Hobbies

From BoingBoing comes this 1990 film of a Rally Car running up Pikes Peak.

Corbis Stock Photography has created several papercraft pinhole cameras that you can download and make for FREE.

They used some of their images for the artwork on the bodies and they are very nice.

Here is one of the available cameras:


There are four currently available and more on the way.

Thanks to PaperForest for the heads-up.

I got the Orange Box a while ago and last night I was playing Half Life 2 and I got stuck. (It happens to the best of us.)

So I went looking for a walk through.

I found a really nice one that's all screen shots.

Well done. (Got me unstuck too.)

I do love the mashups.

The Bootie Top Ten for July is finally out. Nothing outstanding on the first listen, but it's still fun stuff.

One of the songs in the top ten is from a concept album called Number of Da Bootz - a collection of mashups featuring Iron Maiden songs.

That collection is featured over on a blog that is new to me called Mashup Town. I'm going to have to add that one to my blog roll.

I still have a small pet peeve about these mashups. At least 50% of them have missing or mangled IDv3 tags in them. I really get tired of having to cleanup the tags before I can import them into iTunes.

Ooo! More fun stuff from Mashup Town - Bootwerk - a collection of mashups of Kraftwerk songs.

The Bootie Top Ten Mashups for June have been released!

And it's a great collection this month!

Favs from this month:

• Pretend We're Alala (L7 vs. CSS) - kicks ass!
  
• Walkin Out Yo Girlfriend (lobsterdust mash) (Unk vs. Avril Lavigne ft. Toni Basil) - Who else could get away with mixing in "Hey Mickey"?
  
• Love Or Hate Me Banquet (Bloc Party vs Lady Sovereign vs Abba) - Yet another mashup with Lady Sovereign - but it's pretty fun. It's faster than DJ Jay R's Sweet Sovereign (Lady Sovereign vs. Eurythmics vs. Shiny Grey) from the Best of Bootie 2006 collection.
  

Go download them now!

CMT makes some nice tools.

I have a pretty good collection of CMT router bits and I'm pretty happy with them. They have nice profiles and they cut really smooth.

I recently replaced the Oldham 10" thin kerf blade on my table saw with a CMT 10" 50 tooth ATBR thin kerf blade.

The difference is night and day!

The Oldham blade was loud, it bogged down and burned in the cut, it vibrated, and it tore up the veneer on plywood something terrible.

The CMT blade is quiet, it cuts as fast as I can push the wood through it with no burning, and it makes nice clean cuts in veneer plywood. I wish I had bought this blade a long time ago.

I bought an 8" JET professional stacking dado set recently and I just wasn't happy with it. The bottom of the dado wasn't clean and it ripped up the veneer on plywood something bad. (Sound familiar?)

Yesterday I returned it and went home with the 8" CMT Precision Cut stacking dado set.

More night and day action.

The CMT Dado set is very nice and there is very little veneer splintering. I'm going to experiment with my technique a bit and I think I can reduce the splintering to almost none.

In any case, I think all my saw blades are going to be Orange from now on! They aren't the cheapest option, but man they cut nice.

Now here is a great hardware hack. Build a cheap (about $1 per input) A/V switch with as many inputs as you like.

The link comes from Hack A Day, a great hardware hacking site.

I'm going to have to build one of these.

Although I can already think of some hacks to improve it. They are using on-off push buttons, so you have to turn off each input to switch to another. With some latches or flip-flops you should be able to use momentary push buttons.

Also a copper perf board of some sort would clean up the wiring quite a bit.

Gee, with all the spare time I have...

PZ Myers points out this list of "Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years"

I'm not sure I agree with all these titles being on the list, and I'm sure I could come up with more personal favorites, but it's a good starter list in general.

Following PZ's and Tikistich's lead, I have marked the ones that I have read. (Quite a few of them.)

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
Dune, Frank Herbert
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
Cities in Flight, James Blish
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
Gateway, Frederik Pohl
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Little, Big, John Crowley
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
Ringworld, Larry Niven
Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
Timescape, Gregory Benford
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

Bold = I've read 'em
Italic = I read the first three chapters and now they're in a box somewhere

The Wood Whisperer is Marc Spagnuolo, a Gen-X wood worker who has a weekly(?) podcast on wood working.

It's pretty amusing, but I wonder how he can afford all that nice equipment in his garage.

I searched the archives and am working my way forward from episode 1 (there are 11 currently.)

There is also some other useful information on the site. I think this might go into my daily read list.

This is a really cool project. You can build a mobile projection theater system for supposedly around $1000.

Just the projector itself intrigues me.