Design News magazine has a whole section of information on designing with plastics. It appears to be a compilation of various articles they’ve published through the years. The experienced part designer may not learn much, but it’s great for all you new college grads (or for you experienced engineers, it could be a good refresher read). You can find it over at the Design News website.

Anyone who has performed an extensive patent search knows what an arduous task it can be, even with the search features at the Patent and Trademark Office’s website. Well, finally, Google has applied their search technology to the task, in the form of a beta version patent search! You can try it out here. I found it to be worthy of the ‘beta’ moniker – it works well, but some features are still lacking. For example, the ‘read this patent’ buttons weren’t working for me, but if I click on one of the images, I can navigate through the patent pages that way.

Ever wondered how your Christmas lights stay lit when a bulb goes out, even though they’re all wired in series? EDN has the answers in a nicely technical article here.

Most of you have probably thought about building (or have already done so) a system to automatically water your Christmas tree. Mark McCuller designed a nice system that uses water level sensors to maintain a precise water level at all times. Click here for the extremely detailed plans in PDF format.

Lastly, click here for some good instructions on how to build an electronic circuit that sequentially cycles power strings of Christmas lights (turning on and off entire strings at one time, not bulb-by–bulb control).

Lotus Engineering, the division of Lotus Cars that does a lot of consulting work for other car companies, publishes a free newsletter every couple of months. The latest issue can be downloaded here, with a focus on vehicle chassis technologies and manufacturing.