This time last year, I was working on the IceCube Neutrino Observatory as a grad student. The experiment is located at the South Pole and I traveled there to deploy the instruments that I was working on. I spent Christmas and New Years there along with 200 other humans, 900 miles away from anybody else. The experience was awesome.

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a massive "telescope" which uses the ice at the South Pole as a target for neutrinos. Neutrinos are fundamental particles which are very difficult to detect- in the time it took you to read the last sentence about one billion neutrinos passed through you without any interactions. The goal of IceCube is ambitious: to produce a sky map of these hard-to-detect particles. In particular, IceCube is looking for neutrinos of extremely high energies which are produced in astronomical events such as gamma ray bursts and supernova explosions. Because neutrinos are so difficult to detect, IceCube's strategy is to capture them by instrumenting 1 km^3 of ice at the South Pole. Even more ambitiously, IceCube uses the earth itself as a noise filter. The telescope is embedded in the ice underneath the South Pole and looks downwards for the only particles that could possibly travel upwards through the entire earth, neutrinos.

There is no way I can do the project justice in such a short blog post. Even something as mundane as the 3km holes that IceCube drills in the ice are fascinating. Every part of the experience from going to Antarctica to deploying the instrumentation itself was amazing. Over the next series of blog posts, I'd like to get into more detail on the experiment and write a bit about Antarctica as well. In the mean time, if you want to learn more about IceCube check out the project's home page. Also, please send me an email and let me know if I messed up some details or if you'd like to hear more about something in particular.

Here is a video I made for my family from the pole.

I just received this picture from South Pole Station, Antarctica and I had to share it. The guy wearing an Octopart t-shirt is Mike and he is an electrical engineer for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory (he's also a friend of ours). He's at the South Pole right now probably huddled in a field tent splicing wires at -30 deg celcius. Thanks Mike and Justin!!

This picture is especially meaningful for me because the box he is standing with is the laser I was working on in grad school. It is also the laser that started Octopart. As I was building it, I found it really frustrating to find the right parts and devices for it. Sam had a similar experience with his projects so we started working on Octopart at night to try and make our day jobs easier. Now we are coding full time but I'm still nostalgic for that period. As of yesterday the laser is buried 2km below the surface of the ice and it will never be seen again.

Ironically, I was in the middle of writing a blog post about IceCube when I received this picture. I'll hold off on that post for another few days. If you have any cool pictures of Octopart t-shirts doing battle with the elements, with soulless grizzlies, or with short circuiting soldering irons please email them to me! If you need a t-shirt to give to your mother for Christmas, send me an email as well.

Sometimes a small window to the right of your screen just doesn't cut it for keeping track of your electronic parts. To solve that problem, today we are releasing a more fully-featured PartList. By popular demand, you can use this application to cut and copy your parts, partlists and folders. To help you remember why you needed that particular semiconductor chip with the really long part number, you can add part titles, part comments, and descriptions to your partlists. Together with publishing and the cross-distributor shopping cart, we're hoping that this feature makes your life easier as you build electronics projects.

As always, please e-mail us with feature requests and bug reports and watch for additional improvements to the partlist in the future - this is just the beginning.

Last Friday morning, Sam and I sleepily boarded a big jet plane out to Austin and the Maker Faire. The Maker Faire is put on by Make Magazine and brings together people who are very interested in, well, making things. Friday night felt like a strange dream - we set up our booth next to gigantic robots, bicycle powered carnival rides, and a series of battle-hardened model warships equipped with pellet guns.

The next few days were well worth the trip out. We met a lot of great people and learned a lot about the open-source hardware movement. Although the term still hasn't been clearly defined, the motivating philosophy is similar to that of open-source software. Information, such as schematics and designs, describing hardware is made freely available which in turn fosters a highly collaborative spirit. Judging from the fair, it seems that the open-source hardware movement is flourishing, especially with the advent of new tools such as the oft-used Arduino. Bre Pettis and Phillip Torrone from Make Magazine came by our booth to chat about Octopart's role in reducing the barrier to people who need to find information about electronic parts.

The highlight of the fair was meeting with our users and peeking over their shoulders as they used the search engine. We collected a heap of great feedback which we'll be using to make Octopart better. A lot of people were excited about our new publishing feature, which we'll be improving in the weeks to come.

We also found out that a lot of our users are involved in some pretty amazing projects. The guys over at the Fab Lab are aiming to provide tools to the general public and educate them in their use, complete with afterschool programs which teach young children how to design and solder a circuit. Zach Smith works on RepRap an open-source 3D printer, the stated goal of which is to be able to replicate itself. It seems the group also replicates itself as there are many RepRap groups throughout the country and the world.

We caught our flight out early Monday morning after saying goodbye to our users and all of the friendly robots - but we had such a great time that we'll be seeing everyone again at Maker Faires in the future.