We’ve written about the Silicon Valley Electronics Flea Market many times before. Make that many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many times before. It’s a great source of inspiration, beautiful objects and interesting conversations.
We’re writing about it now because it has moved locations! The April 14th flea market will be at the parking lot of the Sunnyvale Fry’s. We’ll hope to see you all there this weekend!
First cut up the lemons into small pieces and remove any obvious seeds. After juicing lemons, we’ve found that straining it through a julep strainer holds back the seeds but allows most of the pulp through.
Our favorite tool for grating ginger is a fine microplane. For making matchsticks, a mandoline slicer makes short work of it.
Put the lemon pieces, lemon juice, water, grated ginger, and ginger matchsticks in a pot and simmer until the lemons start to soften. Add the sugar. Stir regularly and cook to the desired consistency. To test consistency, put a spoonful on a plate in the fridge. If it’s too runny after cooling for a few minutes, keep simmering and test again after a few minutes.
Makes about four pints. If you want to can it for longer storage, Ball has a nice introduction to canning on their website.
Other fruit preserves from the Play with your food archives:
The folks at Sac City Brews use an AxiDraw to create their tap list. The AxiDraw plots out the beer name, info and logo onto a piece of acrylic which gets mounted in the tap list above the bar.
Best of all, they’ve mounted the AxiDraw in plain view, so patrons can see it getting ready for the next beer to go on tap. (You can see video of it in action in their Yelp pictures.)
If you’re in Sacramento and are looking to try out a new tap house, check them out. Thank you to Todd for sending us the pictures!
On Monday, February 19, we’ll be celebrating Presidents Day at The Tech Museum in San Jose.
Spend your Presidents Day with us! We’re bringing you even more hands-on science fun than usual. You’ll build straw rockets and design colorful climbing robots. We’re also teaming up with Kickstarter to give you a sneak peek at some new tech.
The hours are 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. and we’ll be bringing the MOnSter 6502 and demonstrating how microprocessors work with our giant version of the classic MOS 6502.
Lee at Sawdust and Solder is building a kids spaceship cockpit and used a Larson Scanner for one panel.
I wanted to spread out the LEDs over a large arc to simulate the sweep of a radar screen. The idea was to make it a scanner to look for other ships, class-M planets, or whatever is required. So I decided to mount the LEDs on the acrylic panel and wire them back to the board. I also decided to use my own switches mounted to the panel rather than the ones supplied with the kit. I used my Shapeoko CNC to cut out the acrylic panel.
After I painted and weathered the acrylic panel, I engraved the text (again, with the CNC and a v-carving bit) and then assembled everything.
There’s a ton of documentation and some good tips in the post. Check out the other parts of the cockpit project Lee has posted, too!
Today we are releasing our newest set of “Download and Print” cards for Valentine’s day. This is our sixth year, and sixth set of cards: The 2013 set had six equation-heavy cards, the 2014 set was a set of six symbol-heavy cards, and the 2015 set included love, hearts, and arrows. The 2016 set featured Pluto’s cold heart, and the perfect card for your robotic expression of love, and last year’s set featured atomic orbitals, exponential growth, and an epsilon delta declaration of love.
This year’s set features parallel lines, friction, and activation energy:
What could be more romantic than telling someone that the second derivative of your potential energy is at its minimum when you’re around them?
The perfect card to give to any computer scientist when you want them to both (A) appreciate being given a valentine and (B) secretly wonder whether you don’t quite understand what np completeness means, or whether you do but thought it was funny.
Parallel lines never meet. But we should.
For when you have chemistry with someone.
Why measure? Because it’s generally considered impolite to ask someone what their normal force is.
You can download the full set here, which includes all 36 designs from all six years (a 1.6 MB PDF document).
As usual, print them out on (or otherwise affix to) card stock, personalize, and [some steps omitted] enjoy the resulting lifelong romance.
We’re bringing the MOnSter 6502 and the Digi-Comp II to the Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest February 10-11 at the Living Computers: Museum+Labs in Seattle, Washington.
Living Computers: Museum+Labs is an incredible museum! Bring your camera, bring your children, and enjoy all that LC:ML and VCF have to offer.
Check out the exhibitor list and the speaker lineup for more information.
