iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"We need some new designs for our Kleenex boxes" "How about 'Frogs that just had sex?" "Good, write that down"

Kleenex box with a delightful illustration of spawning frogs, one frog is upside down and looks really blissful

Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Today in "old house surprises" a pipe heating cord that has been wrapped around a pipe and running 24/7 for who knows how long, but long enough to make it nice and crunchy, together with a little guy found right next to it. What could go wrong?

Crumbling pieces of pipe heater tape with a short two prong cord.

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Ha, good question, maybe something from the GE Glow Lamp Manual:

a circuit with a series of resistors capacitors and glow lamps in a satisfyingly symmetrical arrangement

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Good selection of neon art at the Walker: Keith Sonnier, Chryssa, and Marie Watt.

Squiggly bits of neon of all colors hanging in a hallway with one glass wall

A sculpture made mostly of sheet metal script letters such as found in neon signs, the word "air" is illuminated in one with blue neon

Many words pertaining to Indigenous culture such as salmon beaver sky water coyote etc spelled out in tightly spaced multicolored neon

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Interesting analogy for the size of Ceres. Why do you suppose a giant would do such a thing?

and from Piazzi's scanty observations reconstructed the lost body's orbit. When he emerged from his figuring binge a few weeks later, he told astronomers where to point their telescopes. They did and, sure enough, there was the mislaid wanderer. Piazzi christened it Ceres and later measurements have revealed it as an orbiting island of jagged rock, 480 miles in diameter and with a surface area of 700,000 square miles-equivalent to the Confederate States had they been scooped up by the roots, formed to fit a giant's fist and hurled into the heavens.

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

For #ThingThursday, a big old map book of the BWCA/Quetico.

A big map book with lots of drawings of canoe trip fun and a photo of people paddling to a cliff, all in a mid-century style.

An example of the maps to be found within.

A title card and scale marker with a drawing of a First Nations guy in a birch bark canoe

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Some guys who are definitely not pecking at a rental car

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

This looks fun, twin cities parents:

PINHOLE NATURE PHOTOGRAPHY

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 |

1-3:30 PM

Learn the basics of pinhole photography while exploring habitats in the park. Learn how to make a pinhole camera, develop photos in a dark room and the steps needed to do so at home. Make 3-5 developed photos to keep. Ages 10+. $6. Reservations required.

Lowry Nature Center

Carver Park Reserve, Victoria, MN 55386 |

763.694.7650

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I have one of the old Toronto ones from when they switched them out to LEDs! Looks like the same stencil as Montreal.

A plastic lens with a walking person symbol from a crosswalk

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

My favorite programming language is solder(ing capacitors in until it starts working)

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

That must have been a good place to get suppositories, on the other hand if folks need ED meds, there's a place in my neighborhood:

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Please tell me that this is taking off from one of my favorite book illustrations of all time:

Drawings from George Gamow's "1, 2, 3 Infinity" showing a right and wrong way to project a 3 dimensional horse onto two dimensions. The right way is tracing rays, the wrong way is a completely bonkers drawing of a horse lying on a blanket in a hydraulic press.

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Not sure that knife is actually getting sharper, bro

An ad for some chef competition thing with a caption "the knives are sharper, the stakes are higher" and a picture of the hands of a burly dude sharpening the wrong end of a knife with a steel. It might be AI, it has that look.

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

It's basically a copy of the old Paia reverb module from my synth, which I somehow lost along the way, but at least I had the manual.

Manual for a spring reverb from a 1970s synth.

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Modifying the spring reverb I made a while back. I had used a cheap dc to dc converter to make a bipolar supply, but a couple of people told me they could hear it, so changing it to use a regular guitar pedal 9v input. Of course I've made a mistake somewhere and it doesn't work now. :)

A circuit board and a bunch of in a diecast Hammond box together with a black spring reverb tank and miscellaneous tools and junk scattered around

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Maybe it looked like a thousand but it was the same guys going around and around and I know that gets confusing.

Newspaper photo of a bike race and a headline suggesting that there were more than 1000 riders in a race that had about 250 starters

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Someone gave us a bottle of stingless bee honey once, it was really interesting!

A bottle that looks like a brown beer bottle with a yellow label depicting traditional stingless bee hives.

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Well, that's refreshing, an ad for a luxury item that features stingless bees.

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

What's really great is that the Mexican Independence Day festival always coincides with Board Meeting, so one can grab a tamale or taco on the way

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Cocoon mode engaged. Of course it crawled out of the nice thing I made for it. It did that in just a few hours!

A small cocoon surrounded by cricket parts.

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

In a few more years we can see how this cohort does with firing torpedoes.

A baby looking at some flash cards with high contrast black and white patterns

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

It finished all the crickets, and started spinning a cocoon. I made a little rolled up tube of acetate so it would have some walls to work with. #invertebrate

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

If your product logo features the Droste Effect, you should be required by law to depict a minimum number of recursions

Oyster sauce label showing a woman in an apron holding a bottle which has the same label showing her in smaller form, but that's as far as it goes. The text on the bottle is in Thai with a bit of English.

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

OK, I realize that this is not everyone's cup of tea, but I also don't think that nature needs to be flagged as sensitive content, so use your judgement, if you do or don't don't want to see a wasp larva eat a cricket. This normally happens out of sight, so a rare opportunity.

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

For #thingThursday, my dad's old Heathkit multimeter, which would have been called a VOM (for volt/ohm meter) at the time. Used this all through my teenage years, I don't actually remember when I first got an electronic meter.

An electronic instrument with a selector switch to choose various settings and an analog meter with several different scales, all in a black bakelite housing.

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Hungry Hungry caterpillar has nothing on li'l dude here. You can't turn lead into gold, but you can turn cricket into wasp.

Wasp larva in a container of tree crickets, visibly larger than a couple of days ago.

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Here's a little 4OkHz transducer. After the mechanical chimes came electronic remotes that were still acoustic. When IR LEDs came along, they were basically just swapped out, different drivers and preamps, but the signal path was the same.

A small electronic component, a short cylinder about 1cm in diameter with a shiny disc visible in the open end.

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

My first-aid kit is very sad that I keep hurting myself.

A small red pouch with straps on the back that look like a sad face.

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I brought these home partly because I wanted to see what kinds of crickets they were. Two kinds of tree cricket and maybe an oak-bush cricket?

A small pale green cricket with wings. It has an elongated body.

Another small cricket with rounded wings

A slightly chunkier Katie did. It looks more like a grasshopper but is small and has a really long overpositor that is sword-shaped

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

A grass carrying wasp filled a hole that I needed for other things so now I have a container of undead crickets and at least one confused wasp larva

A take-ot sauce container with several tree or bush crickets and a little wormy guy, plus various bits of debris.

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Bluesky unmatched as the joke understanding website

Nancy strip with the gag that nancy and sluggo are hiding behind a fence to give Busmiller less work on labour day, followed by a user pointing out that actually strips are drawn in advance.

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

If you lost your yoga ball in the big storm, I know where it is.

Storm debris in a creek, mostly downed branches but also a big black yoga ball.

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Rob Cruickshank @robcruickshank.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Heads-up to cyclists in Taylor creek, one of the bridges in closed due to storm damage. You can go around on the the path that goes through the creek if you can deal with a few inches of water, otherwise it's a bit of a hassle to get around.

section of Taylor creek in a satellite view showing the bridge in question

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