Andrew R Gross

I finally posted an overview of the build process for the chicken coop.  I'm hoping that it gets selected as a 'featured' project, completing a hat-trick setup by the Captain America costume and the Arc Reactor. I started building that coop in March of 2015.  I finished it officially in October of 2015.  I meant to share an overview, since as my posts and this website attest, I'm trying to improve my skills in not just building things, but documenting how I did so and compiling all such projects into a kind of portfolio (which is this blog).  I'm very proud of the coop, but I was pretty daunted by the process of compiling it.  The challenge to get a third featured post on Instructables motivated me, though, and I'm really proud of the result. As proud as I am, it's humbling to see the entries people submit to Instructables contests.  People build and program drones from scratch, and present a summary of their approach with better communication skills tha

Recently, Julie and I discovered kombucha. We were at a vegan restaurant near our house.  Although their food is great and as a vegetarian I appreciate the service they provide, vegan restaurants tend to incorporate certain elements which feel very 'new-age'.  This is stuff Julie and I generally want no part of.  Imagined gluten allergies, for instance.  Or GMO alarmism. So it was on a lark that Julie purchased a bottle of kombucha.  It's fermented tea, which happens to be two of yuppies' favorite words.  To both of our surprise, it was great.  It's tangy and carbonated.  It tastes a fair bit like hard cider, although it has negligible alcohol.  It's like soda, but it's only got 30 calories.  Of course, that shit's going to be like $4 a bottle. So out of curiosity, I looked online to see how it is made and discovered that it is supposedly very, very, easy to make. You make tea.  You sweeten your tea with sugar.  Then you add kambucha to i

I'm feeling really good.  I just posted the full set of instructions on how I made Julie's Arc reactor on Instructables.  If you haven't seen it, Instructables.com is a website where users can submit instructions on how to make something.  It's pretty remarkable.  You can find instructions for changing the bulbs in your headlights, recipes for brownies, or an guide to making friendship bracelets.  Among these are a lot of electronics projects. It's odd and inspiring to see how much can be made with such cheap, available parts so easily.  I recently looked to it because I had an idea at work, and found instructions on how to build an ohm meter from $30 of parts.  It's exciting to be able to access so much knowledge. At some point, I decided that it'd be cool to be able to provide that level of usefulness.  Fortunately, you don't have to produce a college course, you just need to do a good job documenting a project well done.  So I started taking pictu