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
- Crypto Billionaire Pardoned In Prison By Trump Just Wrote a Memoir - 2026-04-12 05:34
- AI That Bankrupted a Vending Machine is Now Running a Store in San Francisco - 2026-04-12 02:34
- Latin America's Central Banks Establish Digital Payments Used By Hundreds of Millions - 2026-04-11 23:07
- Judge Pauses Arizona's Prosecution of Kalshi, Bars Arizona from Regulating Prediction Markets - 2026-04-11 21:07
- Oxygen Made From Moon Dust For First Time - 2026-04-11 17:52
hackaday
- Passive Radar Explained - 2026-04-12 03:00
- Testing Refrigerants and Capillary Tubes to Find Peak Performance - 2026-04-12 00:00
- Kiki is the Unknown Array Language - 2026-04-11 21:00
- A Suction-Driven Seven-Segment Display - 2026-04-11 18:00
- Implementing PCIe over Fiber Using SFP Modules - 2026-04-11 15:00
neatorama
- Star Fling is a Maddening Yet Addicting Game - 2026-04-11 20:48
- Raising an Abandoned Infant Wallaby is Not For the Lazy - 2026-04-11 18:29
- Movies and TV Shows That Had a Real Effect on the Real World - 2026-04-11 13:30
- He's Stuck in a Time Loop- Or Is He? - 2026-04-10 20:14
- The Truth Behind a 1941 Giant Squid Attack - 2026-04-10 16:30
NPR
- A Hezbollah commander describes battling Israel in Lebanon - 2026-04-12 05:02
- No Deal: U.S.-Iran peace talks in Islamabad collapse - 2026-04-12 04:40
- The real space science behind 'Project Hail Mary' - 2026-04-12 04:00
- White House ballroom construction can continue for now, appeals court says - 2026-04-11 21:56
- Trump touts newly released plans for D.C. triumphal arch - 2026-04-11 17:24
jacobin
- Ben Lerner Hears Ghosts in the Wires - 2026-04-11 07:46
- Capitalist Profits Depend on Stealing Our Future - 2026-04-11 06:44
- Zohran Mamdani’s Toughest Task in 100 Days: Taxing the Rich - 2026-04-11 05:45
- Resource Competition With China Lay Behind Trump’s Iran War - 2026-04-11 04:48
- Serbia’s Government Is Targeting the Public University - 2026-04-11 03:46
africa is a country
- 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
- The human cost of Kenya’s expanding lakes - 2026-04-03 05:00
404media
- 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
- World’s Largest Group of Chimps Waging Deadly ‘Civil War,’ Scientists Discover - 2026-04-09 13:00
- Farmer Arrested for Speaking Too Long at Datacenter Town Hall Vows to Fight - 2026-04-09 10:21
- FBI Extracts Suspect’s Deleted Signal Messages Saved in iPhone Notification Database - 2026-04-09 08:27
techdirt
- Game Jam Winner Spotlight: As I Lay Flying - 2026-04-11 14:00
- NVIDIA’s DLSS 5 Demo Video Briefly Taken Down Because YouTube’s Take Down Process Sucks - 2026-04-10 21:39
- Trump’s Two-Faced AI Policy - 2026-04-10 17:07
- Trump Threatens CNN For Very Basic Reporting On His Shitty, Unpopular War - 2026-04-10 15:03
- AI And Cybersecurity: A Glass Half-Empty/Half-Full Proposition, Where The Glass Is Holding Nitroglycerin - 2026-04-10 13:06
the register personal tech
- 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
- Break, no fix: Apple and Samsung make repairs hard - 2026-04-07 10:08
sciencedaily
- Life on Mars? Tiny cells just survived shock waves and toxic soil - 2026-04-12 02:00
- The Universe is expanding too fast and scientists still can’t explain it - 2026-04-12 01:37
- Early weight gain is linked to lifelong health consequences - 2026-04-11 08:54
- Two simple eating habits linked to lower weight, study finds - 2026-04-11 08:24
- Unusual airborne toxin detected in the U.S. for the first time - 2026-04-11 07:58
space.com
- 'The most special thing that will ever happen in my life': Artemis 2 astronauts describe their epic moon mission - 2026-04-12 05:00
- This Week In Space podcast: Episode 205 — All About Artemis - 2026-04-11 08:05
- SpaceX launches huge 'Cygnus XL' cargo ship carrying over 5 tons of supplies to ISS astronauts (video) - 2026-04-11 06:31
- Artemis 3 and beyond: What's next for NASA after Artemis 2 moon success - 2026-04-11 05:00
- Splashdown! Artemis 2 astronauts return to Earth after historic NASA mission to the moon - 2026-04-10 19:24
space news
- Falcon 9 launches Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the ISS - 2026-04-11 11:28
- Moog Technology Keeps Artemis II Astronauts Safe During Historic Lunar Mission - 2026-04-10 19:41
- Orion splashes down to successfully end Artemis 2 mission - 2026-04-10 19:16
- HawkEye 360 files to go public - 2026-04-10 12:36
- Spacety raises $190 million to scale satellite manufacturing, plans IPO - 2026-04-10 11:59
phys.org
- Artemis crew urges unity on 'lifeboat' Earth - 2026-04-12 03:22
- Inquiry-based biomimicry course inspires students to design solutions by learning from nature - 2026-04-11 18:30
- AI pragmatists: How language teachers are navigating AI with nuance - 2026-04-11 17:00
- Flux pathway reveals why mussel-like liquid phase separation can happen in seconds - 2026-04-11 16:00
- Why the Persian Gulf has more oil and gas than anywhere else on Earth - 2026-04-11 15:00
onion latest
- Nation’s Sensitive Kids Denounce NHL Goal Horns - 2026-04-11 11:30
- Scottie Scheffler’s Masters Hopes Fade After He Is Swallowed By Sandworm - 2026-04-11 09:30
- Cocaine, Caffeine Detected In Sharks - 2026-04-10 14:46
- Melania Trump: ‘Never Once In My 4,000 Years Have I Been To Epstein Island’ - 2026-04-10 14:04
- Melania Trump Slams Baseless Reports Linking Her To Wrong Wealthy Pedophile - 2026-04-10 13:51
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