Ben's Journal

Yesterday, Shira and I did some running and hiking on the Potomac Heritage Trail near Riverbend Park . Everywhere you looked you saw bu...

Last week's most clever music video has to be Dearly Departed by Shakey Graves. Sure it's dark, but it's also hilarious and re...

On past trips to Boston, our nieces and nephew have seen the over-sized chess set that's situated in the hotel where we often stay. The...

What follows isn't a life hack, clever trick or road warrior tip. What follows is common sense. All things being equal, I'm glad...

I found Aquilo's Silhouette to be a remarkably touching song, with a powerful video to match. I'd never heard of the group Aquilo,...

Whether it's for back-country use, power outage preparedness or just to indulge the Pyromaniac Boy-Scout within, I've experimented ...

This past weekend a friend mentioned that she was equipping her car with an emergency kit, and knowing my love of all things preparedness, ...

Like any self respecting 40 year old geek, I've got a heap of defunct hardware that I've collected over the years. I keep said pil...

I don't get it: how can this hang drum video have 22 million views? I mean it was good, but 22 million views good? And here's a...

Yesterday's experiment listening to nearby gas and water meters got me thinking about tapping into other devices that emit radio signa...

I tend to think of Software Defined Radio as a dirt cheap, and extremely portable way to listen to radio chatter. However, it's far mo...

This last week I went in search of some new country music, and found aural gold in Stripes by Brandy Clark . It's clever and catchy, w...

3shrink is working well in a desktop context, so it was time to spread the love to mobile. Specifically, I wanted to be able to take a res...

We interrupt this emacs hack for an OS X hack. Yesterday, after making progress with the Trinket Pro , I grabbed the foot pedal, wire s...

A few months back I came across this video showing how to control a DSLR with a foot pedal. This re-ignited a long time project I've...

This past weekend we had a real treat: we got to try Ghanaian food for the first time. And best of all, we had friends of ours from Ghana...

A big thanks to friends for the Houndmouth recommendation. And how about that one armed trash bag technique ? Yesterday I had my 3rd Y...

My friend Nick recommended I check out Packt Publishing's free eBook of the day . To my surprise, the books offered there are the rea...

There's something profoundly satisfying about cracking open a fresh coconut. Maybe it's the fact that step one involves going int...

I learned about Show Your Work from a bag dump of all places. Fortunately, the library had it, so it was easy enough to get my hands on. ...

While searching around for an old post, I discovered this draft I originally composed on 6/26/2007. Nearly everything written below I still...

This week in music I stumble on a bit of jazz , and a remarkable guitar street performance . But the most unusual find has to be Lindsey S...

Firefox's Web Based Protocol Handler support has to be one of its hidden gems. Once a handler is registered, you gain especially quic...

For the past few years, as I've hired someone to cut our lawn, I've wondered aloud to Shira what it would take to have some "r...