The November Birthstone: Citrine

I'm very fond of citrine, the gemstone ranging from a pale yellow to a dark orange. First, I just love the colour yellow; second, citrine is an extremely versatile gemstone that looks great with many different colours. I wear it often with black because I like the contrast of the yellow against dark colours. I like a neutral colour that I call champagne or sand - it's a version of khaki almost, but with golden tones instead of brown - Anne Klein calls it safari. A paler citrine is gorgeous with it. In the summer, nothing looks fresher than citrine bracelets and necklaces paired with white linen or cotton.

Gleam, Glimmer, Shimmer!

According to Vogue and other important fashion magazines, gold is back in fashion. Of course, I don't think that it was ever out! I love the gleam of gold, and while I will concede that there are certain gemstones that are best served by sterling silver or white gold, (think rose quartz) I generally prefer my own jewelry to be gold or a mixture of silver and gold.
One of my favorite combinations is lapis, carnelian, and turquoise; all of these gemstones look great with silver (although lapis always looks better with gold), but put them all together and you've just got to have yellow gold to match the richness of the colours! Above, a unique bracelet with lapis, carnelian, and turquoise accented with 14 karat goldfilled elements (with the exception of the toggle which is vermeil), and below, the matching necklace and dangling earrings.

Tweetidor, the tweeting humidor

Corleone [VHS]

As cigar aficionados will tell you, cigars should be stored in climate controlled humidors to keep them in best condition for smoking. Most of the time a humidor is just a simple air-tight box with a hygrometer attached, which measures the relative humidity inside the box. Feeling as though he needed more control over the environment he kept his cigars in, [Justin] created the Tweetidor, a humidor that tweets its current temperature and humidity. Yes, you guessed it; the project is built around an Arduino. It’s a simple, useful project that is well documented and would be fun to recreate if you’re into cigars (and not tired of Twitter or Arduinos yet.) Combine this with the laser lighter and you’ve got a pretty nice setup.

Eee PC NAS

Hack a Day reader [The_Glu] shared with us a project of his. He used an Eee PC 701 he had lying around with a broken LCD, along with three 1TB SATA drives to create a custom NAS server for his house. The server features a number of other interesting components, including USB2SATA converters to connect the hard drives, as well as a 2 line LCD to display RAID information and server status. The entire  project is wrapped up in a custom made Plexiglas enclosure with case fans to keep the whole thing cool. While this may not be the first Eee PC NAS, or the fastest, this is a wonderful way to repurpose a broken netbook. We also love the idea of netbooks being used more and more in projects like these as the first generation reaches its end of usefulness age. More pictures after the break.
Thanks [The_Glu]
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