Tie Your Shoes Better

In this video, I show how to tie a special knot with your shoe laces. This knot stays tied as well as, if not better than, a standard double knot but can be untied with a quick pull of one of the laces. I’ve been using this knot for over a year and I really like it. Try it and see if you like it too.  Read on…

Simple Frozen Fish Food

In this video, I show you how to quickly, easily, and cheaply make some DIY frozen fish food.  This is a very simple recipe that I will be feeding to fish fry and other small fish.  There are many other ingredients you could add.  Do you have a favorite ingredient? Read on…

.

Stasis Punctuated by Change

Stephen Jay Gould

Instrument Case Scuff Removal

My hardcase for my banjo had several white scuff marks on it that I wanted to remove.  Many musical hard cases, like the one I have, have an outer covering of vinyl.  Most paint removers will eat into vinyl and many gentler cleaning solutions aren’t strong enough to remove scuff marks.   I heard that Mr. Clean Magic Erasers work well on vinyl floors so I decided to try them on the case.  Read on…

Repair Sole of Shoe

The rubber on the heel of my fairly new shoe started to peel away from the bottom of the shoe. To fix the problem, I decided to use 5 minute quick set epoxy which cures quickly, is very strong, and bonds to just about any solid I’ve tried it on. Here is quick video on how I made the fix.  Read on…

Updated: 16 Jan. 2012

Piezo Pickup

I needed a way to tune monitor a washtub bass around other instruments and the mic on my tuner kept picking up the other instruments because they were louder than the bass.  Plus, I wanted a way to record from a ukulele that didn’t have a pickup.  So, I built a pickup from a piezo transducer.  It was pretty easy, didn’t cost very much, and works surprisingly well.  Read on…

Updated: 13 December 2011

35mm SLR Body Cap Pinhole Conversion

I have made and used a few pinhole cameras that used photo paper as “film” but I wanted to try m hand at using real, negative film.  Recently, someone gave me a 35mm film developing jar and so I decided now was the time to try my hand at negative film.  I have several old Canon 35mm SLR cameras which all take FD lenses so I decided to make a pinhole “lens” for them.  Read on…

Quart Can Pinhole Camera

I got into pinhole photography recently because I like the idea of building my own camera, taking photographs with that camera, and developing my own film and prints.  I was wandering the aisles at Ax-Man and came across some 1 quart metal cans.  They looked like an ideal shape, material, and price to be made into pinhole cameras so, I bought half a dozen.  It was quite easy to turn these cans into very usable pinhole cameras.  Read on…

Composite vs S-video vs Component

I’ve heard that component cables provide higher picture quality than s-video and composite cables but I wanted to find out if this was true and if so, to what extent.  I tried all 3 cable types on a DVD player, Wii, and PS2.  The cables fed into a 32″ LCD HDTV.  I played the same test image on all 3 devices.  I photographed the TV screen with a digital camera on a tripod with a timer so that there would be no shake.  Read on…

Updated: 13 December 2010 (Wii Sports Resort Golf images added)

Cooler Spout Replacement

I make homebrewed beer and have been doing partial mash brewing lately.  The processes involves steeping malted barely in a 2 gallon beverage cooler then transferring, via the spout on the cooler, this wort to a brew pot to boil.  The spout on my beverage cooler didn’t have good flow and I had to keep the little button depressed while the hot wort flowed out and burned my finger.  Here’s how I fixed the problem.  Read on…