Alex from Hackster invited me to join her on Hackster Cafe today! We had a wide ranging conversation about running a small business, projects and products, and the AxiDraw MiniKit 2. Thanks, Alex!
All posts by Lenore Edman
Custom aluminum Bulbdial Clock case
Guy made a custom clock case out of aluminum for our Bulbdial Clock kit. It turned out beautifully! There are some really nice pictures of the design and build process, so definitely go check out his post.
Thanks for sharing your build, Guy!
Linkdump: December 2020
- Miniature Notepad Drafting Arm
- What Happened to the Submarines at West Edmonton Mall? (YouTube)
- A history of San Francisco lighted house numbers
- Breadboard wristwatch with bubble display (via hackster.io)
- What shape of 3D printed titanium implants best fosters bone adhesion?
- Typeset in the Future on Star Trek: The Motion Picture (featuring the Blaster Beam and real-life turbolifts).
- The Black-crowned Night-Heron is the official bird of Oakland
- anscombiser: An R package to create data sets that illustrate “the importance of using graphical displays in Statistics”
- A tweet led to a paper about galactic crepuscular rays
- A better air nozzle for better laser cutting
- More crepuscular critters that exhibit biofluorescence
- How push-latch mechanisms work, and how to make your own (YouTube)
- A big chain saw can cut through a big ship
Linkdump: November 2020
- 7-segment magnet-driven ball clock
- Thermite Welding Train Tracks
- A review of the Apple Face Mask, via The Prepared
- A 3D printed infinity mirror Jeffries tube. Design available here.
- My Unlicensed Hovercraft Bar Is Technically Legal
- Moving a large building by walking
- What Victorian-era seaweed pressings reveal about our changing seas
- Biofluorescence in the platypus
Halloween Project Archive
This year’s Halloween may be a little different from years past. But maybe you’re doing a Zoom costume contest? Want some spooky snacks? Or want to get in the mood with seasonal decor? Is it not Halloween for you if there isn’t pumpkin carving? Head over to the Halloween Project Archives for inspiration and ideas.
Halloween is one of our favorite holidays, and … we’ve organized dozens of our Halloween projects into categories: costumes, pumpkins, decor and food.
Linkdump: October 2020
- Restored, upscaled, and colorized film of a 1902 ride on a suspended train in Germany
- Early web artwork restoration at the Guggenheim
- Doubts, a carpet by artist Faig Ahmed
- “The Different Useless Machine” (Rotates the switch instead of flipping it.)
- Introduction to the FOSS Governance Collection, for documents about how open source projects are managed.
- Musings on maker businesses: Makers in the Mittelstand
- Moon behind the NG-14 Antares launch
- Models of sprue card kits for quick 3D printing, like this DH.98 Mosquito
- What happens when an architect sees the movie “Parasite”
- Goodyear’s Illuminated Tires
Interview with Greater Spaces
The Ingeniøren (Denmark’s oldest engineering publication) blog Greater Spaces interviewed me in their ongoing series of interviews with women in technology. You can read the interview in Danish or on Medium in English.
Thank you, Vanessa for the great conversation!
AxiDraw MiniKit in IEEE Spectrum

Our AxiDraw MiniKit was recently reviewed in IEEE Spectrum.
Thank you to Stephen Cass for the review! We’re glad you have enjoyed it.
Evil Mad Scientist interview in HackSpace Magazine
I was recently interviewed for HackSpace Magazine and just got the copy in the mail! It’s a meandering conversation about how Evil Mad Scientist got started and covers some of the wide variety of projects we’ve worked on.
In the same issue, there’s a clock kit review that is very complimentary of the Alpha Clock Five and mentions the Bulbdial Clock Kit which they reviewed in a previous issue.
Thanks to Hackspace for the opportunity to ramble on about the things we love!
Lemon Plum Jam Revisited
It has been a great season for plums, so I’ve updated the lemon plum jam recipe that I’ve been gradually refining over the years. The new basic recipe is below along with other tips I’ve gathered.
Ingredients:- 8 cups cut up pieces of plums, pits removed, skins left on, fresh or frozen
- 3 lemons, (optionally peeled) cut into small pieces, seeds removed
- juice from 3 more lemons
- 6 cups sugar
Procedure:
Put the plums, lemon pieces and lemon juice in a sauce pot and cook, stirring occasionally, until the fruit starts to soften. At this point, you can use a potato masher to crush the fruit pieces for a more even consistency.
Add sugar and cook, stirring regularly, until it thickens. You can test the consistency for doneness by putting a spoonful in a cold dish in the fridge for a few minutes. After chilling, it’s ready if it holds its shape a bit when you move a spoon or finger through it. You can also follow your favorite canning procedure for longer term storage. Makes about 4-5 pints.
Tips and techniques:
For cutting up the fruit, I like to put a small cutting board inside a baking sheet. This catches the juice much better than any cutting board with a moat that I’ve ever used. It makes cleanup much easier, and you can pour the juice from the baking sheet into the cooking pot.
Most jam recipes call for approximately equal quantities of sugar and fruit. I prefer my jam a little more tart, so I’ve revised down the sugar.
I’ve stopped adding water to my preserves. It cooks a little faster without as much liquid, and there’s enough liquid in the lemon juice to get it started cooking even if the fruit isn’t covered.I also often leave the lemon peel out for the preserves I make (other than marmalade). The peel gives it a stronger lemon flavor, but keeps the jam from gelling as well. If you want a thicker consistency that gels a little earlier, you can leave the peel out. If you want zingier lemon flavor, leave the peel on and cook a little longer.
During fruit season, I try to preserve as much as I can by making jams and chutneys, but I usually run out of time and end up cutting up the last of the crop and freezing it. Using frozen fruit for jams seems to work just as well as fresh. I measure out 8 cups and store it in a one gallon freezer bag. Then it’s ready to pull out start a batch of jam. I also recently revised my Plum Chutney recipe, and it starts with 8 cups of fruit as well.