I recently purchased a vehicle made in the early 2000s and it only has a CD player. While I love CD’s and have a collection, it is far easier and more convenient to be able to play music from my phone. In other vehicles I have had access to pair my phone to the car sound system through Bluetooth, or at least through an aux cable.

This would require replacing the car’s head unit. For the sake of simplicity, security, and affordability, I opted to give a try using a Bluetooth FM transmitter that operates out of a cigarette lighter outlet.

I found it really easy to use but sometimes, where there are more towers broadcasting, the FM transmitter can get overpowered. It has the ability to broadcast on different channels which allows for you to work around that problem. I would not recommend it for those who want really high quality, static free music, but for my needs with my cheap car speakers, it is quite handy.

I had been collecting records for my old Soundesign record player and was really enjoying the music. I recently moved however and didn’t have space for it, nor the large speakers I needed. I found this Crosley one at Goodwill for $15 and couldn’t resist. It has little built in speakers that, while they’re no subwoofer, do capture some of the bass from the records. What’s more is that it can act as a Bluetooth speaker if you want, although I don’t know why you would play music from your device when you have records. Anyways, I have definitely been enjoying the portability and ease of use with my new record player.

There are a lot of different chat bots that are becoming popular like Perplexity and ChatGPT. While it is fun to see what the AI algorithms come back with, I have really enjoyed using generative AI to produce images. I have used Craiyon, Stable Diffusion, and more recently Gemini’s Bard image generator.

Although the images generated can be quite chaotic or unrealistic at times, when given the right prompt, these generators can produce interesting and fun images. There are so many key words that they pick up on like styling photos to be photo-realistic, classic, impressionist, hand-drawn, ect. You can pick what ever they draw and add elements like a graffiti or floral look. It is not only a lot of fun, but can be useful when trying to come up with specific images. Here are a couple fun examples that were generated with Bard.

I recently received a few extra bikes from a friend and decided to try making a tall bike from one of the frames. It is basically just an upside-down bike since I just flipped the frame. The seat post and handle bars needed to be longer since the pedals were so much higher. It took a bit of welding and some work getting the chain tensioned without the derailleur. It’s functional, but also a bit scary being so far from the ground. In the future, I would make the bend for the handle bars closer to the frame, as it is a bit awkward to steer.

We bought a decent pedestal fan a couple years back and it randomly died recently. It still didn’t work after cleaning it so, I decided to try bypassing the thermal fuse. It worked, but I couldn’t leave it that way with any peace of mind. After using a magnifying glass to read the small print, I bought a couple new fuses online.

I soldered a new one on, but I got it too hot from the soldering iron. I did it again and left more room between the fuse and the solder point. It works great now, and it just took a cheap little fuse to fix!

My bike recently started to develop a wobble on the back wheel. I realised that it was due to the bearings failing, so I decided to take it apart and try to fix it. I found another rear wheel that had been bent, so I had some spare parts to use.

Once I pulled the gears off, there was this piece with bearings on it. I counted and there were 88 bearings in total. There are 9 bearings on each side of the axle. There are then 39 bearings around this piece in the picture, and then 31 that go on the gear piece.

The hardest part was making sure that there was the proper amount of bearings in each part. Once I got it all back together, it worked great, and it no longer had the wobble because I replaced the broken part.

Since it takes 4 C batteries I got a 6V power supply. I measured the voltage from the supply and found it was outputting 7 something volts! I found out that when “cheap” power supplies are not under load, they can have a higher than expected voltage. I was a bit nervous the first time I plugged it in, but it worked great. It is much better than the alternatives and I have enjoyed the experience.

After playing with it for a week, I decided to oil it. The pamphlet I got with it said to oil it with olive oil or woodwind oil. I poured a small amount in and spun the flute around to coat everything.It took a bit to get everything oiled, but I did notice a difference in the sound afterwards. The lows were easier to sustain and the higher notes were more clear.

It is winter now and the weather is pretty cold where I live. My battery is weak and there is cold weather on the way, so I decided to test the block heater out. I was told by a friend to plug it in, and then unplug the block heater quickly. If the heat plug had any draw it would create a spark when I unplugged it. It did not create a spark so I figured that the block heater was not working for some reason. I traced the cable and found that it was just dangling at the back of the engine bay. After some research and feeling around the back of the engine, I found the block heater plug.