This weather is bullcrap!

That's what I think, anyway. Oh well. it can't stay this cold much longer. Luckily it was about 25 degrees warmer last weekend(not even joking) and I got outside to do some mixing of hobbies. I recommend combining some hobbies thusly:

1 garbage-parts rebuilt mountain bike
1 home built bike trailer made mostly of garbage-parts
1 bag of R/C tools, battery packs, etc
and finally
1 stonking big R/C F150 4x4 model.

Through the miracle of the internet I've got one here to show you that I had prepared earlier:


At this point you could probably take a picture, send it to all of your friends, and then unload the gear and go inside for a beer. That's basically cheating though... mostly because I didn't think of it earlier.

My next step was to bike my lardass and my trailer full of gear a few km down the road to the part of the local recreation trail that is all torn up for rebuilding. That tear-upedness is what makes it great for R/C trail driving. Note all of the logs, uneven ground, stumps, etc:


I had a great time moving my camera around my adjustable outrigger mount thing and taking different angled footage of roughly the same path through the terrain over and over. Sadly my uber-cheap chinese knock-off video camera's battery didn't last a terribly long time. I suspect it needs longer charging than I think it does. Before it quit, though, I managed to get a few good runs in and had enough footage to slop together the following bit of video. WARNING: this is not very stable video on account of the camera and my mount. If you get motion sick really easy or you're generally a wimp you might want to go easy on watching this. For everyone else: Don't worry it's only just over a minute long :)

First Person Awesome

G'day faithful reader(s?),

Once in a while I get the itch to impulse-buy some kinda gadgety thing. This is completely counter to my usual tendency of being tighter than two coats of paint with my money. Thankfully the good people of China seem to churn out bajillions of electronic devices at next to zero cost and sell them on eBay. I recently decided to try a mini digital video camera on a whim and found this little gem for about $19cad shipped to my door:



I think the camera I got is actually a knock-off of the pictured "md80" one but we're not here to judge... especially at a price of $19.

Anyway I wanted this camera to do on-board/FPV video with my R/C trucks and things so today with the help of my buddy, Christian, I took a few R/C truck video clips and I did a little super-amateur video editing to slap them together into this:



Hope you like it. I actually really enjoyed both the making of and the watching of this little movie. I think it shows great potential in the area of cheap on-board video making. I shall pursue this more in the future.

Until next time, Keep yer feet warm and yer beers cold.

The Beer Wall of Fame

Howdy Gang,

Another short blog entry due to the video doing most of the explaining. For some time now I've been hanging onto beer bottles from beers that I've really enjoyed. Both to honour the beer and also to cater to my hording-stuff nature.

The beer shelf itself is constructed from nice plywood shelving that was bound for the landfill. I've re-purposed this shelving material for use as... shelving material by cutting it to length and ripping it to width. I don't know sweet FA about carpentry or shelf-building so I just used some simple glued and nailed blocks to hold the ends up. I love my air-nailer so very much. To anyone who doesn't have one... get one. You'll find all kinds of uses for it I'm sure. Hell, just nail a bunch of scrap wood together for fun!

Sometime in the variably near future I've got an interesting radio controlled / welding project coming up. I've started work on it but need some supplies to continue. Stay tuned for more beer and beer-fueled projects!

Video: