I have been coveting a FarmBot. At $2500 to $4000 these farming robots are a little out of my price range. However, I guess if I had a big enough yard I would still be looking to purchase one of these. They are so cool, they will plant, water, weed …

It can be difficult to be the first student to talk in a quite classroom. I have been experimenting with the use of white noise to raise the overall din in the room and encourage taking more quickly.

When I teach I try to encourage peer and group discussions. Activities …

A great purchase for anyone with a 3D printer and looking for projects With the kids.

About a year ago I stubbled across JJRobots and I just love the idea of this company. They sell a kit of electronic parts to maker hobbyists with access to 3D printers. The idea …

I have been a paid subscriber and dedicated customer to Remember the Milk (RTM) for many years (I have lost count). RTM is a todo list application. It is in the same category of something like Wonderlist and ToDoist (There are many others). RTM fits my personality and needs quite …

I like the idea of blogging but often have difficulty in the delivery. A few years ago I maintained a blog when I worked for the Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research (iCER) at Michigan State University (MSU). At iCER I did a lot of High Performance Computing (HPC) User support. This …

I am interested in purchasing a CNC machine for the shop space in our new house. I think I would like to stick to something around $1000 but would be willing to invest as much as $2000 if I can find the right machine. There are a lot of choices …

When I was at iCER we used confluence for our blogging software and when I did a (personal blog](//apprenticemaker.blogspot.com/) I used google blogger. On of the barriers for me getting back into blogging (besides my own personal hangups) is that I was never really satisified with either …

My university (Michigan State University) plans to scale up the use of Jupyter in our classrooms but we need to address accessibility issues before we can adopt the platform for wide scale use.  On behalf of MSU I had an external group conduct a preliminary audit of our current jupyterhub …

We had fun showing off my 3D printer to the Kindergarten class. Although the printer is fun to watch, kids tend to get board with it in just a few minutes. I like to come up with classroom projects that let the kids use things that are printed with the …

I have been having trouble with my 3D printer over the last couple of months. It turns out that the fans got disconnected. Once I fixed the problem my printer is working better than ever. I was itching for something to print so I came up with this simple spacer …