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
- Critical Atlantic Current Significantly More Likely To Collapse Than Thought - 2026-04-17 22:30
- Online Personalities and Comedians Overtake TV and Newspapers as Primary News Sources - 2026-04-17 18:00
- NIST Limits CVE Enrichment After 263% Surge In Vulnerability Submissions - 2026-04-17 17:00
- Gazing Into Sam Altman's Orb Could Solve Ticket Scalping - 2026-04-17 16:00
- Mozilla 'Thunderbolt' Is an Open-Source AI Client Focused On Control and Self-Hosting - 2026-04-17 15:00
hackaday
- FRED Comes to Hobby Operating Systems (and Linux) - 2026-04-17 21:00
- Making a Bronze Mirror From Scratch - 2026-04-17 18:00
- Cooking With Plasma (Not Fire) - 2026-04-17 15:00
- 2026 Green Powered Challenge: SolMate Charges On the Move - 2026-04-17 12:30
- Hackaday Podcast Episode 366: DOOM on a Toaster, Music in LED Strips, and Old Drives in New Clothes - 2026-04-17 11:30
neatorama
- American Language Mistakes That Wouldn't Happen in Britain - 2026-04-17 20:00
- Police Do Welfare Check on 91-Year Old Woman, Find Her Playing Video Games - 2026-04-17 09:19
- The Final Victim of the Berlin Wall - 2026-04-17 08:17
- All the Reasons for Dave's Suffering Today - 2026-04-17 06:40
- A Lush Garden of Mondegreens - 2026-04-16 19:41
NPR
- Judge halts local TV giant Nexstar's takeover of rival Tegna until trial - 2026-04-17 21:24
- Deaths of migrants in ICE custody hit record high under Trump - 2026-04-17 19:39
- Animal activists celebrate their first global 'Sanctuary Day' - 2026-04-17 17:26
- Gasoline could drop below $4 in coming days - 2026-04-17 13:47
- Why scientists are nervous about fungi - 2026-04-17 08:14
jacobin
- It’s Okay to Like Geese - 2026-04-17 08:17
- Will More Warehouses Burn? - 2026-04-17 07:18
- Mexico Is Going All In for Universal Health Care - 2026-04-17 07:00
- Why the Rich Should Get Free Public Childcare Too - 2026-04-17 06:14
- The Landless Workers’ Movement, 30 Years After a Massacre - 2026-04-17 05:56
africa is a country
- Fields of dependency - 2026-04-17 09:00
- More commerce than chaos - 2026-04-16 04:00
- The demographic dividend no one wants to pay - 2026-04-15 12:45
- The debts our parents left us - 2026-04-14 07:00
- Whose progress? - 2026-04-13 07:00
404media
- FAA Scraps Civil and Criminal Penalties for Flying Drones Near ICE Vehicles - 2026-04-17 10:44
- The Destroyed Remnants of a Lost World Are Falling to Earth, Scientists Discover - 2026-04-17 08:00
- Behind the Blog: Jazz and Journalism - 2026-04-17 08:00
- App Stores Push Users Toward Nudify Apps, New Research Shows - 2026-04-16 11:34
- I Almost Lost My Mind in the Bridal Algorithm - 2026-04-16 08:00
techdirt
- AI Could Create A Massive Problem For Valve’s Steam - 2026-04-17 21:39
- Trump Is Literally Negotiating With Himself Over How Much Taxpayer Money He Gets Because His Taxes Were Leaked - 2026-04-17 17:17
- Inside Trump’s Effort To “Take Over” The Midterm Elections - 2026-04-17 15:15
- A First Amendment Legend Eviscerates Brendan Carr With Substance And Style - 2026-04-17 13:03
- Daily Deal: Python Crash Course - 2026-04-17 12:58
the register personal tech
- Attention data hoarders: Alexa loses its Plex appeal as voice feature gets canned - 2026-04-17 05:45
- Locked-out iPhone user tells The Reg that Apple is scrambling to fix character flaw passcode bug - 2026-04-17 05:00
- The only technology that died more times than VR is AI, and that seems to have worked out - 2026-04-15 02:03
- Microsoft raises UK Surface prices as RAM crisis reaches the checkout - 2026-04-14 05:31
- NHS pays £46K to prep next Microsoft licensing round - 2026-04-13 04:27
sciencedaily
- A “lost world” beneath the North Sea was once full of forests - 2026-04-17 07:46
- Scientists warn of 3,100 “surging glaciers” that can trigger floods and avalanches - 2026-04-17 07:28
- This chain of atoms can detect electric fields with stunning precision - 2026-04-17 06:56
- Scientists discover bacteria can “explode” to spread antibiotic resistance - 2026-04-17 06:44
- Can sparkling water boost metabolism and help with weight loss? - 2026-04-17 02:17
space.com
- How the 'Project Hail Mary' book walks the line between hard and speculative science fiction… and why the film did not - 2026-04-17 16:28
- New moon of April 2026 brings incredible views of the constellation Hydra, Jupiter, Venus and more this week - 2026-04-17 16:27
- 'Tall waves moving in slow motion': Here's how oily oceans on Saturn's giant moon Titan may behave - 2026-04-17 13:00
- 'For All Mankind' alternative timeline vs reality: How Apple TV's sci-fi show diverges from history - 2026-04-17 11:00
- Hubble Space Telescope spots a mesmerizing spiral galaxy | Space photo of the day for April 17, 2026 - 2026-04-17 09:00
space news
- The Space Force’s ‘commercial first’ strategy in action with Col. Tim Trimailo - 2026-04-17 19:21
- NASA selects Falcon Heavy to launch ESA Mars rover mission despite budget threat - 2026-04-17 17:05
- NorthStar to go public via SPAC to expand space-based SSA network - 2026-04-17 16:53
- Shenzhou-21 astronauts complete third spacewalk, mission extended by a month - 2026-04-17 13:11
- Artemis 2 astronauts praise performance of Orion - 2026-04-17 11:41
phys.org
- How nanomedicine gets inside your cells and treats you from the inside out - 2026-04-17 21:00
- Study finds park design affects cooling differently by day and night - 2026-04-17 19:40
- Examining the impact of sanctioned elites on authoritarian realignment - 2026-04-17 18:20
- Warmer streams may be draining river food webs by sending more carbon into the air - 2026-04-17 18:00
- Doomscrolling or connecting? Study reveals social media's complex effect on loneliness - 2026-04-17 17:20
onion latest
- Oil Prices Plummet In Big Fuck-You To Americans Who Got Gas Yesterday - 2026-04-17 13:42
- Tips For Getting Better Haircuts - 2026-04-17 13:07
- Lena Dunham Claims Adam Driver Used The Force On Set Of ‘Girls’ - 2026-04-17 13:04
- TMZ Launches D.C. Bureau - 2026-04-17 10:57
- Live Nation CEO Sentenced To 10 Years In Online Queue - 2026-04-17 10:56
changelogs
April 2026
2025-04-03 - linkroll - added more links.
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