ultrascience labs
This brand makes the thing which a consumer is satisfied with. - engrish.com
lab notes
Research articles and blog posts, some of it evergreen. Included archived blog posts restored from previous website incarnations.
r & d
Work logs for past and present hobby projects. Case mods, electronics, models, woodworking, vintage audio.
linkroll
A cultivated collection of link to sites of all types. Currently working on a linkroll and directories section - a linkroll of linkrolls.
current news
RSS headlines. Sources are subject to change. I try to use sources that are relatively resource light, and produce feed XML docs that aren't ridiculously boated. As usual, tread carefully in the comments sections, for example slashdot is a good source for headlines, but the comment section is full of Libertarians.
slashdot
- WP Engine Says Automattic Planned To Shake Down 10 Hosting Companies For WordPress Royalties - 2026-02-12 15:00
- Anthropic Raises $30 Billion at $380 Billion Valuation, Eyes IPO This Year - 2026-02-12 14:00
- Palo Alto Chose Not To Tie China To Hacking Campaign For Fear of Retaliation From Beijing - 2026-02-12 13:10
- Microsoft Plans Smartphone-Style Permission Prompts for Windows 11 Apps - 2026-02-12 12:10
- Border Officials Are Said To Have Caused El Paso Closure by Firing Anti-Drone Laser - 2026-02-12 11:12
hackaday
- Storing Image Data As Analog Audio - 2026-02-12 15:00
- Exploring Homebrew for the Pokémon Mini - 2026-02-12 13:30
- The Death of Baseload and Similar Grid Tropes - 2026-02-12 12:00
- Bash via Transpiler - 2026-02-12 10:30
- Practice Makes Perfect: The Wet Dress Rehearsal - 2026-02-12 09:00
neatorama
- Cappuccino Served in a Rotisserie Chicken - 2026-02-12 13:26
- The Oldest Olympic Athlete Was This 72-Year Old Man - 2026-02-12 13:15
- Valentine's Day Lore is Full of Myths - 2026-02-12 10:22
- Mystery Kitten Becomes Devoted Companion - 2026-02-11 18:57
- How Hannibal Lecter Grabbed Us All - 2026-02-11 09:46
NPR
- Ukrainians rally in support of Olympian Vladyslav Heraskevych, banned for his helmet - 2026-02-12 14:38
- ICE conducted 37 investigations into officer misconduct in last year - 2026-02-12 14:38
- 54-year-old U.S. curler sets new American Winter Olympics age record - 2026-02-12 14:36
- Federal judge orders return of Venezuelan migrants deported to El Salvador under Alien Enemies Act - 2026-02-12 13:05
- Have astronomers witnessed the birth of a black hole? - 2026-02-12 13:02
jacobin
- Mark Zuckerberg Wanted to Keep in Touch With Jeffrey Epstein - 2026-02-12 08:30
- The Legacy of the International Socialists, 50 Years Later - 2026-02-12 06:53
- Union Coordination Is Essential to Organizing Amazon - 2026-02-12 06:28
- The Working Class Can’t Be Bought Off Quite So Easily - 2026-02-12 05:17
- Trump Is Dismantling Civil Rights Oversight of ICE - 2026-02-12 04:03
africa is a country
- Revolution without illusion - 2026-02-12 07:00
- Who own’s Ghana’s mission schools? - 2026-02-11 03:30
- Gen Z’s electoral dilemma - 2026-02-10 04:30
- A world reimagined in Black - 2026-02-09 06:00
- The trouble with ‘showing the real Africa’ - 2026-02-07 05:45
404media
- Waymo Is Getting DoorDashers to Close Doors on Self Driving Cars - 2026-02-12 13:34
- Cops Are Buying ‘GeoSpy’, an AI That Geolocates Photos in Seconds - 2026-02-12 08:14
- Free Tool Says it Can Bypass Discord's Age Verification Check With a 3D Model - 2026-02-11 14:53
- Government Loses Hard Drives It Was Supposed to Put ICE Detention Center Footage On - 2026-02-11 12:06
- A Mystery Inside Earth’s Core Has Finally Been Solved With a Mind-Boggling Discovery - 2026-02-11 10:42
techdirt
- Bondi Spying On Congressional Epstein Searches Should Be A Major Scandal - 2026-02-12 13:55
- ICE, CBP Knew Facial Recognition App Couldn’t Do What DHS Says It Could, Deployed It Anyway - 2026-02-12 12:42
- Daily Deal: The 2026 Complete Firewall Admin Bundle - 2026-02-12 12:38
- Joseph Gordon-Levitt Goes To Washington DC, Gets Section 230 Completely Backwards - 2026-02-12 11:26
- Donald Trump Is VERY EXCITED About All Of Our Shitty Right Wing Broadcasters Merging Into One Bigger, Even Shittier Company - 2026-02-12 07:34
the register personal tech
- Apple patches decade-old iOS zero-day, possibly exploited by commercial spyware - 2026-02-12 08:01
- Memory price explosion triggers PC buying spree - 2026-02-12 07:31
- UK unveils telecoms charter to curb mid-contract bill shocks - 2026-02-12 04:58
- Meta will let users tweak Threads algorithms as long as they ask nicely - 2026-02-11 14:50
- Apple's Creator Studio creates a subscription where free apps used to live - 2026-02-11 06:47
sciencedaily
- Scientists discover protein that rejuvenates aging brain cells - 2026-02-12 08:42
- Europe’s “untouched” wilderness was shaped by Neanderthals and hunter-gatherers - 2026-02-12 08:14
- Yellowstone wolves may not have transformed the national park after all - 2026-02-12 07:51
- Astronomers discover an Earth-like planet that may be colder than Mars - 2026-02-12 07:32
- NASA scientists say meteorites can’t explain mysterious organic compounds on Mars - 2026-02-12 07:17
space.com
- Deja vu: Vulcan Centaur rocket powers through 'significant performance anomaly' on satellite launch - 2026-02-12 15:00
- Scientists have found a weird 'inside out' planetary system. Here's what it looks like - 2026-02-12 14:00
- Astronomers witness vanishing star collapse into a black hole in Andromeda galaxy - 2026-02-12 13:00
- Watch a bright fireball blaze a 48-mile path over the Midwest US (video) - 2026-02-12 12:19
- SpaceX Crew-12 launch latest news: NASA ISS astronaut crew ready to fly - 2026-02-12 11:35
space news
- Axiom Space raises additional $350 million - 2026-02-12 15:00
- ThinKom gets military contract to supply portable ground stations for satellite communications - 2026-02-12 13:07
- It is time to take astronomy off Earth - 2026-02-12 08:00
- Software startup Integrate makes push into defense market following Space Force award - 2026-02-12 07:47
- Launch companies debate how to compete against SpaceX - 2026-02-12 06:20
phys.org
- New 3D printing ink uses 70% lignin and recycles with water - 2026-02-12 15:13
- Photonic integrated circuits enable programmable non-Abelian 'braiding' of light states - 2026-02-12 15:00
- Gravitational lensing technique unveils supermassive black hole pairs - 2026-02-12 14:56
- What to know about EPA decision to revoke a scientific finding that helped fight climate change - 2026-02-12 14:40
- New perspectives on how physical instabilities drive embryonic development - 2026-02-12 14:32
onion latest
- U.S. Gains Almost No Jobs In 2025 - 2026-02-12 15:05
- Turning Point USA Announces Alternative Puerto Rico - 2026-02-12 14:10
- Pam Bondi Thought That Went Pretty Well - 2026-02-12 12:52
- OpenAI Introduces Premium Video Generator For White House Advisors Manipulating Trump - 2026-02-12 11:16
- Study: Bonobos Capable Of Human-Like Pretend Play - 2026-02-12 10:14
changelogs
December 2025
2025-12-22 - r & d - Infrastructure worklogs updated in shop rehab redux
November 2025
2025-11-09 - updated the ticker links to open in new tabs.
2025-11-07 - updated yellow to version 0.9.16
July 2025
2025-07-15 - linkroll - added links to the esoterica, linkrolls, design inspiration, and woodworking sections.
March 2025
2025-03-10 - r&d - Added the "rei & asuka" entry under r&d -> case mods -> legacy case mods. I also realized that I also got my Dragon case work log entered but forgot to update the change log to document it. So check that out too, I guess.
February 2025
2025-02-26 - Spent a few days messing around with the site layout. Went crazy with the icons and integrated them into the nav areas of the site. I created new layouts to generate dynamic icon-based navigation. I also pushed the "about" sections to the bottom of their respective sections.
2025-02-20 - linkroll - Alphabetized the linkroll categories. Working on putting together a linkroll/directory category.
December 2024
2024-12-20 - lab notes - Taking advantage of the new lab notes blog format and manually importing content from the previous iterations of the site. I've imported both Greymatter versions of the blog (thanks to the Internet Archive) and I'm working through the Drupal blog posts pulled from the backups I restored in October. I'm including comment text inline with the post content - click "read more" under any of the older blog posts to see them. I should also note that since these restored posts are over 15 years old many of the links are dead. I'm linking to Internet Archive pages contemporary to the date of the blog post in question where needed and when possible.
November 2024
2024-11-18 - linkroll - Adding more links new categories over the last several days. A bit of styling on the headers to improve readability.
2024-11-02 - Updated the styling for the ultrascience_efc theme used on the lab notes pages.
2024-11-02 - lab notes - adjusting content sorting. Lab notes is now in a blog format, using tags to sort blog entries and logn form research articles.
2024-11-01 - linkroll - Added new links
2024-11-01 - Added ticker feeds
October 2024
2024-10-31 - Working on the front page layout. Rolling latest changes into the changelogs. Still messing with the ticker feeds.
2024-10-30 - Updated Datenstrom Yellow to version 0.9, installed ticker extension for displaying RSS feed content. Currently just dumping it on the bottom of the homepage. I also installed the blog extension. I'm also considering other structural changes to the site.
2024-10-22 - lab notes - new article "A Site Recovery 15 years in the making" created to track archived site recovery work. Article is live, but very under construction
2024-10-22 - Been working on recovering the circa 2005 version of the site from my old backups. At the time it was using Drupal 4.7 running on a typical LAMP stack. Recovery work will be logged in a new lab notes article.
2024-10-04 - homepage - added icons, refreshed intro copy, cleaned up changelogs
September 2024
2024-09-16 - r & d - Whitewings worklogs updated under paper airplanes
2024-09-16 - lab notes - Updated the "whitewings" lab notes entry in the "models, hobbytronics & programming" notebook. Added links for model and manual scans. Updated the History of Jet Fighters and Volume 1 worklogs to include a list of models with assembly and flight reviews. Work will be ongoing there as I build and fly models.
2024-09-09 - r&d - Started work on the "Whitewings - History of Jet Fighters 1992" worklog under the r & d section
August 2024
2024-08-01 - August was offline work
July 2024
2024-07-15 - r&d - Started work on the "Whitewings - Excellent Paper Airplanes Volume 1 1980" worklog under the r & d section
2024-07-01 - lab notes - Created the "whitewings" lab notes entry in the "models, hobbytronics & programming" notebook
April 2024
2024-04-17- homepage - Continuing updates - all experimental. Added a current research section as a kind of "now" page.
2024-04-16 - lab notes -New article published "why we are still using 88x31 buttons"
2024-04-04 - homepage - Cleaning up changelogs and latest changes on homepage, added intro copy.
2024-04-04 - linkroll - Added a "categories" list.
2024-04-04 - homepage - Adding icons and images for interest.
2024-04-01 - r&d - Completed the "mdportal elite" entry under r&d -> case mods -> legacy case mods
March 2024
- r&d - Started with restoring my 'ancient' case mod project logs and updating them for the new site.
Updated theming for the R&D section of the site.
2024-03-06 - lab notes - New article published "windows xp running on a vm"
2024-03-01 - lab notes - New article published "searching for search"
February 2024
2024-2-30 - linkroll - Added new category papercraft
2024-2-23 - linkroll - Added links to tools and resources I've been using to build this site.
2024-2-23 - Applied font sub-setting to drastically reduce font download size, played with header font styling.
2024-2-3 - Updated blue theme colors for the landing page and played with background images and styling in general.
January 2024
2024-1-28 - linkroll - Added more links to the.
2024-1-26 - Working on categories/layout for the linkroll.
current research
Web
Thanks to my restored backups and the Internet Archive, I was able to pull in the blog content from my pre 2010 Greymatter and Drupal versions of the site in the lab notes. Content is tagged with "greymatter" and "drupal" as appropriate. Old comments are included. I'm still working on old project logs.
Hardware
Workshop reorganization has continued through the fall and into winter. But along the way I've knocked out a few projects and made headway on others. Details coming.
Papercraft/Models
Paper airplanes made for some fun summer and fall flying, but wet and cold winter weather has settled in so I've been spending time on the model railroad layout. It's a mixed-gauge two-level layout consisting of HO and HOn30. The main HOn30 in-town streetcar loop track has been laid and wired, and I've laid track on the HO portion. Details coming.
Infrastructure
Shop re-org and updates continue. I still need to document the work so I can keep track of it in the future - if only I had a website for tracking projects...
about
Welcome to the labs. Back in the early 2000s I was playing with case mods and website design and I set up this domain as a homepage to share my projects and sandbox to play with various development tools and styles.
I dropped it after several years, but lately I've wanted a place to record and share my old and new project work again. So I re-registered the site and dusted off my old data files.
system status
Generator: Datenstrom Yellow version 0.9.16