All posts by Windell Oskay

About Windell Oskay

Co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

How to extract magnets from plastic toys

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As Marty McFly says, “You don’t just walk into a store and buy plutonium.” Actually, all I was after was neodymium, but the principle still applies. I needed a pile of rare earth magnets in a hurry. Neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets are cheap, extremely strong, and surprisingly ubiquitous. Despite this, most corner drugstores do not carry sets of rare-earth magnets, and it can be hard to get them unless you have a few days to wait for a package.

It turns out that you can get NdFeB magnets at the corner drugstore, and they’re cheap. You just have to extract them from the toys that they come in.
Continue reading How to extract magnets from plastic toys →

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Clogged tubes

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Flickr went down today. There was some sort of data storage issue that required them to transfer twenty terabytes of data. To cope with the downtime, they put up a message that said (in a stroke of brilliance) “Arrggh! Our tubes are clogged!”, and announced a coloring contest: print out the web page and color in the dots– a pair of circles in the shape of their logo. Take a photo of your creation and post it to Flickr, and (when the site returns) post it, tagged with flickrcolourcontest.

We printed out the page and sent Christian to get his crayons. We instructed him to scribble thoroughly between the lines with red and brown. That completed, Lenore donned the Flying Spaghetti Monster crown for our contest entry.

As of this writing, about three hours since Flickr came back online, there are about 450 entries. Ours is one of them.

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New EMSL shirt design: Join the resistance

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New EMSL shirt design at our vanishingly-small CafePress store.

Get them while they’re– well, whenever you want. $9-17.

(We don’t make money off of sales; we just want more people to join the resistance!)

Continue reading New EMSL shirt design: Join the resistance →

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Supercapacitor Contest Update

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Besides the eight project ideas that have been listed as comments to the original contest announcement, I’ve received 39 pieces of contest-entry E-mail, some of which contain more than one project idea.
I’m counting each entry that I’ve received as a separate entry. One piece of email contains a list of thirteen (but number 13 reads “i couldn’t think of anything else, i just like the number thirteen”).

Some of these ideas are just great! Keep ’em coming!

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The mercury ion optical clock

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From 2002-2005 I worked in the NIST Time and Frequency division on a next-generation atomic clock.

The clock is based on a single trapped mercury atom. The most significant result of my work on the clock was a dramatic improvement in its precision, and the report on this progress was finally published this week.

The NIST Press Release compares the accuracy of the mercury clock to the NIST-F1 cesium fountain standard: “The current version of NIST-F1—if it were operated continuously—would neither gain nor lose a second in about 70 million years. The latest version of the mercury clock would neither gain nor lose a second in about 400 million years.”

Read an article from Science News about the paper, or one from Seed Magazine.
Continue reading The mercury ion optical clock →

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Supercapacitor Contest!

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What can you do with a lot of supercapacitors? This is no idle question. I picked up a bag of 100 on eBay. These are sweet: Cooper PowerStor Series A carbon aerogel capactitors with ultra-low resistance. Specifications: 2.5 V, 1.5 F, with nominal equivalent series resistance of 60 milliohms at 1 kHz. I recently saw these at Digi-Key for $9.60 each. These aren’t the wimpy memory backup caps that aren’t rated for enough current to drive an LED. These are power caps, meant for high current charge and discharge.

Obviously, these are meant for great things. It only leaves one question: What great things should I do with them? To help answer that, I’m holding a contest: Come up with the best use for a pile of supercaps, and you’ll get ten of them to play with.
Continue reading Supercapacitor Contest! →

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How to make hard drive wind chimes

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windchimes

Graduate school can do funny things to your head. Sometimes the urge to procrastinate becomes so overwhelming that you strike out in a great burst of creativity; determined to do something, anything, to avoid that which you’re supposed to be doing. Like the time that I painted my bicycle purple (with green polka dots) to avoid studying for my qualifying exam– but I seem to digress.

Where was I? Oh, yes: hard drive wind chimes. I used to disassemble hard drives, whenever possible, both to extract the magnets and to see how the different types worked. Different hard drives contain all kinds of wonderful components: voice coil motors, stepper motors, exotic bearings, electropolished machined parts, chemically etched metal webs, flexible circuitry, and my personal favorite: optical quadrature encoders for pivot arm position readout. The drive platters themselves are also quite remarkable: precisely made aluminum patters with a surface not unlike recording tape. The disks make a lovely clear note if you strike them, so it was only natural to make them into a set of wind chimes.
Continue reading How to make hard drive wind chimes →

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Play with your food: Five pounds of licorice wheels

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We got 5 Pounds of Red Licorice Wheels from Amazon.com. It’s a bulk package of Haribo strawberry licorice wheels, quite possibly the most perfect movie candy ever invented. It just might be the best thing that we have ever purchased. And it only cost $13.
Continue reading Play with your food: Five pounds of licorice wheels →

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Escargot Grand Prix

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How fast are your garden snails?
Are they faster when you threaten them with garlic butter?
How do they leave dotted lines in their wake?
And what are you going to do with the built-in iSight camera on your new Mac?

Answer all of these questions at once with Gawker, a cute little GPL’d mac program that makes making time lapse movies a cinch.

Watch a 30-second quicktime clip of my garden here (1.7 MB quicktime .MOV). The video quality suffers a little from variable lighting [stupid moving clouds!] and the tiny lens.

Go snails go!
Continue reading Escargot Grand Prix →

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