00622 Paint on water

Cara and Meriel were adding paint to water with some turps on it.

It's only the coolest thing ever in the world.

00621 Richard's Board

It was Richard's Birthday over the weekend.

Helen said, "make a board for him, please".

So I did.

And 18 short months later, it was finished:

00622, the iPod amp

There once was a man who worked day and night to make an iPod dock with speakers for his wife's birthday.

He failed and instead went to the shops and bought one and was sad.

For the record, I was not that man, but in sympathy with his tale, I built a failed iPod amp, just to see what it would feel like.

Wood from a skip, speakers from the dump:

The electronics are still to be finished, sometime before my death.

00621 Emerging from hibernation

I have been working and not blogging.

There has been some making, but it's been sporadic and slow.

Tom and Claire's backgammon board is the first thing to be finished, just before Christmas.

This is the inset window with their monogram set under greenhouse glass, held in place by a circular wooden frame:

They were pleased, I reckon. I was.

Wood was stuff chucked away from a local flooring company and the ply was from a skip. Properly covered in cement it was. Puuuuuurfect.

00620, Miniature Victorian bike porn

As featured in "Penny farthings and babes" 1886.

00619, De Branch

I is de branch, innit.

00618 Day 147 to 167, the Last 21

I have reached the end … for the moment.

On the 9th August I signed a work contract with a local company and, realising that I couldn’t in all fairness walk through their doors looking hang-dog and half-dead every day, I decided to call a halt to M.A.D. Consequently all motivation to blog the backlog of completed projects lapsed.

Until now.

Here is a status update:
Days completed: 167
I feel: Happysadness
Number of uncompleted projects: F(x, y)*

I won't go through them all, but here are the highlights:









Below is a list of the projects currently unblogged (which will naturally and immediately create a paradox).

Day Project

147 Solder Alarm
148 the Wickerish Man
149 Undercarrager
150 Atari Punk Console
151 Trimariner
152 Spin the Bottle Die
153 Crowned/Not Crowned Pooh Stick
154 Sound activated camera remote
155 Sandy Cake City/Featherwing
156 Pocket Rocket
157 Breadboarder 2.0
158 D2 - Drink or Drive
159 Jazz!
160 Axis of Feeble
161 the Delivery
162 the Frikkin' Laaaser rifle
163 the Target
164 I Love Lamp
165 Cable release
166 Awkwerd
167 PP-1/Skullllll!

You don’t need descriptions of what they all are (or maybe you do), but the image are all in the Flickr set.

In the meantime, I will take everything I have learned and apply myself to the relief od human suffering.

Or I may just piss about.


*where x = number of days left to live, y = number of distractions
the true value of F(x,y) at any time has never been calculated, but is assumed to be very large.

00617 Day 146, Spaced 2.0

It is Day 1024* of our mission to the outer reaches of the solar system and we have now exhausted the crew members marked as expendable in the pre-mission script. Now the hard decisions have to be made. The remaining crew members include myself, the Science officer, Chief Engineer, and the Doctor - all of whom have significant speaking parts and cannot be lost without jeopardising the series. One notable loss which I have neglected to mention so far is that of the Communications Officer, who was mauled to death after falling and spraining her ankle while being chased by a monster. These stereotyped deaths are really plying havoc with the crew's morale.

As if that wasn't enough, the guy who made my ship out of scraps of wood, wire, old surface mount components and outlet pipe, has seen fit to drybrush her all to hell, so she ironically looks as if she needs a new paint job.

Fortunately I remain firmly in command and incredibly handsome.


*The Captain's log is made of MDF.

00616 Day 145, Airbrushing

An airbrush, some paints, a roll of masking tape, some paper and five minutes.

Brevity has become my new specialty.

Breshialty.

00615, Day 144, the Plug

"Plug plug plug plug plug plug plug plug plug plug plug plug plug plug plug plug,

PLUG, PLUG!"*




to the tune of the "Batman" theme, but you can also sing it to the tune of "Need a tiny plug for your breadboard, but they always get flimsy and break where the PCB interconnect pins meet the wire? Simply slip a piece of plastic drinking straw over the wire to be connected to the pins, epoxy glue the join after soldering and slide the straw over the glued section - Voila le plug!"

00614 Day 143, the Powerboard

Dear Lenny,

While on holiday, we saw this in a shop called "things that Lenny made". It seemed like such a coincidence, we just had to go in.
Jim (that's my made up husband's name - I'm his wife Peggy, who is writing this), has been following your blog and saw that you had got up to Day 142 and he thought that you might like to have this for your Day 143 thing. That way, you can have a holiday from making one thing every day and it's still made by Lenny, so technically, it's still OK.
Hope you like it.

Lots of love

Peggy
(BTW - I'm your imaginary aunt)

P.S. It's something that you can stick in a breadboard to conveniently supply it with wither 5V or 12V, so you don't have all those annoying batteries and wires lying around.

00613 Day 142, the Sound Trigger

When wishing to capture the image of a fracturing balloon, it would be wise to arm oneself with the appropriate triggering mechanism.

One such as is displayed above should prove adequate.

One just needs to link the mechanism to the preferred source of instantaneous light.

One needs to mess with one's strobe.

00612 Day 141, the Suggestion Box

From the instruction manual:

An experiment in iterative and evolutionary suggestibility.
Take a slip of paper from the pocket in the front of the box, add your suggestion as to how the box can be improved and post the completed slip through the hole at the top of the box. The box will then be opened (by pulling upwards on the lid until the neodymium magnets release) and then changed in its next iteration to include the enhancements suggested.


Warning: Evolutionary suggestion boxes can be dangerous if left without administration. If you see the box's evolutionary trend moving towards the production of weaponised suggestion boxes, discontinue the process and revert to the original form.



Alternatively, give the box to your PTA and let them use it in the conventional way.

00611 Day 140, Breadboarder

Dear Diary

Being a PICAXE microcontroller chip is all very good and well, but I find it hard sometimes. I know I'm supposed to allow people to make anything electrical turn on an off when pretty much anything happens, but lately it's been a real drag. Basically, every time the guy I work for wants to make something, he sticks me in one of those breadboards with loads of holes in it and then just covers it with wires. It's so confusing. I mean, I know exactly what to do and in what order to do it, but this guy, all he has to do is stick a wire in the wrong hole and, BAM! He has to spend the next two hours tracing all the connections back to their origins to find the problem. But the other day, he got me this slinky new PCB which means that all the gubbins that he usually has to wire up to me is already attached in all the right places. I just slip on this PCB and plug myself into the breadboard. I look so much better without all those unnecessary interconnects.

Man, I hope my bum doesn't look to big in this.

00610 Day 139, the Guy

Problem: Need to make a comic book without the ability to draw reproducible characters.

Solution: Egg headed man with kidney bean body.

Next up in comic book creation: Background generation using Sketchup.

00609 Day 138, the IR Sensor

On your way to making a high speed photography rig? Need to trip the flash when a drop passes through a sensor?

Then you need to learn electronics and pull up your socks if you haven't! You've got some catching up to do, boy/girl/other!