An exploration of ultracoffee, radiation safety, and more often than not a beer or two.
Got a few changes to report to you this Inauguration Day. Don’t panic, this is all good news. First of all, I’m happy to report the return of Ipsento Panama BBotE, the lovely tart blueberry light roast coffee which has been missed by yours truly, is back for little while. The nice folks at Ipsento were …
Continue reading “An Old Friend Returns and the Harpy Cometh”
In the previous money rant, I finally addressed Lesson Nine from this list of potential rants. It’s time to move on to a more positive one. Let’s talk about a time when America had its shit together, The Great Depression. No, really. I’m not kidding. Much as we may deride President Woodrow Wilson for other …
Okay, yet another rant. This is an old saw of mine which I’ve decided I want to write up so I could point at it later. When I hear someone doing a half-assed job that they’re just going to walk away from, usually incomplete, say with a shrug “Good enough for government work”, I get …
When you have the incredibly photogenic and not bulldozed ghost city of Pripyat to take pictures of, it’s easy to forget the other towns and villages that were once there, or still are in the case of the city of Chernobyl. Generally the name “Chernobyl” is associated in everyone’s head with the the reactor that …
Most of the order slots for production have zeroed out at this point and many have already flipped over to the next window that ends New Year’s Eve. I will still be cranking BBotE & steins out all next week, but all bets are off as to things showing up in time for those of …
Many years ago on livejournal, my friend Ben Stone and his now fiancee Nadja, AKA The Benchilada & fairyarmadillo, AKA Stone Robot Enterprises, inaugurated a holiday tradition of collecting all the friends who made things to share their wares with the everyone else which he called THE BIG SHILL. The Steins of Science were part …
Continue reading “THE BIG SHILL: Things You Can Buy Which I Don’t Sell”
Ooooookay, the milestone where I have a deep sigh and decide to comment on someone else’s product is 50 messages. When I’ve gotten that many emails, texts, IMs, DMs, tweets, phone calls, etc., I have to breakdown and actually make words in reply. TL;DR version: No, they aren’t ripping me off. No one making cold …
Let’s begin with the improvement you can’t see or, rather, won’t see anymore. At some point a “helpful upgrade” was done by BigCommerce who provide the architecture and servers for the store side of Funranium Labs. In the course of this upgrade, they managed to break the 3rd party SSL chain and depending on the browser …
Continue reading “Recent Improvements, New BBotEs, and Vacations”
So, once again, brave souls have stepped up willing to play caffeine mules to the demented infosec hordes about to descend on Las Vegas for DEFCON 2016. Just like last year, you have two volunteers. Please treat them well: Bill is an old hand at DEFCON and also the former BBotE Ambassdor of Chicago. He is …
I regret to inform you all that one of my old favorites from the limited run group has, well, hit the end of its run. I’ll be completing the last batch of Guatemala Nueva Vinas for 2016 tomorrow and it is already fully allocated. According to my roaster of choice on this one, the earliest …
It’s been pointed out to me that July 4th is holiday, like it is every year. As is appropriate, I will be grilling delicious meats, drinking fine adult beverages from my trusty stein, and playing games with family & friends because I’m pretty sure that is what the Founding Fathers really wanted for themselves. Sure, …
Continue reading “Shifting the Production Window Ending July 2nd”
A while back, the fine folks at Drinktanks ran a Kickstarter to create their double walled steel growler, with vacuum insulation, plus a handle and the ability to run a pressurized tap on it to use it as a tiny keg. As someone that had to figure out how to attach a handles to a dewar without …
First, the bad news: for the most part, all the slots for the production window closing June 4th are gone. GOOD NEWS: Most of the production slots for the June 18th window are now up for ordering. Other than Melbourne, Australia and Washington, DC, I haven’t been doing a lot of BBotE Ambassador resupplies lately. …
PLEASE NOTE: there is a very good reason there are no pictures associated with this story. As some of you may know, I teach a radiation safety course at a local community college. A while back, we were discussing bioassay techniques (read: ways determine if there’s been an uptake of radioactive material in the body, …
Continue reading “Great Moments In Teaching – Fecal Samples”
Once upon a time, the radiation safety officer (RSO), let’s call him Bob, had been out performing the inventory of source material* and ran across a bit of excitement. In this particular lab, they had approximately 10 grams of uranyl acetate, a very common contrast stain for electron microscopes. The poor unfortunate grad student who was …
Continue reading “The Picric Acid Tale or “Why I Can’t Have Four Day Weekends Anymore””