If I had a hammer

Part of my brain is always occupied with the idea of tinkering. If I had a shop and the toys and tools and materials, I think I'd tinker a lot. But I get bored with things that don't work quickly, so that would make me a terrible inventor. 

I fantasize about having a house someday that is entirely self-sustaining using simple and readily present technologies. I have it all figured out in my head, just don't have the wherewithal to do it (or a house). Covering the roof with solar panels, collecting every bit of rainwater (I figured once that it would take .8 acres of land receiving 10-12 inches of average rainfall to sustain a family of five using average amounts of water; certainly a conserving-minded family could do better than that), keep or collect certain refuse and garbage that can be used to make fuels to power cars and other large machinery, efficient hydroponics to grow plants and food in small spaces, etc. 

One of my favorite sites that will occasionally suck me in is Instructables.com. They've got anything and everything, from how to make your own Weighted Companion Cube from the Portal game, or an Iron Man chest arc generator. Find instructions for mischief or construction. One guy made instructions on building your own rainwater-yard sprinkler system that automatically turns on or off the collection of rainwater depending on rainfall. 

Not just on this site, but elsewhere there are lots of instructions for building your own hydrogen gas generators for cars. A pair of guys in Tennessee offer classes in building one.  They put one in a Nissan Altima's trunk and boost the horsepower and fuel efficiency using PVC piping, stainless steel plates, water, and lye with various other hardware store parts. And no hydrogen is stored in the car, it only makes it as needed when the car is on. Cars can increase fuel efficiency from 25-50% using the battery's current and lye-water. (Lye can be made at home using soaked wood ashes). Pretty ingenious. Not effective for running a car entirely off of it, but effective in boosting power and efficiency. 

Lye (sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide) can also be used to make your own soap and biodiesel from oils and fats in a saponification reaction (maybe I'll write about it next). Add aluminum to lye-water and huge amounts of hydrogen gas will be given off with it's own potential (but dangerous) uses. I can imagine people collecting ashes and scrap metal from industrial sites just for the purpose of making it cheap and dirty. 

Maybe someday, when the apocolypse has come and gone, I'll have my house nestled back in a canyon somewhere, fully sustainable, and I'll house my own collection of servers and wireless broadcasters (all powered by solar or wind generators) and reinstate a semi-internet for those out there with their own connections and we'll rebuild the internet piece by piece. Ha Ha (*Victorious laugh*)

For now, the closest I can get to inventing/building/tinkering is playing Fantastic Contraption during Biochemistry. 2 of us introduced it to our class and got about 20 people hooked on it for a week. It's a blast. The machines can get as complex as you like, but for the quickest, simplest run through, check out this guy's speed run.