Stuff I've been doing

Since I'm home sickly today I have time to fire a note here for the people who might actually look at my blog.

First I did some science with boiling water and cold air:



Then I did a two-part breakdown look at my R/C snowplow truck (and plow) for all the people who are asking about it all the time:
Part 1:

Part 2:


Fortunately my power-nerd buddies Sean and Vic lead me into my next video. They had been fooling around with some thermite and when they set up another round of burnination and invited me along for the event. Good times!:


And final video update: I got a little rambunctious and started added parts to other parts and things and I ended up with a lunatic rechargeable flashlight that happens to be in the shape of a cordless drill:

Tiny helicopter... tiny video camera... HMMMM

This likely won't surprise anyone who knows me but I took some stuff that wasn't supposed to be put together and put it together... again. This time I didn't even bust out the angle grinder or welder! Just a knife, a little screwdriver, and some tape.

Today's project was one of curiosity. The picture below basically illustrates the thought process in my brain:



What you see there is my little s107 micro chopper being mentally added to an "808 keychain video camera" (google it or check eBay out). I could go through the whole process with you in text but I'd rather just let the video take over from here:

The whirlybird of paradise...

Christmas has finally come and gone. Santa (my in-laws) brought me a cute and completely unexpected toy this year. No, not one of those. No, not one of THOSE either, good lord! The toy in question is a Syma s107 mini R/C helicopter and it's fantastic.

Seriously, if you're a little nerdy and like toys you should probably go to eBay right now and source one up (for about $25cad shipped to your door). Go now. I'll wait here for you.

I had never flown an R/C chopper before this thing arrived so naturally I was expecting mass amounts of carnage and possible injuries. Nope. This thing is as tough as nails and even easier than the super-easy cheap R/C plane I augered into the earth a couple years ago. That was sort of on purpose... I'll tell you that story some other time.

In true YouTube nerd fashion I have hand-crafted an organic, free range video of the included kit and some airborne footage of the wee little chopper for everyone (mostly me) to enjoy:

Video blogs belong in videos.

I'll accept the fact that I'm basically just another video blogger in the interweb sea of millions of video bloggers... and that fact combined with the fact that my spare time is very slim right now means that I'm going to be going pretty light on the written blogging that usually accompanies my video releases. I'll keep updating the word-blog when I do a video because anyone following me here deserves fair warning like that... but I probably won't do as many big elaborate write-ups for a while.

C'est la vie.

Hot off the harddrive platters today we have a care&feeding video about lawnmowers for all of my fellow turf tamers out there:

Petrolhead playground

Vroom!

Nestled in the middle of a bunch of farmland and forest just 15 minutes from my house lies a very interesting bit of tarmac, namely a racetrack. Atlantic Motorsport Park(AMP), to be exact. Most of the time this track is dedicated to motorcycle riding and racing which doesn't particularly interest me. For a few weekends of the season, however, the track gets very interesting when it becomes home to Performance Driving School. When this happens the track turns into a car show better than most other car shows. It's a car show where you'll find assorted Porsche and BMW sports cars by the dozens as well as a random smattering of other interesting cars from the Subaru Sti and hot Audis to performance Volvos and Lexuses (Lexii?)

The reason this is a car show better than most others is that the cars are NOT polished to perfection and kept behind velvet ropes. The cars are fetteled and tuned and the owners are learning how to push them to, and sometimes beyond, their limits. It's truly refreshing to see performance cars having the balls driven off of them in a nice controlled environment.

AMP has a website here: http://www.atlanticmotorsportpark.com/ that you can check out for their schedule and other relevant informations.

Here is a video I cut together from bits taken back in august on my super cheapo chinese micro video camera (hence the crap quality):

Ship ahoy!

I've always been fascinated with boats. They're big and they're heavy and they float anyway. They also aren't confined to roads like cars. Overall, pretty neat things. This fascination, of course, crosses over to my R/C hobby as well. So much so that I've had a couple R/C boats over the years. Well last year I started getting the itch for an R/C boat again. This time I thought I'd go bigger, louder, and home-built.

The boat I'm trying to build is my homage to the Zippkits EasyVee deep vee wooden boat kit. Smart people among you who want to build one of these things... just buy the kit. Doing it really from scratch like I am is stupid and time-intensive. The EasyVee boat is a wooden construction thing about 46 inches long and intended for 2stroke weedeater-sized engine power. The people building these boats "correctly" also use the "correct" R/C-specific engines in them... but those cost money so my intent is to use a real weedeater engine and invent the driveline parts for it. That will take a long time but will save me hundreds of dollars if it works.

For once I had the foresight to get a camera set up BEFORE building the whole project. I have smooshed the pictures into a video so you can really see the progress of the boat from sheets of plywood to a fully formed and resin-sealed hull. That was the easy part. Now I've got some real inventing to do to make her seaworthy. Someday I'll have another update for you. Here is the first video:

A Penetrating Quandry:

As your friendly neighborhood IT Guy I often find myself in charge of doing away with old hard drives. These are drives that might be bad or that are too old and small to use anymore or what have you. Since your hard drive contains traces of everything you do (even after some software methods of erasing them) it makes sense to me to physically damage drives before recycling them. This helps to ensure no prying eyes go snooping around your data for juicy identity-thefty tidbits.

If you are really very concerned about your data I suggest you software-wipe your drive first with something like Boot&Nuke or any of dozens of similar drive formatting jobbies BEFORE physically trashing the thing for disposal... Well I guess you could try doing that after destroying the drive if you really wanted to. Let me know how that works out for you.

Anyway, to accomplish this sort of mindless physical destruction of computer hardware in a safe and tidy way I decided I would need to create a device. Such a device basically appeared to me in a daydream one day and I got to work as soon as time permitted. The device which may or may not be named The Hard Drive Penetrator is constructed out of the following basic ingredients:

- half of a broken punch (sharpened)
- a hydraulic bottle jack (about $9 on sale at Princess Auto)
- some old steel bed frame rails (pick these up for free at roadside on recycling day or cleanup day.
- a couple hours of cutting and welding

In another stroke of workshop luck I'm fairly pleased with the way my drive killer turned out. It's quiet, clean, easy to use, and does a real number on a hard drive. For your info-tainment please enjoy my video about this thing: