My telephone. The gilt metal is just gold coloured metal, the bakelite is some more modern plastic but the onyx is real onyx so the handset alone weighs over 500g.

A disassembled MC68HC908 based remote control of some sort.

What do you get when you jam the optical drives from an emachine 3220 into a Dell 4600? You get Cylon!

Old switch mode PSU transformers in various stages of being recycled into something new.

This was the company satellite truck and I drove it once - over a fencepost. Never felt a thing, snapped the four inch post off clean. Oops!

This is the LED backlight from a broken LCD panel. It didn't take much to get it to light.

If you reverse bias the BE junction of a bipolar transistor far enough it will break down and start to conduct. What you don't see though is it also glows like a very poor LED at the same time. This is a BC107 glowing.

This is typical of what you find in one of those cheap phone car charge adapters. The circuit is lifted straight from the MC34063 application note.

Another phone car charge adapter. This is a 'universal' version and is a little more complex. One of the additions is a voltage set resistor in the plug for each phone type.

There I was sitting quietly when what must be one of the last remaining spiders since the arrival of the house guest, ran out into the middle of the floor. I just had time to grab one quick shot, with my fingertips for scale, before it scarpered.

I ground the top and bottom off an optoisolator just to see what's inside. A lot of stuff you can't quite see through it seems.

A bleeding edge piece of video conferencing technology, from the last millenium.