00453 Pinholarino

Pinholerooney:

For when sharp images just won't quite cut it.

You will need:

One DSLR
One body cap for above
One drill
One can Guinness
One roll black adhesive tape
One needle
One black sharpie

Method:
Drill hole in body cap
Cut piece of aluminium out of Guinness can - smaller than body cap
Pierce Guinness can with needle (use it as a tiny drill to make a very, very small hole)
Blacken camera side of Guinness can insert with sharpie
Tape to inside of body cap
Stick cap on camera body
Take pictures

(Serves 4)

00452 Ladder jig

Did you ever need to make tiny ladders but they just turned out too damn fiddly and time consuming? Then the Ladderman Pro (TM) is for you!

Ladderman Pro includes all the unique features that we've all come to expect from the Ladderman brand:

• Easy to use
• Nails stuck in a piece of wood
• Quick and easy
• Easy and quick
• Did I say easy?
• Easy

See the results for yourself:

No more crying and banging your fists on the table because you can't make enough tiny ladders and the nasty people are coming to get the ladders that you promised them, but you haven't got them finished yet.

"I used to get so worked up when it took me days to make tiny ladders. Not any more! Now I make them all day" - name withheld by family.

"Probably the best tiny ladder making tool not on the market today" - tiny ladders decenniall.

Don't wait, the Ladderman Pro is a limited edition and this offer (of which there is none) can't last for ever (so much so that it doesn't exist).

Biscuits and tea not included. Terms and conditions apply. Your house may be at risk if you make tiny ladders, lose your mind and get carted away by well intentioned medical practitioners called in by your concerned family who have finally realised that you now pose a danger to them, yourself and society at large.

00451 Eeeking out the last

I've now been to this beach so many times, that I'm finding the same sticks on it and am consequently begging for a huge storm to sweep away the old and bring in the new.

Still, gets me out of the house.

Gets me in the water too.

And the camera.

How long can it survive?

00450 The end of the Summer

The hols anyway.

And with that, there always comes a slightly reduced volume of this:

Probably means there'll be more of this:

My inner geek embraces the coming winter.

00449 And then there was one

An excerpt from "Sailing with midgets":

"It is imperative in the extreme, that the natural balance of things be preserved. To wit: for a camera to be maintained as a working entity one must keep it from the ravages of the elements and for a small boat or group of boats to survive the fury of the sea they should be positioned in such a way so as to avoid the inclemencies that may be set upon them, were they to be put in harms way."

I find myself in need of advice such a this when presented with situations such as this:

... followed closely by inclemencies in the surrounding environment such as this:

... which in turn leave me with a damp camera and one, solitary floating figure, such as this:

I must try that "standing on the shoulders of giants" shit one day. At least then I wouldn't get so wet.

00448 Signature

Although this needs a little work, the idea is sound. A tiny glazed window, with which you can frame any text or image.

I'm thinking of selling the idea to T&C, who asked for a board to be made for them with their initials on it.

It's so awesome when it's sanded back level with the wood that it's inset into.

00447 !

WIP - for the "sparebots banger/landmine sound activated flash" arrangement that I've been working on for five seconds.

It's a well beaten path, but you've got to start somewhere.

00446 The X4

As part of the "beige ops" program begun by the former administration, the X4 begun life as just a single, unique cylinder of raw material, found only in one place on earth. Within five months that material had been extensively processed and she had become the figurehead project behind a general move towards miniaturisation. The design team poured everything they had into her, until one day in September of 2010, when the news broke that the plug had been pulled. Someone high up had gotten wind of the operation and demanded to see the detailed specs. It wasn’t long before they figured out that the X4, with all its groundbreaking developments, was smaller than a mini Leatherman.

The funding for the development was cut off immediately and marked “Bollocks”.

Notes:

This information has been taken directly from a corrupted report gleaned from the archives.

It is possible that “months” may have been written as “minutes”.

“One place on earth” may have been recorded as ”behind a rock”.

“Raw material” may have originally appeared as “a stick”.

00445 Sometimes it all just comes together

And then we leave it on the beach to be taken apart again.

00444 The TP 1x

A short excerpt from Ben Gingernut's new book "Penknives and Cockpits":


'In 1957 Geoff "Yaegermeister" Benton was searching for inspiration to drive forward a project code named "TP-1x". As he drove home one dusky spring evening, he passed a local school where two of the kids were playing with a stick, pretending it was a plane and throwing it from one to the other. Like a bolt of lightning striking him in the cerebellum, he knew what he had to do. He raced home and, without even answering his wife Brenda's greetings, he set to work in his study, slaving feverishly through he night, and well into the next day, ignoring calls from his office when he failed to show for work. He returned to work later on that afternoon rushing straight into his supervisor's glass fronted cubicle and waving aside his superior's anger at his late arrival. Ignoring the room's other occupants, his boss's 4 o'clock, he announced his breakthrough to an increasingly open-mouthed audience. When he was finished, everyone was silent. No one could quite take in the depth of his new discovery or the implications of what it would hold for he future of aviation. Work started almost immediately and within two months the prototype TP-1x rolled off the production line.

The euphoria didn't last long.

The paint wasn't even dry when the news came in. Everyone was devastated. No one could quite believe that they could have raised their expectations so high, only to have them dashed so brutally. In their excitement to go ahead with the project, especially in light of Geoff's ground-breaking discovery, they had overlooked one vital element in the complexity of the development. It turned out that the TP-1x, which on paper had seemed like the answer to all their prayers, was in fact only 4 inches long and made of sticks.

Geoff was inconsolable and two weeks after the discovery, he left his wife and drove off into the night. No one ever saw him again, but the next day his Brenda found his mini-leatherman lying on the sofa with a note. It read simply,

"Bollocks"'

Riiiiiiiiiide!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"I follow a pretty simple philosophy - there's just me and the board and the road, and we're, like, together. If you can imagine a stream of being where everything (like, the physical and the spiritual) are combined in harmony, it's kinda like that. And if you can just dip your hand in that stream you become part of it and it becomes part of you. But mainly, it's about the ride. Just the ride."

"Oh, did I not mention that I'm made up? That's the other part of the philosophy."

00442 Towering over smaller things

Back in the day, if you were bad, they'd put you in a tower. If you'd been really, really bad, they'd put you in this tower.

Details are sketchy, but it kind of looks like you'd have to be blended and then some of you would get poured in through the top. Only a bit, mind. So the rest of you would probably just get thrown away. A pretty comprehensive punishment, but also an awesome deterrent.

(They probably didn't have blenders back then, so it was most likely just a pestle and mortar job).

00441 West Show

Table space at the West Show allowed me to see for myself how the public react to something that they quite literally can't comprehend.

Although, perhaps they were all looking at me and I've just tried to shut it out of my mind.

00440 Boats and life are, like, the same and stuff

Sometimes these small boats made simply from sticks found on a windswept beach can seem so much like life.

Our bodies, our genetic makeup (and one could argue perhaps even our very consciousness) made up of parts found on the beaches of time and pieced lovingly together by some great creator, to then be set adrift on the turbulent sea of existence, where we are tossed to and fro', at the mercy of whatever forces we find ourselves enclosed by.

All follow clear and distinct paths, separate from each other, but all are destined to fall or be torn apart and reclaimed by the sea and the wind and the passage of the years.

The boats here might so easily be echoes of our very substance and their plight could so easily be ours.

...

But they're not.

I gave one to Kristyna and the other one got trod on.

All that metaphorical stuff is just hooey and they're just boats.

...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!! A GIANT FOOT IS CRUSHING ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

00439 HMS Flotsam

Commissioned in 1936, HMS flotsam sailed the inshore bays of the Channel Islands providing air support for small children who had grown bored with throwing sand and digging. She was decommissioned after a collision with a six-year-old which left her listing heavily to port.

In her heyday the flight deck would be a hive of activity with mostly (sometimes entirely) imaginary crews prepping the aircraft for inland reconnaissance missions. Shortly before take-off, pilots would brace themselves for the force of "the hand" and subsequently "the throw", which would launch them to their almost certain doom.

Details of the original vessel are captured lovingly in this scale model:

00438 The high seas (5ft)

When the waves are way over mast height and there's no room for error, you have to be able to rely on your vessel. That's why I sail the PS001 and 002 series. I've been in this game for over 117 months and if there's one thing I know, it's how to pick a stable seaworthy craft that'll ...

... *&$£!@!!ing things sunk!

oh well, I guess half an hour was all I should've expected from a bunch of twigs

00437 TP5B nostalgia

Seen here during maintenance, the TP5b underwent primary testing, but never lived up to the promise of increased range. At this time no craft had flown beyond a standard heft (right arm over)

00436 conspiracies and ideas

I can almost feel the trickle of ideas running down the gullies in my mind, just like a small stream that you find in the woods which you wished was a bit bigger because you know that it would be more impressive and memorable that way.

In no particular order, the shapes and colours of the water that flow slowly through my consciousness can be interpreted as follows ( if there's anyone out there willing to take these up, just do it):

A hole punch for leaves in the shape of tiny people' silhouettes, so that you can leave a little trail wherever you go.

Thingy for joining cartons together to make huge temporary sculptures, so that you can have something a little more inspirational in your house than a pile of waxy paper waiting to be recycled.

Cable drum which leaves messages on the sand - I've seen this before, but there so much more that could be done with it.

There are a couple of other personal bits that are just on my list of things I have to make, such as picture frames for pooh sticks, rake art, eggs and tiny planes (which I am now referring to as natural curiosities, for some reason). Also picture books, more boxes for sparebots, and some other goinks and dooh-dahs.

With that out of the way, here' a thing:

So I'm on the path to making an amp with a speaker, set in a nice wooden box which also works as an iPhone charger and dock. Now, I've looked around extensively for hints on how to get around the new 3G and 4G iPhone wierdnesses when it comes to charging and it seems that it's a little more complicated than just providing power and ground to the unit. Anyhoo, I found a video tutorial about how to wire the thing to work and I starred (bookmarked) it in google reader - and all trace of it has disappeared! It's not on the awesome Make Blog where I saw it and there's no mention of it's deletion anywhere on the site. I'm really not conspiracy theorist, but it all sounds very much like a conspiracy. OMG! I AM A CONSPIRACY THEORIST!!! Aieeeeeeeee!
Wait a minute, who are you anyway? I have no idea who's reading this. I have to get out of here. I MUST FIND A PLACE TO HIDE!

I'll sit in the shed - it's where I normally go when this happens.

00435 Double Booooooom!

And again, a stunner of a drifter post by Jeff at Booooooom! This time a world-wide affair. Love how the images just scroll and scroll and keep on scrolling

00434 Tinier and tinier

As any responsible airline would, we are aiming to make safety our first, and in fact, only priority. With this in mind, it's with the greatest of pleasure that we welcome you all to the unveiling of the latest addition to out fleet:

The TTP1

At around half an inch in length, she's the smallest member of our line, but don't let that fool you. With the omission of engines of any sort and the use of materials found lying on a beach, we've managed to cut emissions down to a poultry 0 (unless it accidentally gets dropped on a fire, in which case that figure increases very slightly). But far more groundbreaking that that is the projected safety of the TTP1. With her lack of propulsion and fuel, and with no means of movement at all, coupled with being too small to fit into (by a long way), we've managed to completely eliminate any chance of fatality from all conventional forms of danger present in today's air transport. In fact, so benign is the TTP1, that we can now guarantee that your flight (such as it is) will be 99.995% safe. Were it not for the slight possibility of choking on the aircraft, we'd be looking at a completely clean sheet.

Happy flying!

00433 Beachbots

We went to the beach, what with it being summer and all and when we got there, there were already loads of tiny little people on the beach.

I say people, but they weren't really people.

They say they were people.

I still say the were'n't people.

They say no, really they were people.

I say no, I can see that they weren't people.

That's when the fight started.

and I stepped on all of them.

Some of them didn't bother.

Mind you, they weren't real people either:

yes we are

00432 And the drift goes on ...

Booooooom!'s (that just doesn't do it for me grammatically) "Little Drifters" season got me inspired to go out an pooh stick 'till I could pooh stick no more.

Don't know if I tried to hard this time (it's not like if I strain enough, they come out better), but at least it got me doing something a little more different.

They still sink when I sit on them.

00431 Little drifters

Booooooom! are (is) doing just what I'd hoped someone would do. It's invited people to make little boats, launch them, photograph them and sent in the images. Love the way Jeff has woven in the community approach to all this.

Here's the entrance guidelines.

They're also being published in the Vancouver Sun when they're good and ready, so I'll keep 'em peeled for that.

Booooooom! rules!

But also invites others to rule with it

00430 You can laugh now

I'll be the one who's laughing when the apocalypse comes and I gaze out from my space ship and watch you all as you burn:

I just need to get this shrinking ray working and then we're all stations go

00429 Plane to see

I give them away to children in the vain hope that they will last more than a minute



Which they never do

00428 The beautiful losers

Another triumph of ugly practicality and haste over grace, design and poise.

00427 Exit?

Could it be any worse?

I hope so, then there'll be more and better.