mail and/or newsletters, and so we think that this might be another useful tool to keep up with what's going on here in Evil Mad Science land.

The Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories blog went live on June 21, a little more than six months ago. This week, we broke into the Technorati top 1000. w00t!

We noticed a couple of months ago when Honorary Evil Mad Scientists Laughing Squid first crossed that little line, and we are flattered to be amongst such great company.

As of yesterday, our technorati rank was 992, with over 2100 links from over 1200 blogs. Thanks everyone!

Some of our stories got a lot of attention, particularly the following ones:

• How to make the simplest electric motor
• Interactive LED Dining Table
• Make A Cylon Jack-O-Lantern
• How to hack LEDs into Lego minifigures for Halloween and the Lego Abominations
• Turn an RC car into a floor sweeper!
• How to Build a Better Bat Costume and a Crocodile Costume
• Building a Robotic Dalek Pumpkin
• Dessert sushi

Here are some of the other stories that we really liked, even though they didn't get as much attention:

• Edible origami cranes
• Demonstrate Magnetohydrodynamic propulsion in one minute
• High-tech holiday decorations
• Christmas chaos
• Vintage Remote TV-B-Gone Case Mod
• Crafty fridge magnets

We've also (somehow) become "authoritative" in several subjects. According to technorati we are an authority on cooking, DIY, and craft. What this really means is that not very many folks tag their blogs well for technorati, but hey, we don't mind being the top authority on electronics.

So, maybe all this popularity and authority means that we really are making the world a better place (one evil mad scientist at a time). Or it could be a sign that our reign of terror is getting off to a great start, Muahahahaaaa! If you think so, (shameless plug ahead) feel free to nominate us for the 2007 Bloggies, perhaps in the new blogs category. But hurry, nominations end on January 10. In the meantime, we're going to bask in the glow of our rankings and look forward to the next six months.

Thanks again!
-- Lenore and Windell

Yes, it's time for the state of the blog address. We took the EMSL blog online on June 21, 2006, three months ago.
(It was about time that we started organizing our projects.)

So, happy quarter-birthday to us.

Thus far we've put up some thirty projects. We're actively working on about forty others right now.
If you haven't bookmarked us, now is a fine time to do so. =)

Minor announcement I: We've just created a new group on flickr as a repository for our project photos.

Minor announcement II: We've also updated our CafePress shirt design:

Front: "Resistor" Rear: "Join the resistance." (Get one.)

Minor announcement III: Today we're adding a new section of links to our web page, "Honorary Mad Scientists," a short, specific, non-exhaustive list of creative people, sites, and/or blogs that we admire. We thought about calling the list "people like us," but (1) it's cocky of us to think that we can be as cool as these people and (2) maybe these folks don't want us to suggest that they are anything like us. So, we'll just call them Honorary Mad Scientists; read on for a partial list.

Flickr has announced that they will be down at 10pm Pacific Time this evening (9/1/06) for approximately 2 hours. Since most of the photos at evilmadscientist.com are actually hosted on Flickr, we'll be pretty close to down as well.

The EMSL RSS feed is now fully functional. The address is feed://www.evilmadscientist.com/backend/geeklog.rss