Hey everyone. I know I haven’t updated in forever. I’ve been busy, sorry. Anyway, today I just want to share what happens when you leave coffee in crappy paper cups. The less coffee you have, the faster it gets cold and nasty. It looks something like this:

I have nothing to do at work

As you can see, as you have less coffee in the cup, you need to drink it exponentially faster in order to avoid a nasty mouth full of cold coffee. This seems to directly contradict Newton’s Law of Cooling, because that only takes into effect the surface area of cooling, temperature difference between mediums and heat transfer coefficient of the fluids, not thermal mass. Yes, I tried to model the cooling of my coffee in Excel. I have friends, I swear.

So, my chart might be way off. I don’t have the equipment at work to perform a proper experiment, nor do I think my boss would appreciate it. Any mechanical engineers care to weigh in and help me understand how to optimize my coffee consumption? (I should really just get an insulated mug, but where’s the fun in that?)

Bre Pettis is one of the founding members of NYC Resistor, the New York City hackerspace. I follow his projects, and he comes up with some really awesome inventions all the time. Check out his robot that makes you a sandwich when you type into the command line “sudo make me a sandwich“.

Monday afternoon after work, Skylar, Faith and I went to check out a potential space for HackRVA.

We started out by meeting my friends Lawrence and Billy at their shop to check out adjacent empty industrial spaces.  Lawrence’s shop is awesome, and they do great work. Check them out if you ever need work done on your car. We hung out for a little bit, I checked out that Volvo 122 on the lift, then we got down to the hackerspace business.

Each of the places that we were looking at are out in Ashland, near the Atlee exit on 95. Lawrence rents two of the shops, so he showed us around the others. They all have similar size and rent (except the largest one), although some may have some lofted space already built in them. The floors downstairs are concrete, easy to clean and great for working on without having to worry about messing up the carpet. If we lofted a second floor, we would end up with about 3,000 sq. ft. of space (1500 workspace, 1500 finished living/conference space) for around 750/month with utilities. Completely doable if we can get the membership to support it. Shown above are the giant loading doors, which will be great for getting large projects in and out of the workspace.

Lawrence’s storage shop, complete with unfinished office area lofted above the entrance.

A double width space with loft area to the left. This spot is huge, although it costs twice as much as one of the smaller ones.

Right half of the double width shop.

As you can probably see, these spaces are hard to beat in terms of space/price. They’re about 15/20 minutes from downtown Richmond, but as a starting space, they might be worth it. In the coming weeks, we’ll be checking out more spots. I’ll keep everyone posted. Any suggestions on locations you think would be suitable for our hackerspace would be greatly appreciated.

(All photos courtesy of Faith Broache)

Are you as obsessed with robots and technology as I am? Probably not, but that’s alright because everyone loves tattoos. Meet Thomas J. Robarius. He’s about 1 month old (although when this picture was taken, he was a newborn), and he is AWESOME. I might get him touched up at some point in the near future, but I love him just the way he is. Hope you like him too (because if you don’t he will crush you).

(Photo courtesy of Faith Broache)

Welcome to my new blog. I’ll be updating periodically with the things that I’m working on.

Current projects include:

• Recycling robot for the IEEE
• Starting a Richmond Hackerspace (HackRVA)
• Building a CNC router, when funds allow
• Building a RepRap, when funds allow

Stay tuned!