People draw with charcoal sticks, right? Charcoal sticks are expensive. Why can't I pick up some charcoal from a fire and draw with it?

I've been building one of my Stella Amps into a cigar box. I've been taking pictures the whole time, and some day I'll collect them all to one post. But for now I'll post what i just finished up.

Here in this pic you can see the knobs I just put on, and the new hinges. The old hinges were push-in cheap shiny brass and they fell apart pretty quick. (My kids might have had something to do with that.)

The National Security Agency wrote the Security Enhanced Linux extensions which are now a fundamental part of Red Hat and a few other distributions. The work the NSA did made it so secure that Linux is now the most secure operating system certified by the Russian government.

That is from Red Hat's CEO at LinuxCon. The rest of the article is Linux hagiography if that's your thing.

Here are some recent experiments I've tried:

Making tapioca pudding from scratch, using real vanilla beans: partial success. I never made pudding from scratch before. The pudding recipe (on the bag of tapioca balls) was extremely finicky, it took hours, and never did set. On the other hand, the vanilla bean (I used a half a bean) was a huge hit, and overall it tasted amazing.

Presh Talwalkar over at Mind Your Decisions has noticed that gas stations tend to cluster together in urban areas. It seems like every time you find a gas station, you find another one across the street. Anecdotal evidence suggests this is true.

I definitely have a bug in my circuit.

We just got some popsicle molds for making your own popsicles at home. It's amazing, I've had two popsicles a day since we got them. Here's what we've made so far, all of them have been excellent:

Richard Feynman on Confusion:

Hail to the King (stick with it, it gets ridiculous after about halfway through):