archive

// every hobby, chronologically

July 2026

My Left Hand Waits for Permission That Comes Too Late

Three weeks off and my cortex quietly uninstalled the update. I shrank the cascade to its smallest honest beat — and the beat still beat me, one throw in four.

Ninety Degrees of Regret Before the Paddle Behaved

Flatwater Canoeing

Traded a fly rod for a paddle, expecting a peaceful drift. Instead I spun a full circle and learned the beginner's correction stroke is genuinely, officially called the goon stroke.

outdoors sport nature mechanical

A 1912 Knot That Keeps the Horizon Honest

Kite Aerial Photography with a Picavet Rig

The camera never left the ground today. I spent the whole session on a step with a coat hanger and two eyelets, learning why a 1912 knot outperforms firmware at keeping a lens level.

photography aviation outdoors making craft

Watch the White Ball; It's the Only One That's Yours

Pool (Cue Sports)

Two scratches on the break before a man named Doug pointed out the obvious: the cue ball has to go *somewhere*, and until tonight I'd never once asked where.

sport science strategy math

Forty Rings In Before the Arithmetic Let Them Close

Chainmaille Weaving

I bought a sandwich bag of little metal rings at a market and got quietly furious to learn that whether they click together is decided, entirely, by long division.

making craft math mechanical art

Catch the Egg, Not the Trampoline: Landing the Toss

Diabolo Gyroscopic String Acceleration

Turns out a wooden ball on a string fixed the toss I'd been failing for a week: a taut string is a trampoline, so catch the diabolo like an egg — sink the knees and give.

sport performance mechanical science

Push the Vanishing Points Off the Page

Urban Sketching

Twenty years designing actual buildings, and I could not make a fuel bowser sit on the ground. A weather hold, a re-inked pen, and the humbling art of drawing what's in front of you.

art design outdoors craft

Stop Aiming, Bend Your Knees, and the Ball Lands

Kendama

Went in for carbon kite standoffs, left with a wooden ball on a string and no standoffs. Forty minutes of stabbing at it before I learned the spike isn't an aiming problem at all.

sport performance mindfulness mechanical science

From My Eyeline It Was Flawless; From Theirs, a Wink of Grey

Close-Up Card Magic (Sleight of Hand)

A club regular cut a borrowed deck one-handed, found my card, and said "practise." I went home to relearn bridge and lost an evening to turning two cards over as one.

performance art mindfulness history

The Sky Was Reporting in Eighths the Whole Time

Cloud Spotting

Twenty years reading cloud codes off flight briefings, and a lens-shaped cloud over the foothills stopped me cold. Turns out I could name the weather but not the sky it came from.

outdoors nature science aviation mindfulness

The Sentence Was Lying, So I Stopped Reading It

Cryptic Crossword Solving

A stranger's newspaper dared me with one clue. Turns out the sentence wasn't a sentence — it was a tiny machine, and "flower" meant a river the whole time.

writing strategy mindfulness history

Four Losses in Twenty Minutes and Not One Blunder

Go (Weiqi/Baduk)

After six weeks of my hands failing me, here's a game with nothing to execute — set the stone where you mean. I lost four straight anyway, and couldn't find a single blunder.

strategy math history mindfulness

The Sky Bell Only Rings When You Stop Sawing

Diabolo Gyroscopic String Acceleration

Sawing the string like a panicked canoeist does nothing; a diabolo is a gyroscope you feed by whipping, then argue with quietly before it skitters off into the fence.

sport performance mechanical science

Nine Days Afraid of a Rock, One Whorl Braver

Fossil Hunting and Preparation

Nine days I circled the ammonite before switching the scribe on — then spent the evening hunched in the exact posture my physio banned, learning that a millimetre gouge has no undo.

science craft history collecting making

Four Centimetres of Line Between Straight and Sideways

Ripstop Sport Kite Building and Precision Flying

The kite pulled left. I spent an hour blaming my hands, then the bridle, then physics — before measuring the two lines and finding four centimetres of pure self-inflicted humiliation.

outdoors making aviation textiles design

The Second Arrow Went Where I Didn't Point

Barebow Recurve Archery

The arrow points a few degrees left of the target, then flies dead straight — and somehow, on the second try, my hands agreed to cooperate for once.

sport mechanical outdoors science

I Knew Every Algorithm and Still Lubed It to Death

Speedcubing

Memorizing 78 algorithms: easy. Applying one drop of lubricant: apparently beyond me. Day one ended with a cube like pudding and a corner piece under the fridge.

strategy math mechanical sport mindfulness

Two Millimetres of Stem Between Spinning and Standing Up

Precision Spinning Top Turning and Gyroscopic Balancing

A top that balances on your fingertip is not necessarily a top that spins — mine proved this by walking off the bench onto the concrete. The tippe top, meanwhile, flips itself over for reasons it refu

making mechanical woodworking science craft

Two Millimetres of Bend Between Straight and Coming Home

Returning Boomerang Carving and Tuning

A boomerang that doesn't come back isn't broken — it flew straight, exactly what a hunter wanted 40,000 years ago and precisely what I don't. The fix lives in millimetres of bend.

outdoors sport woodworking aviation making

The Nose Must Outweigh Everything the Wind Can Grab

Model Rocketry

A rocket flies straight for one reason: a pea of clay in the nose. Get it wrong and you've built a very expensive lawn dart. So I swung mine on a string, like 1960 told me to.

making aviation science engineering outdoors

Eleven Dollars of Plastic That Obeys Only Its Own Spin

Disc Golf

The physio said keep walking, low-impact. So naturally I threw a borrowed disc into a spruce, read the four numbers on its rim like an approach plate, and bought three on the way out.

sport outdoors strategy science

Beaten by a V0 and a Nine-Year-Old

Bouldering

I could read every move from the ground like a chess position. Then I touched the wall, my forearms filed a formal objection, and a nine-year-old lapped me eating a granola bar.

sport mindfulness strategy

Half a Millimetre of Shale I Dare Not Cross

Fossil Hunting and Preparation

An ammonite fell out of a rock into my hands, and now I own a pneumatic jackhammer the size of a pen and a fossil that legally belongs to the Crown.

outdoors science nature history collecting

Four Grams of Sugar and the Pressure of a Car Tire

Kombucha Brewing

Last month the culture died in eight seconds. This month it's alive and quietly building enough pressure to turn a swing-top bottle into shrapnel. Progress, technically.

cooking science making engineering mindfulness

To Watch the Sun, I Listened to a Submarine

VLF Sudden Ionospheric Disturbance Monitoring

Yesterday's spectroheliograph caught the Sun for one two-minute moment. So I built a receiver that watches a submarine transmitter instead — and never blinks, even when I'm asleep.

radio science space electronics analog

Five Clean Throws and a Sticky Note That Says 423

Juggling

Four hundred drops before lunch, two beanbags marooned under the couch — and then I discovered juggling has a notation, and abandoned my sandwich to tell someone.

sport performance math mindfulness

Eighteen Hundred Spectra and Not One Photograph of the Sun

Spectroheliography

A good session leaves me with 1,800 spectra and zero photographs of the Sun. The photo is something you compute afterward — one curved pixel-column at a time, dust stripe included.

space science photography engineering analog

Pink at Day Twelve Where Nothing Should Grow

Succulent Propagation

Broken succulent leaves from the free bin grew roots at day twelve, right on schedule. Ninety-five percent water turns out to be enough battery.

nature making mindfulness science collecting

Add Metal Where the Probe Should Vanish

Microwave Interferometry

Measure by inserting a probe that disturbs what you're measuring, then tune it out with an adjustable stub.

radio electronics science measurement engineering

June 2026

Twenty-Three Where Fifty-Three Appeared

Thermal Expansion Interferometry

Counted fringes to nanometre precision. Aluminum's expansion coefficient: 53 where it should be 23. The bench was expanding too.

science optics measurement engineering physics

Six Million Hertz Minus What the Coating Weighs

Optical Thin-Film Coating Deposition

A 1 Hz frequency drop means 0.06 nanometres of coating. You're manufacturing precision optics by watching a crystal oscillate slightly slower.

electronics science making engineering photography

Twenty Grooves Where Two Thousand Should Be

Diffraction Grating Ruling

Commercial gratings cost $347. Ruled 20 grooves by hand with a diamond stylus and a bent paperclip spring. Only 7,480 grooves to go.

science making optics mechanical engineering

One Pass Only or the Break Wanders

Stained Glass

One pass with the cutter or the break wanders. Copper foil, lead solder, flux fumes. Three rectangles that serve no purpose except filtering light.

craft art making design analog

Seven Tenths Where One Focal Length Should Be

Telescope Eyepiece Modification

One of the $15 estate sale eyepieces was rattling. By 2:47 AM I'd disassembled five of them and couldn't stop.

making science mechanical engineering astronomy

Cobalt Glass Between Yellow and Everything Else

Flame Emission Spectroscopy

Sodium contamination hides every other element in the flame—until you hold cobalt blue glass up and the forge lining confesses it's made of strontium.

science making chemistry electronics outdoor

Two Yellow Lines Three Metres Apart

Prism Spectroscopy

Two yellow lines where I expected one blob. Quantum mechanics visible with a razor blade and estate-sale prism—if you remember to keep the blade straight.

science optics making electronics analog

Eleven Forty-Seven When the Wire Disappeared

Optical Pyrometry

Same colour, 250°C different readings. The pyrometer doesn't measure truth—it measures the same calibrated lie every time.

electronics making science engineering metalworking

Seventy to One Hundred Then Three Days for the Medium

Microscope Slide Preparation

The lichen sections have been pickling in ethanol since March. Today I walked them through five solvents and they'll be ready Thursday.

science making craft nature analog

Ninety Degrees Before the Twist Snapped Cold

Blacksmithing

Hot steel rings like a tuning fork. Cold steel sounds dead. The 100°C difference between them is whether your twist flows or snaps, and you're reading it by ear.

making mechanical craft metalworking engineering

Eighteen Centimetres Down to Robertson Number Two

Magnetic Gradient Surveying

Nanotesla-precision magnetic gradient survey for buried foundations. Found a Robertson #2 screwdriver from 1978. The method works perfectly.

electronics science outdoors engineering making

Zero Point Three Two Until the Aluminum Said Otherwise

Ground Penetrating Radar

The radar said 0.32 metres. The aluminum plate I buried said 0.40. One of them was lying, and it wasn't the metal.

electronics radio science outdoors engineering

One Point Eight Metres Where the Ice Left Clay

Seismic Refraction Mapping

Struck a steel plate with a sledgehammer to find out what the Victorians buried under my garage. The answer is clay. Lots of clay.

science outdoors electronics engineering history

Nine Days and I Can't Tell If It's Swelling

Bonsai Wire Training

Nine days since I wired the branch. Bark might be swelling around the copper. Or it isn't. Twenty minutes of staring hasn't helped.

nature craft art outdoors patience

Thirty-Three Kilograms Before the Motherboard Goes Under

Mineral Oil PC Submersion

Went for calcium supplement, left with an acrylic tank to drown a motherboard in. Thermal stratification turns out to be harder than the hardware.

electronics engineering making science analog

One Point Four Grams Where the Leaf Used to Be

Copper Electroforming

Stared at a leaf on my desk for fifteen minutes before realizing it was metal. Not coated—solid copper, grown atom by atom, 1.4 grams.

electronics making chemistry art metalworking

Point Seven Seven Volts Before the Grey Turned Black

Electrolytic Fountain Pen Ink Synthesis

The walnut ink writes pale grey and darkens over minutes. Atmospheric oxygen is free but slow. What if you just electrocuted it instead?

chemistry electronics making craft writing

Pale Grey Until the Iron Remembered Black

Natural Ink Making

A mushroom-stained fountain pen corroded itself into teaching me ink chemistry. The rain barrel turned out to be half the recipe.

craft chemistry nature history collecting

Four Millimetres Today Three Centimetres by December

Coral Fragment Micropropagation

Dropped a coral fragment by accident. Turns out that's the entire propagation technique—Dr. Vaughan discovered it the same way in 2006.

science nature electronics making engineering

Two Hormones Three Outcomes One Ratio Wrong

Aquatic Plant Tissue Culture

Commercial plant tissue culture: agar, MS medium from failed 1962 tobacco research, and hormone ratios that program cells into roots, shoots, or formless blobs.

science nature making electronics precision

Twelve Centimetres Between Drowning and Drought

Paludarium Construction

Stared at dragon stone for forty minutes. The shop owner predicted I'd over-engineer the water section and pile dirt behind rocks. He was right.

nature science design making craft

Six Degrees Down and September Will Tell Me

Bonsai Wire Training

Annealed sixty centimetres of copper wire, bent one branch six degrees, and now I wait until September to find out if I guessed right.

nature craft art outdoors patience

Eight LEDs to Replace the Word Purple

LED Absorption Spectroscopy

Built a spectrophotometer because calling mushroom dye 'purple' isn't specific enough. Eight discrete LEDs, one photodiode, and the end of subjective colour.

electronics science chemistry making analog

Point Zero Zero One Per Five Degrees

Reef Aquarium Keeping

Went for brass fittings, bought a refractometer and 25 kg of salt instead. The shop owner said reef keeping is just RF troubleshooting with seawater.

nature science making collecting mindfulness

Twenty-Nine Shadows From Fourteen Hundred Kilometres Southeast

Radio Occultation Meteor Detection

French military radar 1,400 km southeast, sand grains burning at 85 km up. Twenty-nine meteors logged without looking at the sky.

radio space science audio electronics

Purple Above pH Nine, Clear Below

Mushroom Dyeing

Polyporic acid turns purple above pH nine and stays clear below it—fungal dyes don't follow the rules walnut taught me.

craft nature science textiles art

Flash Yellow If You're Already Watching

Lichen Microscopy

Found a lichen while sorting dried mushrooms. Touched it with drain cleaner. It flashed yellow in half a second and I almost missed it.

science nature outdoors chemistry photography

Four Days at the Bottom Where the Oxygen Stops

Kombucha Brewing

Diane's three-year-old culture sank in eight seconds. Turns out boiling water doesn't remove chloramine—only kills the bacteria that needed oxygen to survive.

cooking science chemistry biology making

Wrapped Twice Around and Tension Holds Everything

Shibori Resist Dyeing

Diane said wrap the thread twice but don't knot it—tension alone would resist what my carved block and aluminum mordant couldn't.

textiles craft art chemistry design

May 2026

Pale Tan at the Coordination Complex I Trusted

Natural Dye Textile Printing

Walnut hulls, aluminum mordant, and a coordination complex that produced every shade of beige I didn't want.

textiles craft nature chemistry art

Three Hundred Thirty-Six Ends Before the Edge Pulled Inward

Loom Weaving

Ninety minutes to thread 336 warp ends. Three inches of weaving to discover they were lying about being evenly tensioned.

craft textiles making design mindfulness

Seven Days Before the Charcoal Tells Me What the Soil Exhaled

Atmospheric Radon Mapping

The Geiger counter that couldn't find meteorites now measures invisible radon seeping from rocks. Eight buried canisters wait to tell me what the soil exhaled.

science outdoors electronics nature engineering

Three Legs Finished and Four Inches Left to Regret

Macramé Plant Hangers

Diane showed me the knot sequence. Looked simple. Sixteen feet of cord per strand, she said. I cut mine to fourteen. That was the first mistake.

craft textiles making nature design

Three Cracks and the Grinder Still Waiting

Terrazzo Floor Tile Casting

Four weeks of rock tumbling, embedded in cement. Three days later: three cracks. Turns out calcite and alkaline don't negotiate.

craft making design art

216.430 MHz Once Per Second for Six More Weeks

Radio Telemetry Wildlife Tracking

The RDF receiver was still in the field case from the meteorite failure. Swept 216 MHz to test it. Someone's tagged a ptarmigan out there.

radio outdoors nature science electronics

Five Species Before the Yard List Takes Over

Birdwatching

The sextant's 4× monocular was for celestial navigation. Then a hawk flew through the viewfinder and I started a list.

outdoors nature science observation collecting

Five Species Through a Monocular Aimed at Something Else

Birdwatching

Spent forty minutes watching the horizon through a sextant. A hawk circled into frame. Now I have a yard list of five species and a navigation problem I can't solve.

nature outdoors science collecting

Forty-Seven Degrees Waiting for an Almanac I Don't Have

Celestial Navigation by Sextant

The sextant says 47° 12.3'. The Sun says nothing helpful. The almanac I need to make sense of either one arrives in four days.

navigation outdoors science math aviation

Ten Arc-Seconds If I Learn Which Line Aligns

Precision Surveying Theodolite Operation

The theodolite measures angles more precisely than I can measure anything. The limitation is me, not the 61-year-old Swiss brass.

science outdoors mechanical precision navigation

About Three Twenty Metres and Exactly Nine Point Eight

Benchmark Hunting

The datasheet says the benchmark is at these exact coordinates. It also says those coordinates might be 400 metres away from the actual benchmark. Both statements are true.

outdoors collecting history science photography

Four Metres of Accuracy Around a Film Canister

Geocaching

The GPS insisted I was standing on top of it. I'd been staring at decorative boulders for twenty minutes.

outdoors navigation collecting strategy engineering

Six Centimetres of Silver Into a Gap I Couldn't See

Bicycle Frame Brazing

Marc heated steel until silver disappeared into gaps I couldn't see. This is either physics or magic, and I'm not sure the distinction matters at 650°C.

mechanical making craft engineering metalworking

Twenty-Three Stitches Out Before the Snap Held Right

Leatherworking

The knife came back from the river with a burr. Resharpened it until it would shave arm hair again. Then it wouldn't fit in the sheath—geometry doesn't compromise.

craft making design textiles mechanical

Nineteen Hours to Leather-Hard, Twenty-Seven to Scrap

Pottery Wheel Throwing

Thumbnail test said leather-hard. Loop tool said otherwise. By 10:47 the bowl was scrap and Diane was explaining why trimming can't fix what throwing broke.

craft art making ceramics engineering

Three Millimetres of Bronze and the Rest Is Grey

Raku Pottery Firing

The research said copper lustre. The bowl says grey. Turns out there's a difference between 'drop it in the barrel' and 'place it in active combustibles.

craft art making design science

Five Attempts Before the Wall Held Its Shape

Pottery Wheel Throwing

Centering took eleven minutes. Diane said most beginners take thirty, which helped until my fourth attempt collapsed into wet gray chaos.

craft art making tactile ceramics

Thirty Seconds Working, Eighteen Hours Waiting for Cracks

Glass Blowing

Diane handed me wet newspaper and told me to press it against 900°C glass with my bare hand. The steam barrier would protect me, she said, until I flinched.

craft making art science

Five Flies Lost Before the Loop Unrolled Right

Fly Fishing

You cast the line, not the fly—the fly is just cargo. Took twenty casts into the willows to learn this, then lost the first successful cast to a trout.

outdoors sport nature craft strategy

Four Litres Waiting for a Quarter Teaspoon

Cheese Making

Chymosin cleaves one peptide bond and milk becomes curd—simple chemistry until you're holding $24 worth of raw milk and a quarter teaspoon of enzyme.

cooking science craft making mindfulness

Six Beacons Waiting for a Fall Zone I Can't Predict

Meteorite Recovery by Radio Direction Finding

The fireball report said northwest of Red Deer. Weather radar confirmed fragmentation. The witness plates work perfectly. They're just sitting in the garage because "northwest of Red Deer" covers four

radio science outdoors collecting electronics

Eight Metres of Uncertainty on Highway Twenty-Two

Mineral Specimen Collecting

Six rocks came home. Without field notes linking specimen 2026-047 to coordinates ±8m, they're scientifically worthless. The notebook matters more than the hammer.

collecting science outdoors nature photography

Six Days for Flies, Three to Eight Weeks for Maybe

Praying Mantis Rearing

The ootheca might hatch tomorrow or in July. The fruit fly culture needs six more days. If the timing doesn't align, 150 nymphs starve in 48 hours.

nature science making observation patience

Two Hundred Twenty Hertz of Marshmallow

Fungal Resonance Mapping

The frequency sweep produced a curve that looked more like a marshmallow than a resonance plot. Turns out living mushrooms are terrible oscillators.

audio science nature electronics making

Eleven Hours of Silence Then Forty Minutes of Maybe

Bioacoustic Spore Discharge Recording

The mushroom's been glued to a contact mic for eleven hours. The waveform is mostly nothing, but the quality of the nothing changed at 9:47pm.

audio science nature making electronics

Thirty Days From Now This Will Look Identical

Lichen Growth Rate Calibration

Just took the first baseline photograph. The black prothallus line I'm measuring will move 40 microns this month—less than a single human hair's width.

nature science photography making mindfulness

Eighteen Hours Between Horizontal and Vertical

Phototropic Sculpture Gardens

Anna Atkins used dead algae for her 1843 photograms because living plants won't hold still. I'm trying it anyway with a fern that's bent 8mm in the last six hours.

nature photography art science craft

Twenty Microns Between Blueprint and Maybe Nothing

Spore Print Cyanotype Darkroom

The oyster mushroom's spore print has been in the sun for four hours. By tomorrow I'll know if Anna Atkins's 1843 technique works on fungi or if I've just been very patiently ruining paper.

science art photography nature chemistry

The Jar Started Raining at Minute Eight

Terrarium Building

The electronics shop terrarium has been sealed since 2020. Mine started its own weather system in eight minutes.

nature craft science making mindfulness

Forty-Five Minutes Staring at a Shadow That Might Be Growth

Mushroom Spawn Grafting

It's 2:17am and I can't tell if that dark patch in the jar is mycelium starting to spread or just a shadow from the desk lamp. Either way, I've been staring for forty-five minutes.

nature making science mindfulness

Sixteen Temperature Readings From Eight Sensors I Soldered

Stratospheric Balloon Telemetry

The bench test showed sixteen temperature readings when I'd installed eight sensors. Turns out every solder joint was measuring something.

radio electronics aviation science making

Three Point Two Microvolts From a Single Breath

Thermocouple Lace Making

Breathed on the lace, got 3.2 microvolts on the oscilloscope. Every junction where copper crosses bronze is a thermocouple. This was supposed to be decorative.

textiles electronics making craft engineering

Seventy-Three Pops and One Frame Almost in Focus

Soap Bubble Photography

Seventy-three bubbles. I counted. Seventy-three formed and popped in the time it took to get one in focus.

photography science art chemistry

April 2026

Six Tiles Held to the Light, Three Passed

Fipple Harmonic Lithophane Tiles

Physics says slide whistles can only produce odd harmonics. The glowing tiles show which ones are cheating.

making audio art digital craft

Twelve Whistles and a Harmonic That Shouldn't Exist

Slide Whistle Tuning

Twelve whistles for fourteen dollars. I've spent two hours filing the fipple edge on one of them.

music making audio craft science

Six Draws Past the Point Where Bronze Forgives

Bronze Wool Spinning

The sticky note said "anneal after three draws." The wire snapped on draw six. The note is still there.

textiles metalworking audio craft making

Forty-Seven Kilohms of Wire That Should Have Been Scrap

Bronze Wire Coil Pickup Winding

The multimeter reads 47kΩ. A normal pickup reads 6kΩ. I'm calling it a feature.

electronics audio craft making metalworking

Thirty-One Hertz Between One Tine and the Other

Tuning Fork Metallurgy

The tuner says 387 Hz. It should say 440. I filed the tips to raise the pitch. The pitch fell anyway.

making craft music audio metalworking

Three Hundred Strikes Before It Stopped Being Money

Coin Ring Forging

Forty-five minutes of hitting a coin with a hammer and I can't stop thinking about it.

craft making metalworking collecting

The Metal Went Quiet Before It Broke

Singing Bowl Hammering

The internet says anneal every fifty strikes. I waited a hundred. Now I have two semicircles.

craft music metalworking mindfulness audio

The Disc Heard Footsteps the Air Never Carried

Piezoelectric Contact Mic Building

Plug a raw piezo into your recorder and enjoy the majestic sound of a telephone held underwater. One transistor fixes everything.

electronics audio making music craft

The Second Pull Kept What the First One Forgot

Gel Plate Monoprinting

Eleven prints went to recycling. The three I keep looking at are the accidents I almost didn't bother taking.

art craft printmaking analog

One Semitone Past the Point of No Return

Tongue Drum Tuning

Flattening a note takes seconds. Raising it takes forty-five minutes. Guess which way I overshot.

music making craft metalworking audio

Three Springs Cracked Before the Walnut Got Its Voice

Kalimba Making

Three tines snapped. Not from playing — from existing.

music woodworking craft making acoustic

Three Blanks Shattered and the Drivers Still Waiting

Wooden Headphone Enclosure Turning

The chamber volume was mathematically perfect. The walnut exploded anyway.

audio woodworking making craft analog

The Air Remembers Every Roughness in the Wood

Acoustic Phonograph Horn Carving

Mole crickets build exponential horns to amplify their songs. I'm doing the same, but for Caruso.

woodworking audio analog craft history

The Pin Sits Forward of Where the Wind Lands

Weather Vane Whittling

The tail needs more area, the nose needs more weight. Carving a contradiction and hoping brass sorts it out.

woodworking craft outdoors making mechanical

The Grain Runs One Way and So Must the Knife

Spoon Carving

From 0.1mm kumiko tolerances to hacking at birch with a hatchet. The wood has opinions about where the spoon goes.

woodworking craft making mindfulness outdoors

Fifteen Seconds Before the Foam Forgets Itself

Latte Art

Rebuilding the espresso machine was easier than making milk look like a leaf on purpose.

cooking art craft analog mindfulness

The Motor Hummed Till Dawn and the Film Took Dictation

Pinhole Streak Camera Building

The math says width equals constant over velocity. My stationary coffee mug begs to differ.

photography mechanical analog making science

Seven Days of Pressure Before the Paper Remembered Cliffs

Barograph Chart Art

A barograph is basically a barometer that learned how to draw. Mine spent the week sketching April as a mountain range.

mechanical analog science art collecting

A Tenth of a Millimetre and the Rest Is Friction

Kumiko Woodworking

Forty-five minutes of watching a man slot wood into wood without speaking. Then I ordered the jig.

woodworking craft art design making

Arctan of My Latitude Times a Week Without Sun

Sundial Making

Ordered brass and a protractor before realizing I'd committed to a hobby that requires going outside and waiting for the sun.

making craft math science outdoors

The Air Had Geometry That Brass Could Shape

Theremin Antenna Pattern Tuning

Mapping an invisible 3D field with fishing line and shallow breaths. Two hours in, I have half the data.

electronics music radio audio making

Thirty-Five Microns Between Green and Gone

Verdigris Electroetched PCB Art

The board now displays my thumbprints in perfect copper-negative detail. This was not the pattern I intended.

electronics art craft chemistry making

Twenty-Four Hours Before the Green Decides

Vinegar Patina Etching on Bronze

I sealed a cracked singing bowl in a container with ammonia-soaked paper towels. This is either chemistry or a cry for help.

craft chemistry making art metalworking

Seven Thousand Years Before the First Stitch Could Unravel

Nalbinding

Found a bone needle I bought in Reykjavík seven years ago. Finally googled what it was for.

textiles craft history making mindfulness

Grey-Green at the Temperature Where Blue Should Be

Mordant-Dyed Tine Tempering

It's 2:47am and I just ruined three perfectly good tines with fermented oak gall solution.

craft metalworking textiles science history

Three Stitches Gathered Before the Wave Let Go

Sashiko Stitching

The name translates to "little stabs." Three hours in, I can confirm the accuracy.

craft textiles mindfulness art making

Fifteen Seconds Before the Wax Stops Listening

Wax Seal Making

Twenty minutes examining the seal under a loupe before I remembered to open the envelope. The wax won.

craft art analog making history

The Click That Refused to Become a Clack

Telegraph Sounder Restoration

Three adjustment screws, twelve hours of forum reading, and I still can't make it clack properly.

electronics radio mechanical history making

Three Weeks of Staring Before the Green Arrived

Bonsai

New growth and yellowing needles on the same tree. The forums say this is fine. The forums also say it's dying.

nature art craft mindfulness analog

Forty-Three Years of Oxide Before I Dare Press Play

Reel-to-Reel Tape Restoration

The machine came with a tape marked "DAD'S BIRTHDAY 1983." The heads are magnetized. No pressure.

audio mechanical analog electronics collecting

Fifty Years of Basement Cold and Three Pieces of Nylon

Typewriter Restoration

The drawband snapped in my hands. This is not how the restoration forums said this would go.

mechanical craft history making collecting

Four Bags of Green Where Pink Should Have Been

Oyster Mushroom Cultivation

Oyster mycelium hunts nematodes with paralytic toxins. Mine got outcompeted by green fuzz in three days.

nature science cooking making

One Baked Bone Before the Metal Stayed

Pewter Casting

Pet stores sell cuttlebone for birds. I bought twelve and filled them with molten pewter.

craft making art history mechanical

Four Dark Sockets and Three Weeks to Wait

Nixie Tube Clock Building

Two tubes glow, one turned purple, and the "3" displays as a backwards "C." That's not a clock.

electronics making design analog history

Twenty-Five Turns for Every One the Speaker Needs

Vacuum Tube Audio Amplifier Building

A 5-watt Class A amp draws 30 watts from the wall. The other 25 become heat. Audiophiles call this warm.

electronics audio analog making engineering

March 2026

Five Millimetres a Year Is the Whole Hobby

Marimo Moss Ball Cultivation

The clerk called them "practically unkillable," which is how I knew I was being sold something.

nature science collecting mindfulness

Eight Hours Before the Brass Remembers Flow

Espresso Machine Restoration

The eBay listing said it smelled of mould. The listing was accurate.

mechanical making cooking engineering collecting

Six Weeks Before the Fat Forgets Itself

Cold Process Soap Making

Searched "sodium hydroxide disposal" and ended up with a silicone loaf mould in my cart.

craft science chemistry making

Three Coats Before the Cloak Caught Light

Miniature Painting

I was researching ant farm decoration. Three hours later I'd ordered soldiers for a game I don't play.

art craft making miniatures analog

She'll Eat Her Own Wings When She Gets Here

Ant Keeping

A founding queen digests her own flight muscles into eggs. I have an empty test tube and a wait until spring.

nature science making craft engineering

The Slippers Were Faster Than I Expected

Microscopy

Something was moving in the ammonia test water. Squinting didn't help.

science photography nature collecting analog

The Back Glass Disappeared at Hour Six

Aquascaping

Tissue culture plants arrived. I couldn't wait six weeks for invisible bacteria. The tank has been soup for six hours.

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Nine Rotations Before the Thread Trapped Itself

Fly Tying

A mayfly hatched from my bonsai's drip tray. Now I'm learning to counterfeit insects.

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The Blank Remembered It Was Glass

Telescope Mirror Grinding

Target tolerance: 50 nanometres. My grinding stand was off by 3mm. The blank lasted twenty minutes.

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The Furnace Registers at 3.2 Hertz

Geophone Seismography

The amplifier works perfectly. I can now confirm my furnace oscillates at 3.2 Hz. Earthquakes remain elusive.

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Four Pull Tabs Before the Silver Appeared

Metal Detecting

Target ID 48. I will not dig any more pull tabs today. Dug a 48. It was a pull tab.

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The Hot Spot I Found and Then Immediately Lost

Crystal Radio Restoration

Forty-five minutes of dragging wire across a rock. Then a mattress ad. Then I breathed wrong and lost the signal.

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Three Instruments, Three Answers, One Atmosphere

Weather Station Building

My phone says 1018 hPa. The new barometer says 989. The airport says 1016. One atmosphere shouldn't need this many opinions.

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The Sun Painted What I Left in the Dark

Cyanotype Printing

Half the formula was already in my darkroom. The other half is FDA-approved for treating radiation poisoning.

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Thirty Years of Transmitting Before I Learned to Listen

Shortwave Listening

Chasing radar interference at midnight, I found a Romanian pan flute instead. Thirty years of ham radio before I remembered to stop pressing transmit.

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Five Signatures for Five Hundred Years of Circuits

Coptic Stitch Flight Logbook Binding

My Jeppesen spine cracked again. Transport Canada doesn't mandate logbook format. Coptic monks solved this 1,800 years ago.

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Nineteen Pins, Sixty Keys, and a Spacebar That Finally Quit

Mechanical Keyboard Building

The spacebar quit after fifteen years. Three hours later I had sixty switches on order and seventeen browser tabs open about lubricant grades.

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Three Hours and Now I Own Copper Wire

Bonsai

Three hours ago I was reading about tree rings. Now I own copper wire.

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What My Fingers Knew Before I Did

Lockpicking

Forty-three seconds to open a lock that took twenty-seven days to learn. My fingers figured it out without telling me.

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What Silver Halide Remembers in the Dark

Analog Film Photography Development

The movies lied—there's no moody red safelight. Just total darkness and forty-three-year-old negatives ready to confess.

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Seven Millimetres of Brass and Everything Else Is Wood

Pen Turning

Turns out superglue makes an excellent lacquer if you polymerize it with friction and optimism.

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Three Significant Figures and the Rest Was Memory

Slide Rule Collecting

It's 2 AM and I'm teaching myself to multiply. The year, somehow, is 2026.

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Sixty Thousand Workers and No Org Chart

Beekeeping

Sixty thousand decision-makers, zero central authority. Still better organised than my last project team.

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What the Creases Already Knew

Origami Engineering

I spent an hour arguing with a theorem about paper. The paper won.

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Four Weeks Before the Gravel Remembers How to Shine

Rock Tumbling

Silicon carbide is stardust. I'm using it to polish gravel in a rubber drum for a month.

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Two Mirrors and an S That Landed Right

Linocut Printmaking

The S is backwards. No—wait. The S is correct. My brain keeps tripping over the double negative.

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One Streak of Char and a Letter to Tomorrow

Pyrography

Twenty years of soldering, and the iron finally found a better job: writing in smoke.

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Three Fragments Where Eighty Years Should Be

Dendrochronology Core Sampling

The core is in three pieces. None of them are long enough to count.

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Forty Minutes Until the Tomato Apologized

Knife Sharpening

The knife was tearing tomatoes. Forty minutes with a wet rock later, they started apologizing.

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The Fifth Pull Finally Looked Like Weather

Paper Marbling (Ebru)

A sample sheet of marbled paper arrived with my bookbinding thread. Forty-eight hours later I'm buying ox gall.

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Twelve Dollars, One Kinked Spiral, and Fifteen Teeth Untouched

Mechanical Watch Disassembly

The seller called it "parts only." I called it a twelve-dollar curriculum in precision.

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Four Sheets Folded Before the Thread Knew When to Stop

Bookbinding

Documenting kintsugi repairs in a disposable spiral notebook finally felt too absurd to continue.

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Seven Pieces and a Box Full of Humidity

Kintsugi

Dropped the mug I spent days engraving. Now I'm fixing it with gold and developing a rash.

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February 2026

The Gills Lied About Their Colour

Mushroom Foraging & Spore Printing

The gills promised white. The paper said rust. Six hours of waiting to discover somebody was lying.

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Seventeen Jewels and One Hairline Fracture

Mechanical Watch Disassembly

Seventeen jewels. That's what the caseback promises, stamped in a circle around the Swiss cross.

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The Patch Kept Running While I Wasn't Looking

Monthly Retrospective

Twenty-eight hobbies. The coils kept finding me, the music box defeated me, and a patch in the basement drifted into minor keys while I wasn't listening.

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The Sounder Learned to Hold a Pitch

Harmonic Telegraph Key Restoration

Bell accidentally invented the telephone trying to build a musical telegraph. I'm finishing his original project.

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The Air Between My Fingers Wouldn't Sing

Theremin Circuit Voicing

Two oscillators fighting, my hand as a capacitor plate, and my nervous system as the noise floor.

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Eight Thousand Turns Before the String Could Sing

Guitar Pickup Winding

Eight thousand turns of hair-thin wire. One sneeze and you start over.

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The Jar Started Pinging at Four in the Morning

Fermentation Sensor Logging

Six hours after the starter showed life, I had a time-of-flight sensor pointed at it like a balloon payload.

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Eleven Minutes Before the Chaff Caught Fire

Roasting Profile Curve Engraving

The popcorn popper caught fire at minute seven. I still engraved the mug.

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Dave's Thirty-Year Culture and the Move I Had to Make

Sourdough Bread Baking

Dave handed me a mason jar and said "feed it or it dies." That sounded like a challenge.

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The Wind Found Its Way to the Cathode

Nixie Tube Flight Instrument Clocks

The Soviet "5" is just an upside-down "2". I'm trusting it to show me the altimeter setting anyway.

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Fourteen Pins, One Crooked, and a Hymn Stuck in Brass

Cylinder Music Box Transcription Punching

Fourteen pins. That's all I punched before I ruined the cylinder.

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Three Cups, One Wobble, and a Northwest Gust

Mechanical Weather Vane Instruments

Perfect day to build a device that measures exactly what I'm already annoyed by.

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Eighty-Five Teeth and Mars Still Drifted

Orrery Clockwork Escapement Printing

Eighty-five teeth for Mars. Forty-five for Earth. A fishing sinker doing orbital mechanics on my workbench.

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The Box That Learned to Say No Seven Different Ways

Puzzle Box Mechanism Design

Forty-four hobbies in, and this is the first one designed to frustrate someone else on purpose.

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The Payload Stopped Talking at Eight Hundred Metres

Stratospheric Balloon Telemetry

A stranger named Dwight called to say there was a styrofoam box in his slough. He was remarkably calm about it.

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The Moon Learned to Glow Through Two Millimetres of PLA

Lithophane Lunar Phase Calendars

NASA publishes the moon's exact wobble hourly as JSON. I'm turning a year of it into glowing plastic.

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Five Pins, Zero Opens, and One Bent Hook

Lockpicking

The pick bent on the third pin. The lock remains locked. Day 1 goes to the padlock.

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The Beam Traced a Face the Speakers Couldn't Stand

Oscilloscope Art Portraiture

The face on the phosphor looks almost friendly. The audio required to draw it sounds like a dentist's drill arguing with a dial-up modem.

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The Patch Kept Running After I Forgot to Listen

Generative Soundscape Composition

The Pi in my basement ran for 37 days without supervision. When I finally listened, I didn't recognize my own patch.

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Teaching a Junk-Drawer Nib to Remember Blue

Fountain Pen Restoration

The nib hasn't written since 1962. I'm fixing that with shellac, a brass shim, and excessive optimism.

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The Cross-Country That Learned to Keep the Beat

Flightpath Zoetrope Drums

Victorian parlour trick meets GPS log meets strobe light. Somewhere in the blur, September is learning to drum.

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The Desk That Knows When the Sky Is Busy

Orbital Decay Audio Notifications

Something chimed on my desk at 14:23 and I looked up from the wrong screen. The ISS had just cleared my horizon, and I'd missed the first note.

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The Waterfall Scrolled Green and Nothing Burned

Meteor-Scatter Shutter Triggers

It's 2:47 AM and I've been waiting for France to bounce a meteor my way. So far: thirty-seven frames of black sky.

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Two States Between Static and a Forest

Generative Soundscape Composition

Six days of overengineering. The fix was two states and thirty percent. I'm almost embarrassed.

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Writing Games in Light on a Quiet Board

Chess Move Lighttrail Journaling

On move 23, I hesitated. The scoresheet forgave me. The photograph didn't.

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The Knight That Learned to Leap in Solfège

Knight's Tour Choral Canons

Sixty lines of Python generated a melody full of tritones. Now I have to convince my voice it's singable.

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What the Shutter Saw When the Choir Went Flat

Choir Pitch Lightpainting

A community choir can defeat a microcontroller in under four seconds. I have the coloured squiggles to prove it.

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Teaching a Knight to File a Flight Plan

VFR Knight's Tour Grid Flights

The script found a perfect 41-square tour. Then I checked for restricted airspace.

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Before I Read the Weather I Heard It Hum

METAR Chord Briefings

Clear skies make my synth go silent. Terrible weather sounds gorgeous. I may have the emotional mapping backwards.

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The Balloon Climbed for an Hour Without Changing Key

Stratospheric Telemetry Chord Maps

The script converted my balloon data into MIDI without a single error. The result was one hour of C-sharp minor.

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January 2026

The Bearings That Learned to Hold My Coffee

QSO Radial VOR Dial Coasters

Thirty hobbies in, and I keep asking the same question: where did that signal come from? Now my coffee mug rests on the answer.

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The Air Had Geometry All Along

Monthly Retrospective

Radio signals became lanterns. Flight paths became thread. A star disc stayed silent. January taught me the air has shapes worth holding.

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The Disc That Knew a Star but Forgot How to Sing

Stellar Spectrum Music Box Discs

The disc contains Sirius. The pins are 0.3 mm too short. The music box plays exactly nothing.

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Asking Polaris for a Second Opinion on North

Star-Drift Compass Calibration Cards

Polaris is 0.7 degrees off true north. My compass is worse. Tonight we're going to have a conversation.

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The Bishop Finally Admitted It Had a Back Lobe

Antenna Pattern Chess Set

The rook has a back lobe. When I pick up the bishop, I can feel the null. That sounds absurd. It is. I don't care.

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Stitching the Sky While the Payload Keeps Talking

Stratospheric Telemetry Panorama Stitching

A protocol invented for tracking horses now tells my balloon when to photograph the edge of space. This seems fine.

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Teaching the Wind to Sign My Name in Dits and Dahs

Callsign Morse Windchime Mobile

The code is not in the tubes. The code is in the gaps. You will space your first set of chimes evenly because it looks elegant. The result will sound like noise.

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Every Position Hums If You Let It

Zugzwang Cadence Etudes

Move 23 cost me the game. I know because I turned it into a guitar piece that refuses to resolve.

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When the Flight Log Learned to Whisper in Thread

Morse Waypoint Flightpath Embroidery

The flight log didn't ask to become fabric. Neither did the Morse code. I overruled them both.

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The Baton That Learned to Hear Us Drift

Pitch-Tracking Conductor Baton

The sopranos drifted flat and my face was three beats too late. Now my baton does the yelling—in LED.

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When the Flyby Learned to Hum Its Own Speed

Propeller Doppler Arpeggiator

Wind from the northwest, gusting to 25 km/h. Not ideal for flying—but exactly what my arpeggios needed.

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The Racetrack in the Sky Had a Time Signature

Holding-Pattern Polyrhythm Loops

Standard-rate turns are 3° per second—exactly 60 seconds for 180°. The FAA didn't mean to write a time signature, but here we are.

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The Knight That Learned to Bend Starlight

Knight Aperture Star Spikes

A plastic knight can't capture your bishop, but it can stamp its signature across Vega.

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The Broadcast That Wouldn't Hold Still for the Choir

ATIS Choir Harmonization

I built a click track at 84 BPM. The ATIS announcer did not consult it.

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A Knight's Walk Across a Programmable Night

Knight’s Tour Starfield Mosaic

Sixty-four tiles, one knight's tour, and a sky that cooperated like it had read the algorithm.

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The Chord I Could Finally Hold

Chord Spectrogram Relief Tiles

Two out of three chord guesses right—by touch alone. My fingers apparently know things my ears don't.

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Where the Radio Pointed While the Stars Turned

QSO Constellation Overlays

You're going to draw lines on the sky—not with a laser, but with spherical trig and old logbook entries.

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The Hiss That Refused to Become a Room

Generative Soundscape Composition

Five things blew up in the first hour. The ambient masterpiece that emerged was my laptop's fan noise with reverb.

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The Patch Keeps Running After I Leave the Room

Generative Soundscape Composition

Back at this. Third time this week. The 7 MHz band sounded strange and I couldn't not record it.

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The Choir That Lives Inside the Carrier Wave

Morse Canon Choir Loops

Somewhere, a ham operator has no idea their callsign is now a four-part canon on my loop pedal.

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Printing the Sky My Radio Forgot to Keep

APRS Skytrace Sculptures

The tracker gossips to digipeaters I've never met, and somewhere a map in Japan shows a foam aircraft drawing loops over frozen Alberta.

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The Antenna Finally Admitted It Had a Shape

Antenna Lobe Lanterns

The antenna rotates like it's auditioning for a lighthouse job. Eventually, it becomes one.

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The Signal Sends a Fork and I Answer

Morse Chess Tactics Beacon

Keyed a knight fork into the ether. Decoded it by ear. Solved it wrong. At least the transmission was clean.

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The Ribbon That Refused to Touch Its Own Terrain

VFR Track Relief Printing

My flight path floated a storey above its own mountain. GPS and terrain data have different opinions about ground.

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Teaching a Foam Wing to Sign the Dusk

RC Light-Trace Calligraphy

The aircraft vanishes in the long exposure; only its glowing path remains. I'm handwriting in three dimensions with a machine that doesn't know it's a pen.

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Nine Miles of Visibility in a Major Seventh

METAR Chord Briefings

Nine statute miles of visibility produces a major seventh. I've accidentally turned preflight planning into jazz.

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The Beacon That Spelled My Name to Polaris

Morse Beacon Star-Trail Lightpainting

A dah is three dits, a letter gap is three dits, and somehow that led to teaching an LED to spell my callsign while Polaris rotated overhead.

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Teaching a Foam Wing to See What Radios Hear

Airborne RF Shadow Cartography

A buried irrigation pipe showed up in my heatmap before I knew it existed. The foam wing sees what I can't.

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Teaching a Foam Wing to Draw the Ground

Foam-Wing Orthomosaic Mapping

Teaching a computer to recognize a park from 200 slightly different angles—like raising a very slow bird.

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Holding the Spectrum Up to the Window

RF Waterfall Lithophanes

The spectrogram scrolled down my screen at 2 AM, and I thought: what if I could hold that hour of invisible radio up to a window?

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The Feedback Loop Only Sounded Beautiful Once

Generative Soundscape Composition

Eight seconds of cascading self-referential harmony. Then the audio interface died and stayed dead for an hour.

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The Ionosphere Wrote the Harmony While I Wasn't Listening

Generative Soundscape Composition

Set grain duration to 8 milliseconds, got a refrigerator compressor. The 20ms boundary between texture and pitch is real.

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The Sky Was Never Silent, Just Radio Silent

Aurora Chorus Sonified Timelapse

The aurora has been broadcasting this whole time. I just needed a radio and a frozen field to finally hear it complain.

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Teaching My Computer to Dream in Sound

Generative Soundscape Composition

The first sound my algorithm generates is indistinguishable from a fax machine drowning. This is, apparently, progress.

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A Quarter Watt from the Edge of Space

Stratospheric Balloon Telemetry

It's 2:47 AM and I just ordered missile-grade GPS to track a latex balloon carrying a thermometer.

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