Author Archives: Tom

Tom currently lives in rural Tennessee, is a former USMC air support control officer and was awarded the Air Medal for his service in Operation Desert Storm. He graduated in the top 3% of his class at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he earned a degree in Control Systems Engineering. After a stint on USMC recruiting duty, he earned a master's degree in Electrical Engineering at Virginia Tech as an Air Force Laboratory Graduate Fellow. He is qualified as a rifle and pistol coach in both the Navy and the Marine Corps, and was awarded the Merritt A. Edson trophy at Quantico for the highest combined rifle and pistol score in his class. He has developed homeschooling course materials, and his homeschooled children have demonstrated collegiate excellence.

Testing Emergency Solar Christmas Lights

Old School Tech has released a new article in the emergency solar Christmas light series, a topic of interest to self-sufficiency enthusiasts who need a little bit of extra light in those dark corners but don’t want to use valuable inverter capacity. This time, an easy-to-make test fixture is described which overcomes the quality problems […]

Three Blind Manassas Mice Agree To Training

As posted over at Leech City, Manassas city council members have finally relented and agreed to attend the state-mandated training for elected officials in the new year. We take full credit for this development. For years, the council members (Audrey solely excepted) had been steadfast in their refusal to attend this training. As such, this […]

Exclusive Pixie Mafia Interview

Leech City has released an interview with the Pixie Mafia, a psyop article that is laced with triggers for the local crime and corruption syndicate. The most important trigger is the name itself. The local syndicate prefers to call itself the Dixie Mafia, which was a real thing along the Mississippi Gulf Coast before the […]

Leech City Update, City Attorney Resigns Again

Leech City has posted notes from the December Reidsville city council meeting, which we attended. Our regular readers will recall that Reidsville’s newly hired city attorney, B. Jay Swindell, who was the Manassas city attorney when that city’s mayor falsely accused me of criminal behavior during city council meetings, resigned that post a few months […]

Faithless Elector Update, 13 Dec 2016

Another week, and more breaking news in the faithless elector astroturf campaign. To keep this one short, we won’t repeat the background thus far, you can catch up here, here, here, here and here. The latest: Clinton campaign backs intelligence briefing for Electoral College electors (CNN), an attempt to paint the election as having been […]

Extracting Potash

Old School Tech has released an article about extracting raw potash from wood ashes. Future projects will refine and use this raw product for interesting things. Not only does this project make a great homeschool chemistry lesson, it also sets the stage for some chemical processes of interest to self-sufficiency enthusiasts. As mentioned in that […]

Leech City Posts Open Meetings Requirements

Leech City has posted an article about Georgia’s Open Meetings Act and its requirements for how public officials are to conduct themselves while performing public business, including what constitutes an illegal meeting, which we call a clandestine meeting. Also important is the requirement to allow audio or video recording without permission. Although these laws vary […]

Emergency Solar Christmas Lights

Old School Tech has posted an article about converting Christmas LED light strings into emergency DC lighting for use directly from an off-grid battery array, no inverter required. This kind of lighting is great for safety-critical areas and allows a reliable backup source of lighting when other sources fail. Annoying AC flicker is also eliminated. […]

Faithless Elector Update, 6 Dec 2016

Once again, like clockwork, more faithless elector conditioning and trial balloons appear on or shortly before each Tuesday since the election, prompting my weekly article (despite my ongoing wish to be completely wrong about all this). Although the releases have been timed in a way to have the maximum social impact (1), and this discipline […]