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
- WeatherBug Data Says October 8 Is the Real Perfect Date - 2026-04-14 02:00
- Stanford Report Highlights Growing Disconnect Between AI Insiders and Everyone Else - 2026-04-13 22:30
- Apple AI Glasses Will Rival Meta's With Several Styles, Oval Cameras - 2026-04-13 18:00
- Hollywood Stars Sign Open Letter Protesting Paramount-Warner Bros Merger - 2026-04-13 17:00
- FBI Raids Texas Home of Man Suspected of Firebombing Sam Altman's SF Mansion - 2026-04-13 16:00
hackaday
- Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Hard - 2026-04-14 03:00
- Electric Truck Sets Racing Record - 2026-04-14 00:00
- They Weren’t Joking: Gentoo WAS ported to GNU Hurd - 2026-04-13 21:00
- Your Own Tool Changer - 2026-04-13 18:00
- ESP32 Weather Display Runs Macintosh System 3 - 2026-04-13 15:00
neatorama
- Disney Princes Stand Up For Themselves in "Charming" - 2026-04-13 19:51
- Campy Stained Glass by Amy Stewart - 2026-04-13 10:11
- Could We Ever Turn Mars Into an Earth-like Planet? - 2026-04-13 07:08
- 1971: America's Deadliest Prison Riot - 2026-04-12 20:27
- Grandma Kept a Delightful Illustrated Diary in the 1940s - 2026-04-12 17:13
NPR
- Why Congress is fighting over a central tool of American surveillance - 2026-04-14 04:00
- Morning news brief - 2026-04-14 03:43
- U.K. inquiry lays bare 'catastrophic' missed chances before stabbings at dance class - 2026-04-14 00:41
- Man accused in Molotov cocktail attack of OpenAI CEO's home charged with attempted murder - 2026-04-13 20:02
- Eric Swalwell will resign from Congress as he faces backlash over assault allegations - 2026-04-13 16:49
jacobin
- Zohran Mamdani on Using Government to Fight for the Many - 2026-04-13 11:10
- Trump Accounts Offer Little to Families That Aren’t Rich - 2026-04-13 07:53
- Maple Leaf DOGE vs. the Canadian State - 2026-04-13 05:49
- A Tribute to Iran’s Soulful and Revolutionary Cinema - 2026-04-13 05:46
- Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian Model Has Collapsed - 2026-04-13 05:33
africa is a country
- Whose progress? - 2026-04-13 07:00
- Art has never been innocent - 2026-04-10 07:00
- Between fandom and dissent - 2026-04-09 04:00
- Who gets to be a civilian? - 2026-04-08 07:00
- The making of Arundhati Roy - 2026-04-07 07:00
404media
- Hacker Compromises a16z-Backed Phone Farm, Tries to Post Memes Calling a16z the ‘Antichrist’ - 2026-04-13 11:11
- How the Internet Became Hell (with Whitney Phillips) - 2026-04-13 09:48
- WebinarTV Secretly Scraped Zoom Meetings of Anonymous Recovery Programs - 2026-04-13 08:15
- The Oldest Octopus Fossil Ever Isn’t An Octopus At All, Scientists Discover - 2026-04-11 08:00
- Behind the Blog: Smoking the Whole Carton - 2026-04-10 11:07
techdirt
- Oh God: RFK Jr. Unveils Plan To Be First Sitting Cabinet Secretary To Host A Podcast - 2026-04-13 22:12
- The FAA’s “Temporary” Flight Restriction For Drones Is A Blatant Attempt To Criminalize Filming ICE - 2026-04-13 17:12
- DOJ Is Using A Grand Jury To Force Reddit To Unmask An Anonymous User - 2026-04-13 15:05
- Section 230 Is Dying By A Thousand Workarounds, And Massachusetts Just Added Another One - 2026-04-13 13:05
- Daily Deal: uTalk Language Education - 2026-04-13 13:00
the register personal tech
- NHS pays £46K to prep next Microsoft licensing round - 2026-04-13 04:27
- Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user - 2026-04-12 03:01
- Electronics industry says FCC's foreign-made router policy is a bit of a mesh - 2026-04-10 10:44
- Peace President's Iran war piles more pain on already battered PC market - 2026-04-09 08:38
- Amazon rewards loyal Kindle devotees by closing the book on old e-readers - 2026-04-08 07:42
sciencedaily
- “Giant superatoms” could finally solve quantum computing’s biggest problem - 2026-04-13 07:38
- Scientists were wrong about lifespan. Your genes matter way more than we thought - 2026-04-13 03:12
- Black hole wakes after 100 million years and erupts like a cosmic volcano - 2026-04-13 01:23
- Forget daily pills. This shot works when blood pressure meds fail - 2026-04-12 23:20
- Stanford scientists discover “natural Ozempic” without side effects - 2026-04-12 21:34
space.com
- Sci-fi stories never really end anymore, and that's a problem - 2026-04-13 17:00
- NASA science faces 'very serious threat' from new White House budget, experts say - 2026-04-13 15:00
- Huge Northrop Grumman Cygnus XL cargo ship arrives at space station - 2026-04-13 12:31
- How Artemis 2 commander Reid Wiseman saved the mission's moon mascot: 'It's hard not to love this little guy. I can't let Rise out of my sight' - 2026-04-13 12:04
- Artemis 2 astronauts celebrate successful return to Earth | Space photo of the day for April 13, 2026 - 2026-04-13 10:54
space news
- L3Harris investing upfront in bid for Golden Dome work - 2026-04-14 04:00
- Jielong-3 launches internet test satellite, Kinetica-1 lofts 8 remote sensing sats - 2026-04-14 03:48
- President Trump signs legislation reauthorizing SBIR - 2026-04-13 22:01
- Washington agrees on space urgency, but not on how to deliver - 2026-04-13 17:39
- Q&A: Heather Pringle on what to expect from Space Symposium - 2026-04-13 15:59
phys.org
- No great equalizer: Young laborers were hit hardest by early modern plague - 2026-04-14 04:00
- Contaminants, including ink, detected in meteorites suggest sample preparation needs improving - 2026-04-14 03:13
- Ancient graves and DNA uncover family bonds that went beyond genetics - 2026-04-14 02:00
- Information from starquakes provides theoretical evidence for 'fossilized' magnetism in stars - 2026-04-14 02:00
- When the boss burns out, the whole team loses energy, trust and performance - 2026-04-13 23:10
onion latest
- Hiker Airlifted After Being Stung By Bees Over 100 Times - 2026-04-13 17:11
- Justin Bieber Performs Coachella Aftershow Lying Face-Down On Massage Table - 2026-04-13 16:00
- Trump Escalates Feud With Unclear Adversary By Posting AI Video Of Self Fucking Basketball - 2026-04-13 14:50
- Man Who Threw Molotov Cocktail At Sam Altman’s Home Claims He Was Following ChatGPT Recipe For Risotto - 2026-04-13 14:12
- The Noble Prize - 2026-04-13 10:12
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