I wanted to try printing a new Shakespeare cookie cutter with my new 3D printer, to see if the better print quality would result in a better cutter. The CAD tool I use, OpenSCAD with the BOSL2 library, has been updated since I designed the cookie cutter, and the old code no longer ran, due […]| Gas station without pumps
My wife accidentally left a silicone basting brush too close to a burner on our gas stove and melted the ABS handle: She was OK with using the basting brush with the bent handle, but I thought that…| Gas station without pumps
1 post published by gasstationwithoutpumps during August 2025| Gas station without pumps
My family and I went to Ashland, Oregon July 15–20 to see 7 plays in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. There were 9 plays in this year’s season, but seven was as many as anyone could see on on…| Gas station without pumps
I’ve done yet more printing on my new 3D printer—a variant of the stand that I posted in More 3D prints on QIDI Plus4 and another mask The stand I printed this time was not for a roll of new …| Gas station without pumps
I’ve done some more printing on my new 3D printer. The grocery stores near us have switched to using compostable bags, which are not washable or reusable, and I like having bags around for le…| Gas station without pumps
1 post published by gasstationwithoutpumps during July 2025| Gas station without pumps
I’ve recently bought myself a new 3D printer: a QIDI Plus4. I bought this one primarily to be able to print larger objects—in particular, I wanted to be able to print masks this Fall when I&…| Gas station without pumps
This post is yet another weight progress report, continuing the previous one, part of a long series since I started in January 2015. As I predicted in my last weight report, my exercise levels did drop down over the summer, despite taking acting classes twice a week in UCSC’s summer session. The classes ended up being one […]| Gas station without pumps
In Auditioning for 8 tens @8 I mentioned that I’d be auditioning for the short-play festival 8 tens @8. On Sunday Sept 29, I did a monologue from Last of the Red Hot Lovers by Neil Simon, and I got two callbacks based on it. On Monday, just before I went into my Voice and Diction […]| Gas station without pumps
I’ll be auditioning for the short-play festival 8 tens @8 this weekend. The festival has been running for a while (the first one was in January 1996), and they claim to be “The longest running short play festival in the world!”, though I don’t know what evidence they have for the claim (other than that […]| Gas station without pumps
Santa Cruz Shakespeare finishes their summer season tonight (they still have Glass Menagerie in the fall and Christmas Carol in December), so I’ll post my reviews now. Let’s start with the “Fringe” productions: two staged readings and the intern’s play. The first staged reading was Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike by Christopher Durang. They selected the play to commemorate […]| Gas station without pumps
Because LeanPub has recently eased off on their $7.99 minimum price, I decided to lower the minimum price for the PDF of Applied Analog Electronics from $7.99 to $4.99. This reduces my royalties per book a lot (from $6.39 to $3.49), but sales are slow enough that increasing the number sold is more valuable than […]| Gas station without pumps
Well, it finally happened. After over 4 years of avoiding COVID, my wife and I both finally caught it—probably during our trip to Rhode Island for a family wedding. I had a cold during the trip, but tested negative for COVID on June 14 and June 24, but then tested positive on June 27. My […]| Gas station without pumps
As you may know from Colonoscopy prep 2024, I was scheduled for a colonoscopy today. I stopped nuts and whole grains a week ago, solid food on Sunday, and started the mega-laxatives on Monday. After two nights and two days of having to visit the toilet about hourly, I got a call Wednesday night telling […]| Gas station without pumps
Long-time readers may remember that I had to fix my bike seat due to metal fatigue at the clamp that holds it back in 2016 (see Bike seat fixed, Broken bike seat and Flexible adhesives). I wrote then “I was going to sand the rust spots, prime with metal primer, and repaint the spots, but my […]| Gas station without pumps
World Scientific Publishing is marketing my book. They have put out a flyer for several of their electronics books (https://www.worldscientific.com/pb-assets/wspc-site/catalogue-pdf/Electrical-Electronics-Engineering2024-25-1705395593457.pdf), and my book is the first one on the flyer! Of course, they don’t mention that the PDF for the book is also available on LeanPub for only $7.99 (https://leanpub.com/applied_analog_electronics), but I wouldn’t expect them […]| Gas station without pumps
In Fantasy costume renderings, I showed my first assignment in costume design. I tried this week (during our Spring break) improving the renditions by running them through an AI program—specifically Freepik Sketch. The AI drawing program mangled the annotation, so I removed the “writing” and did a little cleanup and resizing in Photoshop Elements. Here […]| Gas station without pumps
For my theater-design course (TA 31 at Cabrillo), my next assignment is to create costume renderings (with certain constraints). Because I have never done a costume rendering before and never used water colors (the suggested method), I decided to do a practice run over the weekend, doing some costume renderings for Falstaff, Bardolph, Pistol, and […]| Gas station without pumps
For Theater Arts 31 (Introduction to Theater Design), we had to design a box set for Chekhov’s The Bear (sometimes translated as The Boor), a short one-act play that takes place in the living room of a widowed country aristocrat. We read the play in class (probably because the teacher didn’t expect half the class to have […]| Gas station without pumps
Today I found out that the boards that I had been using for the data-acquisition system in my electronics course and textbook (the Teensy LC and the Teensy 3.2) have been discontinued, so I’ll need to port PteroDAQ to a new board. I’ve been thinking that I should port to the Seeed Studio XIAO SAMD21, […]| Gas station without pumps
I picked up my last pots from the Fall pottery class on 2023 Dec 21. Most of them were the tiny tea-ball dishes I use for glaze tests (made with the 3D-printed form), but I also had one thrown pot…| Gas station without pumps
musings on life as a university professor| Gas station without pumps
5 posts published by gasstationwithoutpumps during January 2024| Gas station without pumps
As I promised in Acting Update: Fortinbras, this post is about building Claudius’s prayer bench (my work for TA 27 Theatre Production Workshop). The design is not mine, but Skip Epperson’s, but I did all the construction on the bench. First, the photos: Building the prayer bench got me a chance to work with a […]| Gas station without pumps
This post is yet another weight progress report, continuing the previous one, part of a long series since I started in January 2015. I had a body-fat measurement done at Stanford as part of a medic…| Gas station without pumps
I’d like to invite everyone to see Cabrillo’s Spring play Fortinbras at the Black Box theater inside Crocker Theater on Cabrillo’s Aptos campus. The play by Lee Blessing is a very silly, very funny…| Gas station without pumps
I’ve not been blogging lately, for two reasons: I’ve been wasting a lot of time on Reddit (particularly on r/Theatre and r/acting), and I’ve been spending a lot of time on actual …| Gas station without pumps
On Monday 2025 Jan 20, I had a rehearsal down in Soquel for NextStage Readers’ Theater (this will be my third year doing staged readings of short plays with them). I decided to leave early, so that I could stop for lunch at Asian Express at Capitola Mall, since I had seen people commenting on […]| Gas station without pumps
On 2025 Jan 15, I had another stress echocardiogram. I felt in better shape this year than I have in a while, after all the moderate-intensity exercise I’d done commuting to Cabrillo College …| Gas station without pumps
Today I recorded two monologues and added them to my playlist: https://tinyurl.com/Kevin-Karplus-monologues. Both were monologues that I learned for the Shakespeare course from Bill Peters at the Actors’ Theatre that just ended last week, though only one is from Shakespeare. One is the first sentence of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which I provided as an example of […]| Gas station without pumps
I tried Chatbot Arena (https://lmarena.ai/) with some simple electronics problems today. The large language models have gotten much better and can do simple problems of calculating complex impedance, but they still can’t do simple designs like this exercise from my book: Design a passive band-pass filter with a peak gain around 0.5, a low […]| Gas station without pumps
4 posts published by gasstationwithoutpumps during August 2023| Gas station without pumps
My family (that is, my wife, our son, and I) went to Ashland to see Oregon Shakespeare Festival this week, for the third year in a row. We chose the end of July to be able to see as many plays as p…| Gas station without pumps
I missed a lot of my Spring pottery classes due to conflicts with acting that I had not anticipated when I signed up for the classes. I felt a bit guilty about having taken up one of the slots and…| Gas station without pumps
I’ve had “trigger finger” (the medical term is stenosing tenosynovitis) in the middle finger of my left hand for about a year. What that means is that one of the tendons that flex…| Gas station without pumps
Continuing my updates from Acting update for May 2024, I’m now finished with Spring Semester at Cabrillo College. Here are the things new since the last update: I did the staged reading of a…| Gas station without pumps
This post is yet another weight progress report, continuing the previous one, part of a long series since I started in January 2015. As I predicted in my last weight report, I did take the bus a fe…| Gas station without pumps
Continuing my updates from Acting update for January 2024, I’ll try to bring people up to date on what I’ve been doing in my new acting hobby. I finished the run of 12 performances of …| Gas station without pumps
I have been using an old M7803 Pro keyboard on my iMacs for quite some time—it has ©2000 on the label. I liked it much better than the newer keyboards. Unfortunately during the table read for As Yo…| Gas station without pumps
Our second costume-design assignment was to design costumes for the 3 characters in Chekhov’s The Bear (МЕДВЕДЬ). We were to do it as a historical-dress piece, to be compatible with the box s…| Gas station without pumps
I’m in the “intermediate” class this semester—because the beginning class conflicts with my theater-tech class at Cabrillo. Unfortunately, even the Wednesday ceramics class confl…| Gas station without pumps
I have been drinking tea for decades, and one of the teas that I’m fond of is pu-erh tea, which I usually buy loose in bulk from Staff of Life. Recently, one of my former students stopped by …| Gas station without pumps
As mentioned in First costume renderings, my most recent assignment for my theater-design course was to create costume renderings for 4 characters: a lead singer and 3 chorus members. The design w…| Gas station without pumps
I had my first on-camera acting gig yesterday (not counting the monologues I recorded at home) for a film being made by students in UCSC’s Film 196B course. I had seen the audition announcem…| Gas station without pumps
I was doing a matinee at Actors’ Theatre yesterday (2024 Feb 4) as part of the 8 tens @8 short-play festival), and I was in the second play. It wasn’t quite a full house (8 empty seats…| Gas station without pumps
Continuing my updates from Acting update for November 2023, I’ll try to bring people up to date on what I’ve been doing in my new acting hobby. I finished the Cabrillo Intro to Acting c…| Gas station without pumps
As a followup on my previous stress echocardiogram last year, I took a treadmill stress ECG on 11 January 2024. The procedure is much like the stress echocardiogram, except that they only record…| Gas station without pumps
For my intro-to-acting course, our final exam period required us to reflect on what we had learned (in writing ahead of time), then present snippets from that in person (in-person attendance for th…| Gas station without pumps
This post is yet another weight progress report, continuing the previous one, part of a long series since I started in January 2015. I’ve cycled about 1455 miles in 2023 (4 miles a day), …| Gas station without pumps
This is another update to Ceramics update. I’ve done a number of the little dishes shown there as glazing experiments, and I finally got them all back (except for the pieces I glazed on the …| Gas station without pumps
Continuing my updates from Acting update for October 2023, which was about a month ago, I’ll try to bring people up to date on what I’ve been doing in my new acting hobby. I’ve be…| Gas station without pumps
Continuing my updates from Recent (mostly theater) activity, which was about a month ago, I’ll try to bring people up to date on what I’ve been doing in my new acting hobby. Every Monda…| Gas station without pumps
In First callbacks, I posted about my theater activity for 2013 August 28–Sept 17. Now I’ll bring you up to date on more recent activity. On Thursday Sept 21, the cast for The Artist met at m…| Gas station without pumps
In More busy theater weeks, I posted about my theater activity for 2013 July 26–August 21, and in Santa Cruz Shakespeare 2024 season I posted about next year’s Santa Cruz Shakespeare season. …| Gas station without pumps
Yesterday, in More busy theater weeks, I mentioned that I would be going to the Grove again tonight to find out what next year’s season will be. This is very early for the season announcemen…| Gas station without pumps
In Busy weeks for theater, I posted about theater for 2013 July 13 through 23, which included a trip to Oregon Shakespeare Festival. This post is mostly about August 1 through 19, which included a…| Gas station without pumps
I got into the beginning ceramics class for Watsonville/Aptos/Santa Cruz Adult Education (at Santa Cruz High) for this fall! The online registration for the first session opened at 9 a.m. on August…| Gas station without pumps
I am scheduled for a colonoscopy next week. Here is the protocol I plan to use this time, modified a little from the one I used last time: Day –7: Discontinue nuts, whole grains, popcorn, aspirin, …| Gas station without pumps
