» Nerdery How to Spot a Psychopath

So many ways to be useless

9 May 2010 — dan

Shannon's Ultimate Machine, aka the "Most Useless Machine", has become something of a fad.

So of course, people have made Lego versions.

I think this one, announced in this Lugnet post, is my favourite.

Yep - it's clockwork!

The clockwork motor it uses is either this one or this one. There's also this rather rare see-through one. You could probably also use one of the many pull-back motors.

(Bonus points go to anyone who makes a Useless Machine that's powered by the clock escapement from the #8888 Idea Book.)

Posted in Hacks, Nerdery, Toys. 2 Comments »

Are you wondering, "Hey, in these belt-tightening times of international financial crises and slashed Internet advertising budgets, have those contextual-link-advertising companies that splattered so many stupid irrelevant ad-links over so much of the Web cleaned up their act, and started linking from stuff that actually has something to do with what they're advertising?"

Idiotic contextual-advertising link

Apparently not.

(From this page, about the Star Wars fan-film series that's just hit chapter two, a few years late.)

The company responsible promises "the most relevant contextual advertising links". I'm sure that's correct. They seem, at least, to be running equal first.

Posted in Ads, Nerdery. 4 Comments »

"...but some elves came and helped them, WHO WEREN'T EVEN IN THE BOOK..."

20 April 2010 — dan

Martin Pearson's The Unfinished Spelling Errors of Bolkien is very funny, very clever, and very hard to find.

[UPDATE: Martin says it's OK to download it for free!]

(MP3)

It's a two-hour, two-CD, filk-infested one-man comedy show about of The Lord of the Rings - both the book and the film versions.

(MP3)

Even if you don't usually like those The Fiftieth Time Some Dude Put Stuff About Elves And Cthulhu To The Tune Of "Jailhouse Rock" sorts of songs, I assure you that you are going to have a very hard time not finding Bolkien funny. C'mon, the guy actually sings the Black Speech inscription on the One Ring to the tune of "King of the Road".

(MP3)

The total length of the double CD, not counting six minutes of out-takes at the end, is about 115 minutes. And there are a lot of songs in it, but there's a lot of talking too.

(MP3)

The Bolkien CDs were recorded with a live audience, which is of course essential for this sort of thing. There are also not many of those annoying comedy-record moments when everybody laughs, but you don't know why, because it's a visual joke and you don't have video.

(There are a few videos of Pearson on YouTube, by the way.)

There are also only a couple of jokes that you won't get if you're not Australian.

(MP3)

Honestly, half of the world's English-speaking nerds should have a copy of this.

But they don't, on account of how it's not very easy to buy it.

Bolkien is listed here and there on podunk online CD stores (Pearson also has his own Web site, which is currently somewhat unfinished). The only online store I could find that even claims to have Bolkien available for sale, though, is Ducks Crossing, where the double CD costs a handsome $AU40 plus $AU6 delivery in Australia, or $AU12 to the USA. They do at least accept credit cards and currency-convert the total price, though, so US customers will pay a total of a mere $US48.36, delivered, for the double CD.

Which is, of course, a bit on the bleeding steep side.

Apparently you're also meant to be able to buy the CD through 7th Dimension Music. But for months now there's been nothing in that site's shop, and the product page for Bolkien has, for lo these many months, been a database error. Some of his previous stuff used to be on this site, too, but now it's broken as well. It's all very depressing.

So I e-mailed Mr Pearson (pearsonmartinXX@XXhotmail.com, without the XXs) and informed him of the large number of people who would like to give him money, if only the CDs were available at a reasonable price. I also asked whether he'd considered opening the money-tap rather wider by letting people pay for downloadable MP3s.

Martin said that if people want to buy the CD, they can e-mail him. And maybe mail him a cheque, so he can put it on a wooden table and take a picture of it, et cetera.

It struck me that buying CDs by e-mailing the artist personally is not necessarily a completely optimal e-business paradigm. I suggested he try out a sell-your-files service like (to pick a random, presumably-honest example) PayLoadz, or of course CD Baby, who sell physical CDs, and can also put artists' MP3s up on iTunes and Amazon and so on. (This is CD Baby's "Artist Sign Up" section.) But he didn't go for it.

So allow me to postulate a hypothetical situation.

Suppose, hypothetically, that someone were to illegally download The Unfinished Spelling Errors of Bolkien, from one of those intarweb bit-waterfall things that the kids are so enthusiastic about. Beats me how you'd find it, but perhaps some cunning search string featuring Martin's name, or just the word "Bolkien", might do it.

If that someone decided they liked it, they could go on to send a few bucks to Mr Pearson via PayPal. (Once again, that's pearsonmartinXX@XXhotmail.com, without the XXs.)

Martin doesn't have a PayPal account either, but I think he may be persuaded to get one if a thousand bucks pile up waiting for him.

UPDATE: Martin Pearson his own bad self showed up in the comments below, and officially gave free BitTorrent distribution of Bolkien his blessing.

So here's the torrent, people! Remember to PayPal Martin, pearsonmartin@hotmail.com, a buck or three if you like it!

(Alternative torrent link. This is the magnet URI.)

Posted in Humour, Music, Nerdery. 29 Comments »

Look upon my Lego gearbox, ye mighty, and despair!

4 April 2010 — dan

OK, so you've got your Lego automatic transmissions, and they're pretty awesome. And there are a number of Lego continuously-variable transmissions, some of elegantly simple design, and those are impressive too.

And then somebody comes along and makes a seven-speed-plus-reverse sequential Lego gearbox, and puts it in a fully remote-controlled Lego Veyron.

With, of course, working steering, engine pistons, disc brakes...

Oh, and it's the targa-top version of the Veyron too, just to pack another darn mechanism in there.

Like someone whose unsettling dreams about becoming the world's greatest badass have been dissipated by an encounter with Raven, all of the rest of us are now under no pressure at all for high achievement in Lego engineering.

(The gearbox is only an expanded and improved version of the 8448 gearbox, mind you, so clearly this is not really that much of a big deal. Also, I think you'll find that Mount Rushmore isn't actually a very large mountain.)

Posted in Hacks, Nerdery, Toys. 5 Comments »

Does YOUR hamster have The Right Stuff?

9 March 2010 — dan

When I read that Neil Fraser's Meccano lava-lamp centrifuge only rotated at 42 revolutions per minute, I didn't think it sounded very impressive.

I take that back.

Posted in Hacks, Nerdery, Science. 7 Comments »

If only Formula 1 knew about duct tape and baling wire

14 February 2010 — dan

Just as not everything that appears on Photoshop Disasters is an actual Photoshop disaster, and not everything on The Daily WTF is uncontroversially WTF-y, so too not everything on There, I Fixed It is actually a half-assed repair job.

These wheelchairs, for instance, may look gimcrack, but (as commenters quickly pointed out) they're actually real, functional and sorely-needed "appropriate technology".

(If it's stupid but it works, it isn't stupid.)

I think quite a lot of the other There, I Fixed It posts have a similar charm, especially to people like me who actively prefer shabby things to shiny ones. (I am not being sarcastic when I say cat-scratches "improve" furniture.) I like things that look totally ramshackle, or even obviously broken, but actually work, or can pretty easily be made to work.

This desk support, for instance, rather appeals to me.

You could make it properly structurally sound, too. Just gather enough unimportant documents - not, I think you'll find, a difficult task for many people - and pile them up one sheet at a time, putting a circle of white glue on each sheet. Then put the desk or something back on top of the pile to clamp it while the glue dries.

You could make a desk that stood on four of these things, a coffee table on four short ones, a single one as a display plinth for your Office Space collectibles...

You could even make the stack lightweight, if you did something like core out the middle inside the glue-rings and replace it with a length of large-diameter PVC pipe. And then you could, of course, hide booze in it!

I invite readers to nominate their own examples of constructions and contraptions in this sort of improbable-yet-functional, broken-yet-working category.

(With pictures, if possible! Commenters can't use image tags, but if you just put the URL of the image, Flickr page or whatever in your comment I'll picturify it, provided it doesn't make my Civil Defense Lemonparty Survey Meter beep too loudly.)

Posted in Hacks, Handicrafts, Machinery, Nerdery. 15 Comments »

The End of Lousy Writing, With Any Luck

10 January 2010 — dan

I just got to watching The End of Time, the two-part final instalment of Russell T. Davies' writing stint on Doctor Who (he's been at it since the series was reborn in 2005).

Spoilers below, et cetera.

Again, not very good. I pretty much agree with Frank at Cathode Ray Tube. And with the whingier commenters, too.

I even almost agree with the "gay agenda" criticisms this time. In the coda where the Doctor takes a moment to see all of his buddies for the last time, saving a life here, handing someone 20 million quid there, he stops in to a polyglot space cantina on Earth Music Sung In English Night to... set Cap'n Jack up with a hot guy.

Who Jack may need to be with in order to save the universe or something, but way to agree with fundamentalist preachers about the one and only focus of all gay men, Russell. Jeez.

The bit my inner fanboy latched onto as particularly obnoxious, though, was after Earth suddenly found itself populated by 6.7 billion Masters, at the end of the first instalment.

The next bit'll be rich, said I. A planet filled with billions and billions of "I am the Master and you will OBEY ME!!" megalomaniacs! It'll instantly granularise into millions of tiny warring fiefdoms, everyone scheming against everyone else, everybody with access to three tin cans and a bottle of bleach cooking up mind-controlling super-viruses, demons being raised right and left, legions of clanking K1s fighting pitched battles against pithed Silurians with Dalek beam-guns grafted onto their arms all slaved to the brains-in-jars of as many Masters as one lucky other Master managed to catch in a stasis trap...

But... no.

All of the Master-duplicates cheerfully stayed in exactly the position in the world's countless chains of command that the human they'd replaced was previously in. And they all happily took orders from the Masters above them. And said "Yes, sir!"

The new Masters in Donna's house didn't even seem to sodding move from their spots next to the dining table.

One can only presume that the Masters who took over the bodies of burger-flippers didn't bother to remove their paper hats.

And then they gave up all their technology and sent their ship into the sun, and a major character vanished into thin air.

(Wait. That might have been a different show.)

The new Masters had to act nothing like the actual character, of course, because otherwise the Grand Evil Scheme Davies had spent all of three minutes thinking up wouldn't work at all, and the Reset Button at the end when the human race all turn back into themselves would be hindered by the population of the planet having dropped by a factor of 100 in a couple of hours. But I like to think that even young viewers would have been wondering why The Crazy Baddie suddenly turned into The Peaceful... Obedient-ie.

TV Tropes calls this phenomenon Writer On Board, and has many examples. This one was an absolute corker, though.

Posted in Nerdery. 14 Comments »

Are you troubled by yellowed, lifeless Lego?

18 December 2009 — dan

There I was, idly scanning eBay for Lego baseplates to maybe give to one or another child for Christmas (HOW CAN THEY NOT MAKE CRATER PLATES ANY MORE WHY WAS I NOT CONSULTED), and I noticed that most, if not all, of the plates on offer weren't very close to their original colour.

This reminded me of a thing from the other month about de-yellowing the casings of old computers and video games.

If you don't want to paint over the yellowed plastic, you can soak it in a hydrogen peroxide solution, with a dash of one or another kind of bleach. (Note that the popular "oxygen bleach" products are based on sodium percarbonate, which when added to water just gives you hydrogen peroxide plus washing soda.)

If you want to get fancy, you can make a gel concoction dubbed "Retr0bright", which'll stay where you put it. So you can bleach things without having to remove all the electronics so you can dip the casing, or bleach the outside of a thing but not the inside, et cetera.

Apparently even plain few-per-cent peroxide will often do the job if you leave the pieces to soak overnight. If you want faster results, you need 10%-to-20% peroxide, which you may or may not be able to get from a pharmacy.

(I must, at this juncture, digress and recommend Armadillo Aerospace's old video - 56Mb MPEG here - of what happens when you put high-test rocket-fuel-grade hydrogen peroxide on various common substances.)

Does this technique, I wondered, work on Lego?

Apparently, yes, it does! Even on clear pieces!

(Bleach can apparently attack the paint on some printed bricks, though.)

I don't think this will actually do the plastic any harm, either. Or any more harm, anyway. The reason why plastic discolours in the first place is because something - ultraviolet light and/or atmospheric oxygen, usually - reacts with one or more of the constituents of the plastic. The material that yellows may be the polymer itself, or it may be flame-retardant additives, or plasticiser, or something. In any case, bleaching already-damaged substances back to white shouldn't do any more damage.

[Update: I just remembered that a couple of years ago I wrote this piece, about the making of Lichtenberg figures in clear acrylic. It involves a rather unusual way to discolour plastic.]

You don't have to bother with this at all, of course. A yellowed Amiga 500 is still an Amiga 500, and yellowed Lego is still Lego. Some builders have even...