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
- CERN To Host Europe's Flagship Open Access Publishing Platform - 2026-03-27 02:00
- Apple Gives FBI a User's Real Name Hidden Behind 'Hide My Email' Feature - 2026-03-26 22:30
- Apple Discontinues Mac Pro - 2026-03-26 18:00
- Senators Demand to Know How Much Energy Data Centers Use - 2026-03-26 17:00
- JPMorgan Starts Monitoring Investment Banker Screen Time To Prevent Burnout - 2026-03-26 16:00
hackaday
- This Flow Battery Operates With No Pump Required - 2026-03-27 03:00
- Improving Soda by Turning It Into Mead - 2026-03-27 00:00
- Momentus Clock Aims To Find Meaning - 2026-03-26 21:00
- Comparing the Power Usage of 12 VDC and 240 VAC Kettles - 2026-03-26 18:00
- Looking at a Bike Built for the Apocalypse - 2026-03-26 15:00
neatorama
- Everything You Need to Know About Marshmallow Peeps - 2026-03-26 20:23
- Another Day: The Calculator That Makes You Feel Old - 2026-03-26 18:14
- Fat Cat Gets Trapped in Couch While Trying to Escape Vet Visit - 2026-03-26 09:37
- Cat Drives Off Bears - 2026-03-26 09:20
- The Pickle Puffer - 2026-03-26 09:03
NPR
- Senate votes to fund much of DHS, minus immigration enforcement - 2026-03-27 02:19
- Judge weighs whether Venezuela can pay Maduro's legal costs in US drug trafficking case - 2026-03-27 01:55
- A surprise resignation could open the door for an independent to win a Montana Senate seat - 2026-03-26 23:01
- The depleted Education Department will move out of its headquarters - 2026-03-26 20:51
- Judge temporarily blocks Trump administration's Anthropic ban - 2026-03-26 19:17
jacobin
- Hugh Mulzac’s Journey From Black Nationalism to the New Deal - 2026-03-26 10:14
- A Top Pentagon AI Gatekeeper Has a Stake in Anthropic’s Rival - 2026-03-26 08:00
- JROTC Is Preying on Poor Students - 2026-03-26 07:30
- Project Hail Mary Is the Feel-Good Dystopian Sci-fi We Need - 2026-03-26 06:04
- TSA Is on a Brown-Bag Strike — and Crippling Airports - 2026-03-26 04:36
africa is a country
- After the subcontracting state - 2026-03-26 06:45
- Cooking up the city - 2026-03-25 05:00
- Who owns the memory of struggle? - 2026-03-24 07:00
- Greater Israel and the new regional order - 2026-03-23 07:00
- Senegal’s theater of morality - 2026-03-20 07:00
404media
- Apple Gives FBI a User’s Real Name Hidden Behind ’Hide My Email’ Feature - 2026-03-26 14:38
- Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content - 2026-03-26 11:13
- Police Used Flock to Give a Man a Traffic Ticket - 2026-03-26 10:04
- Why It's Good to Jack Off Frequently, According to Science - 2026-03-25 11:38
- Disney's Sora Disaster Shows AI Will Not Revolutionize Hollywood - 2026-03-25 09:15
techdirt
- Robert Malone Resigns From ACIP After Internal Squabble - 2026-03-26 22:23
- Ctrl-Alt-Speech: For Meta Or Worse - 2026-03-26 18:20
- Blocking The Internet Archive Won’t Stop AI, But It Will Erase The Web’s Historical Record - 2026-03-26 15:44
- America’s Self-Proclaimed Free Speech Warrior, Brendan Carr, Gets A Letter Documenting His First Amendment Violations - 2026-03-26 14:25
- Judge Boots DOJ Prosecutor From Courtroom, Demands To Know Who’s Actually Calling The Shots - 2026-03-26 12:46
the register personal tech
- AMD’s new desktop CPU oozes cache out of all 16 cores - 2026-03-26 16:12
- Apple signs meaningless deal to make some less-important parts in America - 2026-03-26 12:09
- UK wants to know if banning under-16s from social media does anything useful - 2026-03-26 04:30
- Go for a walk, man: Sony's drive to create a car parked by partner Honda - 2026-03-26 01:24
- Dell slims down business laptops, fattens up cooling and battery life - 2026-03-25 08:00
sciencedaily
- This dangerous combo in your body could raise death risk by 83% - 2026-03-27 00:23
- Scientists uncovered the nutrients bees were missing — Colonies surged 15-fold - 2026-03-26 23:17
- Freshwater fish populations plunge 81% as river migrations collapse - 2026-03-26 20:51
- Scientists create clear nail polish that lets you use touchscreens with long nails - 2026-03-26 20:43
- This cow uses tools like a primate—and scientists are stunned - 2026-03-26 07:28
space.com
- Watch the BBC's Dr Who spin-off 'The War Between the Land and the Sea' and every episode of the classic Dr Who series on your travels with our exclusive NordVPN deal - 2026-03-27 03:00
- Hitting the brakes: Hubble Space Telescope watches doomed comet reverse its spin - 2026-03-26 17:00
- Sun storms are powered by a magnetic engine 16 Earths deep, study finds - 2026-03-26 15:02
- 'For All Mankind' is confirmed for season 6, but it'll be the final mission for Apple TV's incredible space show - 2026-03-26 14:25
- Don't miss the waxing moon swing by the Beehive star cluster March 27 - 2026-03-26 12:00
space news
- U.S. GSSAP satellites execute GEO handoff to monitor China’s Shijian-29 spacecraft - 2026-03-26 18:12
- Space Command begins phased move to Alabama - 2026-03-26 16:20
- Government use of commercial procurement models has limitations in space - 2026-03-26 15:36
- Turning growth into profits remains a challenge as space demand grows - 2026-03-26 14:49
- Xona raises $170 million for satellite navigation network - 2026-03-26 14:17
phys.org
- From simulation to strategy: Climate modeling motivates action at the top - 2026-03-26 23:20
- Study in search of a tropical spring is first to show some birds flip their breeding season in response to climate - 2026-03-26 23:10
- From engineered fungal molecules to drug leads, chem-bio hybrid synthesis enables antiparasitic drug discovery - 2026-03-26 22:30
- Scientists may be overestimating amounts of microplastics in the environment, and the culprit is lab gloves - 2026-03-26 21:50
- Study finds 60% of Australia's top-use pesticides are banned in the EU - 2026-03-26 21:20
onion latest
- Delta Suspends Special Congressional Services Amid TSA Shutdown - 2026-03-26 15:57
- ChatGPT Convinces Sam Altman To Kill Humanity - 2026-03-26 13:00
- The Onion’s Exclusive Interview With Taylor Frankie Paul - 2026-03-26 10:38
- ‘Love Story’ Inspires Viewers To Half-Ass Flying Lessons - 2026-03-26 08:00
- FDA Approves Lettuce That Can Be Remotely Detonated In Event Of Recall - 2026-03-26 08:00
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