First (rough MDF) Box Project

Hello! I thought I’d give you a quick update on what I’ve been looking at recently so you can have a laugh at how terribly its all going! 🙂
I’ve started work on what should be the first in a number of wood box projects. Eventually the goal is to build my own enclosures for a couple of electronics projects I’ve got in mind.
This first one however is just a bit of fun. It already looks terrible but it does fit together. It’ll look great as long as you don’t look directly at it!
I’ll post some images up once I’ve got something worth looking at.

As an aside, I’d like to add that getting the wood cut by the guys in B&Q does sacrifice accuracy. They did their best but the saw they have is better at roughing out. All the panels making the box are different sizes. Like I said, this is a functional bit of storage thrown together for fun, the next projects should have a lot more finesse! 🙂

Birthday Week

Well, I took the week off this week to enjoy the weather and get a year older. Apart from the hay fever and constant fear of death by sunlight, it’s been a great week so far.
As I’m sure you’ve already guessed, I’ve been hiding in the shade the whole time but it looks lovely out there!
My mission this week (aside from getting older) has been to read a lot and try to get some new knowledge into this old brain. Its been going surprisingly well considering the heat and proximity of my movie collection.
Every time I close my eyes now, I see formulas though. That’s a good thing right?!? 😉

Light a Candle, Make a Torch!

Since living in my old flat and enjoying the wonderful power cuts it used to serve up periodically, I’ve come to appreciate the wonder that is the pocket-sized torch and candle light reading. Her majesty is always chuckling about my obsession with checking out portable lighting whenever we go to hardware or DIY places. I always insist it’s for camping trips so we can light our tent but I know she suspects it’s the power cut preparation thing.

She’s right, I just don’t want to admit it! 🙂

As you may or may not know, I’ve been trying with some very minor successes to teach myself electronics. I’m still wrapping my head around the maths but I’m trying! As an excercise to practice soldering, I grabbed a few parts I had lying around and made, you guessed it, a torch! Have a look:

It’s a little basic I know but when I presented it to Her Majesty, being the practical kind of girl she is, she loved it. Turns out she loved that is was hand made badly in about 5 minutes by her geek! 😉

If you’d like a torch of such wonderful (or better) quality, go have a go with a bit of stripboard, a superbright 10mm LED, a battery holder and a push button. Total cost for project: About £1.50 in spare parts. Bargain… AND you get to fiddle about trying to solder it correctly. What more could you want?

Tonight (D&D Song)

This song is one I discovered trawling YouTube one day. Allie Goertz is a singer/songwriter who puts her songs on the web so everyone can go and enjoy them, although this is one of her older ones, it’s the one that I like most.

Listening to this song reminds me of a long time ago when I was heavily in to table top RPGs and makes me think about all the laughs we had and the simple enjoyment of spending time with my friends pretending to be heroes (or villains). When I was a student, I’m positive it’s what kept me from going crazy, I just got to enjoy being a geek. Things seemed simpler or at least that’s how I remember it.

I’m older now and life conspires against such pursuits, your friends drift apart (or in my case – me from them), time becomes more scarce and you think about the good old days but don’t seem to have the energy to set about bringing them back.

All I know is that there’s a big part of my formative years encapsulated in Allie’s song. I can still taste the coke and pizza and I still chuckle at some of the situations we got our characters in to.
Time moves on and so must I. It’s just nice to look back and smile sometimes.

Taking the Plunge – Moving to Windows 8

Hi again boys and girls! I thought I’d give you an update from what I was saying before about Windows 8, I did as I threatened and upgraded to Windows 8 while it was still nice and affordable.

Again, loving it. It’s very different and sometimes if I’m honest frustrating (getting to settings in programs for example) but that’s just because I’m not completely up to speed with it yet. I’ve noticed the final version takes fractionally longer to boot but we’re only talking seconds here so it’s noticeable but not bad enough to really matter.

I’m really happy with it running on my laptop. Although it screams out for a touchscreen, it’s nice and easy to drive and all the keyboard shortcuts I’m used to work just as well as they ever did. It’s not like moving to Ubuntu or anything, even DOS commands I grew up with still work!

The cheap upgrade window (excuse the pun) has now passed so I’ll be very interested in how the OS performs in the marketplace now. Corporate uptake of this will also be interesting, wait for the Surface Pro to show up and be evaluated for field forces. If it delivers a usable platform that can be adequately secured and with good battery life you should see it fly off the shelves as the corporate and education sectors dive on them. We’ll see though I guess.

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes here with all the upgrades, should be a laugh…