This is me:

I'm a 23 year old Canadian citizen and my name is Barclay Hygaard.
I'm currently a student at UT Knoxville majoring in English Literature.
Things I like: high voltage electronics, urban exploration, treking, Arnold Palmers, leather.
Things I dislike: foul and nefarious odors, 100% humidity, extremists.
You can find me on Facebook if you want to know more.

I would like to make something perfectly clear; I may be an audiophile, but I am not crazy. Often you hear people touting the shear volume of their lossless FLAC libraries and saying that they would never listen to "CD Quality" audio (44.1khz/16bit), these are the type of people I want to differentiate myself from. I've gotten into quite a few heated discussions lately on the topic of audio fidelity and decided that this would be a great place to direct people in order to see the actual facts. The most prevalent gris-gris amoungst self proclaimed audiophiles and hipsters alike is that Vinyl records are superior to CDs. The second is that a 192khz/24bit track is clearly better in every way than CD quality audio. Before I tackle those I'd like to show off a bit. Below you can see my AKG Q701 headphones and the FiiO e17 I use to drive them, when I'm not listening with headphones I use a Logitech Z-5500 5.1 system.

The Raspberry Pi is an ARM based computer system that was produced with the intent of creating an affordable machine for novice programers to learn about the basics of hardware and software. The project started in the UK, but excitement grew and they sold their first 10,000 units within hours of them going on sale.

The Pi uses an SD card to boot from and as primary storage. It has 2 USB ports, one Ethernet port, an HDMI output, composite video out, a 3.5mm audio output, and a set of 14 pins for expanding the platform. It is all powered from a 5v micro USB connector, you need at least 500ma; if you want to overclock it's best to have a one amp power supply. I'm running the Raspbian distro built by Hexxeh. My device is running with a small copper heat sink installed on the Samsung ARM chip which is modestly overclocked from the stock 700mhz to 800mhz.

A Tesla Coil is often known as a lightning generator. It creates a very high voltage current that is discharged into the air forming streamers of electricity. I'm in the planning and gathering phase of the build right now. I have acquired a 12kv 30ma neon sign transformer that will be acting as the power supply. Here is what it looks like operating as a Jacob's ladder.

All the parts are starting to come together.

This is an AC line filter to stop dangerous voltage/frequency from getting into the mains wiring.

This is the Capacitor Bank.

Here is the top load torus with the secondary coil.

Finally a close up of the winding on the secondary, 1500 feet of 24 AWG enameled copper wire.

I have an affinity for lighting projects and this one was really fun. I covered my ceiling with glow in the dark paint. Glow in the dark paint happens to react with 405nm wavelength light. The result is that I have a large canvas that I can draw on with lasers. There's nothing quite as fun as laying in bed and drawing on your ceiling.The video doesn't show it well, but the effect lasts about 3 minutes.