Creation Of Significant Cultural Artefact
A couple of years ago I got pissed and accidentally created a Facebook page entitled "Campaign to get Brain Blessed to do a voice over for my sav". I didn't think much about it at the time, I just wanted a Brian Blessed Sat Nav.

Anyways, it got to 500 people and I thought "I'll phone TomTom and Garmin and see what they say." and they said "Impress me".

So I asked our local Rock Radio station to help me out and we another thousand, and I asked B3ta and we got to 3,500 overnight (I'm pretty sure B3ta was responsible for about 6-8,000 all told).

And then TomTom said "give us 25,000". So we did. Through the medium of making a film with Brian Blessed. In the back of a smart car. What larks.

That was nice, and the Blessed was happy, we had a party with Brian and TomTom paid for ALL the beer and we all wore Brian Blessed masks and had an "I'm Spartacus" moment led by Brian and it was good, and quite beardy. When it was all over I got my satnav and it was ace (it still makes me grin when I use it, only it's not a sat nav any more, it's just Brian).

Then life got pretty mundane, so I asked him if I could make a Brian Blessed Alarm Clock and he said "yes". Which was nice.

So I asked around and Terry, a friend of a friend, agreed to do the clock graphics up front, and another mate said he'd program it and we had a working prototype to show Brian, which I did, and he agreed to record it in his shed.

Brian's shed is fucking awesome.

So we did that and I got a mate to do the sound and we lost a couple of programmers to self employment and Canadian games companies and finally Steve finished it, kudos to that man, it's pretty solid. Not as good as the Apple alarm in some respects (you can't just hook into the alarm API, that would be too simple) but as good as the best 3rd party iPhone alarm clocks you can build (we know, we've tested them) and certainly extremely useable. Besides, the Apple alarm doesn't have Brian Blessed and ours goes off even on January 2nd.

I'm quite proud of the finish as well, you can pick holes in the bits I did but I think it has a lot going for it. I couldn't afford a AA grade games animator so we went for Terry Gilliam instead, I hope we did alright on that. It amuses me that I went to all the trouble of nicking the code for Moon Phases from the Royal Astronomical Society and Steve went to all the trouble of implementing it and we still haven't got a shit clue how to read the Moon Dial (but it does go round every 29.5 days, we've tested it). We thought it was important that it worked.

So there we go. I'm thinking we'll make enough on it so everyone who was involved thinks it was worth their while, and have a little in the bank to offset some of the money I've spent. If I'm lucky maybe next time I can pay someone else to do the bits that took me so much bloody time to do (mainly because I didn't have a shit clue what I was doing).

Anyway, sales and stuff. I'd certainly recommend sponsoring the B3ta newletter, I've been watching the traffic figures.

Of course later on on launch day we got linked by Stephen Fry on Twitter (you beautiful man, you).

So, we did alright but we're not retiring any time soon, peaked at 9 in the UK charts and stayed at number 1 for Utilities for 3 days, which was a nice start. Of course I'm hoping Brian's media appearances will jolt sales a little every now and then. More importantly it was just ace to make cool shit for a change.

So there we go, I've set up an anarcho-syndicalist collective in my spare time and it seems we make pretty good apps.

But back to an earlier point, which is that I wouldn't be doing this unless B3ta had helped create the Blessed Sat Nav, so in a lot of respects this is all your fault.
(ruminator Never knowingly overestimated, Thu 24 Nov 2011, 1:24, 7 replies)

Monkeying with the Moon
For some years I've been working on a large model of the Moon - well, the nearside, anyway. It's about 50cm across, a size chosen to be as large as possible while still able to fit through doorways. It's made of fibreglass, with the surface modelled in Milliput, working by eye from maps and photos.

The project has been on hold while my daughers were young (kids are Time Vampires, and this is a long process) but I'm planning to get back into it soon.

Here's a picture; one side is the real moon, the other is my model. Can you tell which is which?



Obsessed? Me? Well, the clue's in the username...
(moon monkey is busy making memories worth repressing, Thu 17 Nov 2011, 14:30, 44 replies)

cock fairy
I made a beautiful fairy for the top of my xmas tree. All flowing white lace dress, long blonde tresses, and delicate crown and wand.

When you lifted her dress, as everyone is wont to do..it revealed a large, hand carved wooden cock.

The mother in law wasn't best pleased
( cakeburglar still bored with Freebase, Thu 17 Nov 2011, 15:48, 24 replies)

Crap Tank!
I decided to scratch build an RC vehicle and am part way through, three weekends in and it's getting there.
It's made from kitchen chopping board, two electric drills and a couple of hundred bolts. I cut all the cogs myself (Mainly through luck than judgement) and plan to weaponise it and put the wireless camera on this weekend for remote shooting fun.
It's good for about 10 miles an hour and goes pretty much anywhere. all in all I'm not too disappointed with it! ;-)


( JamHamster My eyes, my beautiful eyes!, Fri 18 Nov 2011, 21:35, 18 replies)

Hardly a project but unfolding as we speak
My 18 year old brother and a few friends are currently on a coach on their way to Amsterdam. All of them are quite big fans of the 'erb. They're on the coach with about 30 other lads (I'm assuming some student arranged thing)

I've just mocked this up in paint, took a photo of my laptop screen and sent it to all them. They're fucking fuming to say the least, my brother text me and I've explained it's because of the "Euro zone crisis".




They'll find out the truth in a minute but it's all good fun for me.

(I know it's awfully done but as you can imagine, on a small phone screen it looks legit)

edit: got rid of my bloody postcode
(nobface part time paperboy full time gangsta, Thu 17 Nov 2011, 20:02, 9 replies)

I was particularly proud of the hill climb part of the track...

( da5id <YOUR SIG HERE>, Thu 17 Nov 2011, 21:04, 16 replies)

DIY Z80 computing
I'd long wanted to put together a Z80 computer of my own design and finally got around to it last year.



It has a 10MHz Z80 with 64KB RAM, a 320x240 pixel display (monochromatic; can be displayed on a built-in LCD, on a TV or a VGA monitor), uses a PS/2 keyboard and has a serial port for data transfer and a parallel port for printing. An SD card is used for storage. It runs CP/M 3 (you can just about make out Zork in the last photo).

The thing is, having spent a fair amount of time designing and constructing the device I haven't actually done anything with it beyond recording a dull video for YouTube...
( benryves Now I'm radioactive! That can't be good!, Sun 20 Nov 2011, 19:20, 11 replies)

earlier this year
I piled a big bunch of slabs onto a batch of shonkey cement to form a very basic path. Happy with my work i went to grab a drink. whilst indoors i found out that whilst i was labouring away a bunch of rather serious chaps had inflicted a case of high velocity lead poisoning on osama bin laden. i spent a few moments watch the horrific footage offered by the bbc.

the noise, the grotesque twitching, the shouting. Yes, the Sherman were having a nationwide street party and bellowing at any journalist who came near about "closure" and "justice".

I went back outside to the still wet cement and in a corner hidden by a fence .
post i wrote the initials "OBL".

Yes he was a bad man, but it was a bad path so i think it makes sense on some level.

besides, the chants of "USA, USA, USA" are still ringing in my ears.

So, my back garden is now home to the osama bin laden commemorative foot path.
(OTT, Wed 23 Nov 2011, 19:03, 6 replies)

My Dad and brother, working together.
My dad used to tinker with motorbikes. He had a few around, and sometimes used to canibalise one as spares for another.

One day he was having a cleanup, and wanted to take the old frame from one to the dump. So he got a hacksaw, sawed it in half and stuck it in the boot of the car.

When he got home, he found my brother, who was 5 at the time, had thought this a rather jolly wheeze, and had sawed his own perfectly serviceable bicycle in half.
(username failed moderation, Thu 17 Nov 2011, 16:12, 7 replies)

I expect I've already posted this one...
But anyway:

During my teenage years my primary pastime (yes, even more than playing Head Over Heels on my MSX) was, well, masturbation. I had a reasonable collection of porn thanks to the lively black market at school (this was well before the Internet made such items utterly redundant) and enjoyed nothing more than to spend a relaxed afternoon pulling my pud.

My problem was, of course, where to store it? I had no lockable drawers or cupboards, and was mortally embarrassed at the thought that someone in my family might somehow stumble across my stash and realise what i'd been up to.

I don't remember how I arrived at this cunning plan, but it was, if I may say so, ingenious. In the corner of my room was the airing cupboard, which had a hollow door. The bottom of the door was about a foot off the ground so it was a simple matter if rolling up a magazine and stuffing it up the inside of the door, where it would unfurl enough to wedge itself in place. Easy, job done.

After having thus concealed my prized collection, I realised that the previously very flimsy and light door was now very noticeably heavier and harder to open and close. This, clearly would give the game away in an instant -- but necessity is something or other and this was soon fixed when I rigged up a small pulley, a piece of string and the lead weight from my fishing rod: voila, a self-closing door!

I told my parents that I'd done it because I was annoyed at people leaving the door open all the time. And obviously the extra weight of the door was due to the lead weight and the friction from the pulley.

I was really rather chuffed at this solution, and it stood me in good stead for a number of years. It was only some 20 years later that my mother decided to tell me -- over dinner with my then-new girlfriend (now wife) -- that she'd been in one day, knocked the door by accident, and the entire stash had fallen out onto her foot.

But it was OK she said, she'd just rolled them up and put them back. She was happy because up till that point she'd been worried I was gay.
( reallywittyname veraciously conspues lexiphanicism on, Fri 18 Nov 2011, 13:36, 8 replies)

A pond, a yachting club and a golf course.
Our projects in the past 10 years:

1) summer 2001: sweating in the garden, we decide it would be great to have some place where we could cool down. So we built ourselves a 80 square meter natural pond in the garden, all by ourselves.

2) summer 2002: not satisfied with this, we thought it would be great to have a seafront house (we live in the Bavarian Alps, so this is certainly not easy to realize). We found ourselves tied into one of our dumbest projects ever: since we couldn't increase our swimming pond to a size that would trick us into believing it is the seafront, we rather cunningly put a 6m catamaran on our pond, and took some photos just at the right angle to make our house look like a seafront resort. The look of disbelieve on the faces of our neighbors will live in our memories forever.

3) summer 2003: Since having a sailing vessel on the pond meant we are into sailing (we actually aren't, we just know someone who owns a boat), so founding a yachting club kind of made sense. We founded the first, and only, yachting club in our town (mind you, no major bodies of water in a 30 km vicinity, so no real point). We dubbed it "Segel Club Unterer Markt" ("Lower market sailing club"). This nicely abbreviates to "S.C.U.M.", which we printed on pirate themed t-shirts now proudly worn by my wife and daughter (both blissfully unaware of the English meaning :-)).

In the following years we have
- 2005: built a 3 hole golf course in our garden (no, the garden is not that big. You just need to be clever with the layout)
- 2009: doubled the size of the swimming pond because we were sick of mowing the lawn (thereby loosing the golf course)
- 2011: used a stretch of farm land adjacent to our garden to build another 3 hole golf course, because our friends missed the S.C.U.M. golf tournaments.

Redwine, President of the S.C.U.M.
( RedWine President of the S.C.U.M., Thu 17 Nov 2011, 20:24, Reply)

I built THE BEST playhouse EVER EVER EVER to have been built in my back garden. By me.
So I'm ***SERIOUSLY*** proud of this... no plans, no picture to copy. Built all of this bad boy purely from rough timber from the near by yard.

I do have the right to be pretty chuffed, right??



(also built the sandpit and did all the wood chipping, but meh, that's easy...)
( RocketSurgeon is pretending he's still young, Thu 17 Nov 2011, 19:17, 31 replies)

An early stained glass project.
One of the things that I really love in the cooler-but-still-warm weather is to sleep with the windows open. But since I live in a subdivision with neighbors directly across from me, having the curtains open presents a problem- they really don't want a clear view of what goes on in my bedroom, I'm sure.

So I decided to construct a set of privacy screens.

Here is the very start of it- a pile of brass cut to length and the MAPP gas/oxygen torch set I had to work with. (I've since gone to oxy-acetylene. Booya.)

This is one of the frames.

I then got a hoop bender and used it to make curved shapes out of thinner brass, and attached that too with silver solder (higher melting temperature than lead solder, so I didn't have to worry about melting things later). The result looks a bit like ribbon candy.

Next I started cutting out a large number of leaf shapes from colored glass, brown and red and green and yellow. I picked up a few leaves from the yard to use for templates, then cut them out with a glass bandsaw. I foiled the edges, put on a coat of solder, and did the same to slices of agate. Then came time for assembly. A closer look here.

And the final result? Not too bad, if I say so myself. I made one for each window. Now I can get the air through without having to worry about scarring the neighborhood children for life.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Mon 21 Nov 2011, 19:06, 15 replies)

Pianola
When I was growing up we had a big old piano in the corner of one room. Only this was a pianola or player piano. You could pump some pedals and the piano would play music all by itself, thanks to a paper strip with holes in it. Well that was the principle; in practice the mechanism was completely gummed up with years-worth of crap and dust. So my project was to un-gum it and make it work again.

One incentive was to play the stack of paper rolls I had. But the main incentive was to attract the lovely Liz to my house. She was the love of my life, mostly because she had big knockers. For some reason she was interested in my pianola so when I told her I was going to take it apart and put it back together again she was very excited. Every now and then I'd ring her up and tell her that I'd taken some new bit off or exposed a bit more of the mechanism, and she'd come round and take a look, allowing me to take sneeky glances at her boobs when I thought she wasn't looking, and lean in unnecessarily close when both peering into the mechanism.

Eventually something happened and we ended up snogging and groping, with bits of pianola lying all around us. From that moment on 'would you like to come round and see my pianola' became something of an obvious double-entendre for us.

The pianola became more and more dismantled (there had to be some excuse to invite her round) but there was far more snogging going on than reassembly. After several months the piano was in bits all over the room and not a single note had been played. Eventually my mother became suspicious of why I always closed the door when 'working on the pianola with Liz'. She told me I had to put it back together or throw all the bits out. So I put as much back in as I could. I pumped the pedals as hard as I could. The pianola gave a solitary, wheezing gasp from it's bellows, but still not music.

So a waste of several months then? Not at all: Liz really did have tremendous knockers.
(Smale is stuffed, Fri 18 Nov 2011, 13:59, 6 replies)

Sadly not mine
But a friend of mine scupted this ..



It creeps the hell out of me, it's so fantastic!

She had fun with that one on the plane back to Norway, had to buy Joker a seat of his own. I pity the child that sat next to them.
(darras jeg har en grevling i hodet. Grevling, grevlang, Fri 18 Nov 2011, 10:31, 9 replies)

Stuff Wot I've Dun...
I've dicked around for decades making gadgets and odds and ends, probably the most interesting are as follows...

When I was around 12, I made a hand-cranked phonograph from a long nut-&-bolt I found, some bits of wood, a yogurt carton, a balloon, and a needle. I made recording cylinders from candle wax, melting the candles on our gas cooker - the first time I just chucked the wax into a saucepan and put it straight on the hob, whereupon after a few minutes the liquified wax burst into flames. Cue a brief bollocking off mum, who then showed me how to melt the wax safely in an improvised bain-marie. It actually worked, bellowing into a paper horn produced just about audible recordings which wore out after being played a few times. No photos, sadly, it was thirty years ago...

More recently, I used to run a (now defunct) spoof news website with a mate of mine, which I was very proud of.

Even more recently, I've been experimenting with a high-speed video camera shooting miniature pyrotechnics - you can see an example here: youtu.be/BYUx8eVUe24

Last year, I made a life-size Spitting Image style puppet head of Nick Griffin - I was going to make a spoof BNP party political broadcast before the general election, but it took too long to make the puppet, the election came and went and the BNP was consigned to the dustbin of history. The head now sits atop a full-size body in my lounge, where it startles the shite out of unsuspecting visitors (such as my mum recently):


(Harry Webshiter Spiggley biggley bog., Sat 19 Nov 2011, 23:42, 10 replies)

TWANG THWACK
When I was nine I spent some of the summer holidays in my dads shed, making a crossbow out of a bit of scrap wood and an old fishing rod. I did craft some arrows from a couple of ‘borrowed’ knitting needles, but soon discovered that it fired screws and 6-inch nails just as well.

Thing is, it did look like something knocked together out of tat by a 9 year old, so no adults bothered to check if it was a functioning lethal weapon, which it was. Eventually I got spotted by one of the neighbourhood parents firing 6-inch nails into a tree, was frogmarched home and forced to demonstrate it to my dad. He thought it was bloody marvellous and it was with a genuine heavy heart that he did the right thing and confiscated it for ever.

So I made another one the next day and was a bit more careful where I used it.
( Ring Of Fire A petty, drooling belming butthurt retard., Thu 17 Nov 2011, 14:51, 3 replies)

The wrong trousers
This has elements of moneysaving from last week too.

Right now I'm in the middle of making my poor unsuspecting child a pair of overtrousers. The weather is getting (slowly) colder, the childminder asked me to wrap her up warm, eBay was looking a bit sparse, so this morning I cycled to Ikea, ate their 99p cooked breakfast with free coffee, and picked up a fleece blanket for £1.59 (on a giftcard that still had a couple of quid on it).

I've just sewn the legs and crotch and am about to do the waistband. Catfaceceilidhbaby is going to be resplendent in homemade pale blue fleece trousers. In a few years time I hope to make some outfits for the whole family, Von Trapp style, out of some old curtains, then we'll stand around singing before fleeing from some Nazis.

This is what having kids is all about - not a physical demonstration of your union or moulding a human being or any of that crap - it's about dressing them up in stuff that you hated when you were a kid and perpetuating the cycle of shit fashion. Don't feel too sorry for her - when she's an adult she can make a fortune writing misery lit along the lines of "Please mummy, no, not the sewing machine" and "They put a bowl on my head and cut my hair".
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Thu 17 Nov 2011, 13:29, 9 replies)

Self funded figures
Im a 3D character modeler / illustrator, and i always fancied having a figure based on one of my models / characters. Now that 3D printing is more commonplace, i gave it a go. I had a prototype printed, then painted it myself. I was so pleased, i sent the 3D data to a chinese company and had 50 painted figures produced, which i am currently selling for £90, not including postage.

Check out the 3 Facebook albums called "Trixie figure" for an in-depth look at the production process:
https://www.facebook.com/AndrewHickinbottomArt?sk=photos

Buy link on my blog:
andrewhickinbottom.blogspot.com/
( taters Bah weep grahnah weep ninibong, Mon 21 Nov 2011, 22:05, 30 replies)

Radio Station!
Me and my mate Tom were unemployed, bored and stoned musicians. Fearing total withering of our souls from under/mis-use we decided to start our own radio station. 'What super fun we'll have! Just like the proper DJs" etc etc mindless gibberish.

The rules of the radio server we used were quite simple...

1. No hate speech - easy... we are peaceful stoners

2. No swearing before the watershed - we took this with a pinch of salt as internet radio is global therefore it always past the watershed somewhere in the world. Of course this means that it is also always before the watershed somewhere in the world. "Well, we have to ignore ONE of them otherwise we can NEVER swear and where would be the fun in that?"

3. All music played must have the full written permission of the copyright holder - Bums. A tricky one. No 'Led Zeppelin Hour' then. "But we have loads of music we've recorded ourselves and know loads of people in bands... shouldn't be too tricky!"

This went on for a week or two... Tom and myself getting boxed, playing our own music and a few tracks from friend's bands, about two hours worth in total, and talking gibberish at anyone we could convince to listen to us.

Then - BRAINWAVE! One of our friends was running a Facebook campaign to try and get an unsigned band into the charts. We could get the list of entrants from him, contact all the bands asking for mp3s and the all important permission, promote the hell out of his campaign and get loads more listeners.

That was about a year and a half ago. The station has had many ups and downs since then. At one point we were broadcasting every single day, we've played tracks recommended by B3TA including all of Kunt and the Gang and another band featured in the newsletter called Dataloaf, put gigs on up and down the country, had loads of unsigned bands in for interviews and live sessions and we're STILL going. Our database currently contains approximately 12 consecutive DAYS of music, all of it sourced by emailing bands and, more recently, by bands who have heard of us getting in touch and asking for airplay.

It's very much an ongoing project and broadcasting has scaled back considerably to fit around things like having to go to work. I can only do shows on Thursdays at the moment but hoping to get more stuck into that as time goes on.

Now, shill as I am, I'd very much like to chuck a link at the bottom of this post but am managing to restrain myself. However, if any B3TAN musicians or curious music lovers out there are interested gaz me or ask in the comments and I'll give you the linky/airplay you desire.
(Ktulu O'Ryleh float like a turd, sting like chlamydia, Sun 20 Nov 2011, 15:37, 10 replies)

Corporate Mallet
My windows domain at home recently passed its ten year anniversary. I've been running a windows domain controller at home since Windows 2000 days. It's now up to Windows 2008R2.

For many years, it lived under the stairs (like Harry Potter, but more useful and not as horcruxy). These days the ankle biters have left home and it now has its own "comms room". Mrs.Booce even put in a patch panel and hardwired the whole house for 1GB Ethernet.

It hosts the family and friends user accounts, a mail server, a webserver and a full implementation of Citrix running remote applications.
It's my PVR and stores 4 terabytes of movies, TV, music, over a decades' worth of digital photography and home movies. It's also a UPNP server serving multiple different device types (xbox, smartphones etc). It has a VPN and I can access anything on it from anywhere with a net connection. It's also connected to a webcam covering the front door and so acts as a security system too.

It's massive overkill, I've spent many many months working on it over the years, spent thousands of pounds on it and I love it. It's my technological folly.

Much like the golden gate bridge, it'll never be finished, and as it's a Microsoft product, it'll never be perfect either. The ideal project for a man.

Sad, I know, but to me that classes as an incredible project.
(Booce, Thu 17 Nov 2011, 17:01, 12 replies)

Did some work with The Red Cross a few years ago
Helping out with various relief projects in some of the poorest areas of Africa. Really rewarding work, I can’t even begin to describe how great it feels to be making a difference, helping to improve people’s lives. One of the major projects that we had embarked on was the sinking of dozens of wells to ensure the locals could get fresh, clean water and help keep disease at bay. All of this was abandoned however in favour of my brilliant and completely original idea to build dozens of Pizza Huts instead, so that the kids could eat for free.
(TheManWithThePlan cussed your mum on, Tue 22 Nov 2011, 13:56, 5 replies)

I've always
got a multitude of projects on the go. Some of you may remember the 'techno-diy' QotW a while back.
However, my latest is this:



Video of it working here: youtu.be/3BjWlcvNA7U

I have a soft-spot for old arcade games - Defender, Stargate, Lunar Lander etc... - probably a result of a mis-spent childhood in local arcades, however.

I also converted a USB keyboard into a controller for the buttons/joystick etc...




Now this works fine, but I forgot about the bounces that I'd get from mechanical switches - I press DOWN on the joystick and it sends TWO/THREE or more signals to the controller and in some cases makes the game impossible to play.
I phoned a local PCB making firm to find out how much it would cost to make the board for me - but this time with some 1uf caps across the switch to stop the bouncing. It took me days to solder that up and I just don't have the heart to do it again. They quoted me £5.50 per square inch. So that's not happening then!
I started thinking that it can't be all that hard to make my own PCBs at home.
I found snippets of info in the interwebs from others that have attempted to do the same.
Basically, I have a Konica Laser printer. Laser toner (for the most part) is made from plastic and is melted to the paper.
I figured that if I printed a circuit board out, then pressed it to a copper clad board with a laminater that the heat would melt the plastic to the copper. Then all I'd have to do is to get rid of the copper that was left displaying, then scrub the toner off the board and I'd be left with my copper print waiting for me to solder the bits into it.
So I tried it. I bought some Ammonium Sulphate on ebay for a few quid, disolved it in boiling water, added my newly melted toner-on-copper to mix. Shook it about a bit, and voila! The copper melted away. I scrubbed the toner off and it only bloody works!

This is the result:




I've wired those LEDs into an Arduino and they all work fine. Incidently, to get more practice, I remade that little LED board with a resistor array instead of single resistors, I just don't have any pics of that.
So now that my little test is over, I have to repeat the process with the larger replacement board for the mini-arcade box and I've finally finished a project rather than getting it to about 80% and leaving it!

...and being able to print my own PCBs means that my house is now going to be full of little home-made gadgets that will no doubt please and delight the misses. Oooerr.

Yay me!
(dchurch bah, Fri 18 Nov 2011, 10:55, 18 replies)

Fatal flaw exposed
One of my chosen subjects at A-Level was Design Technology and each year we had to design, document and build an electronic device.

To add to the pressure, each device would also be entered into the Young Engineer of Britain Competition which culminated in a judging session in London.

The first year I'd developed a device that alerted the deaf that their kitchen appliances had completed their tasks (kettle boiled, microwave finished etc). It was a receiver and transmitter, the former housing a couple of flashing lights. Sounds shit, was shit.

Amazingly though the judges at the YEOB competition liked it enough to give me a commendation.

Having raised my own expectations, I really went to town the following year. The judges seemed to like inventions that were somehow linked to pressing social issues, so scanning the news I locked onto the growing concern of video game induced epileptic fits.

My amazing idea was to develop a circuit breaker that cut the power to the games console after a pre-determined time. Parents could then limit the time little Johnny spent on his Megadrive. You plugged the console into my device which in turn plugged into the mains. My device had a small display counting down the time before switch off so little Johnny could save his progress in time.

The teachers loved it, and felt sure I'd be well in the mix for the title that year. I started practicing my winner's speech.

The day of the judging started well enough. There's usually four judges who come to your stand to ask a few questions of your invention before retiring to consider the winner. The first three asked some fairly basic questions about epilepsy statistics and power regulation which i answered competently.

The final judge came by, took one look at the device and said: "What's to stop the kid from unplugging the console from your device the second the parent is out of sight?"

I didn't win.
(BinDipper, Wed 23 Nov 2011, 14:17, 9 replies)

squawk squawk SQUAWK



squawk squawk SQUAWK scapheap challenege scrapheap challenge squawk

*blings*
(bollocks parrot squawk squawk squawk, Sat 19 Nov 2011, 14:25, 7 replies)

I'm still proud of this one.
My annoying neighbour "Albert the Knob" has this adorning my shed on his side;




I'm thinking of lighting it up for Christmas...
(Kliper Filllets Getting noticed by twats on the internet since, Thu 17 Nov 2011, 18:53, 66 replies)

Improve QOTW!
I made it a project to vastly improve my QOTW experience. With time, effort, experience and refinement, I think I have it down to a fine art.

Find the following users:

Amorous Badger
Rory Lyon
PERSONALITY HORSE
FIRST! FIRST! FIRST! FIRST! FIRST!

On their profile, click "Ignore this user".

Done! Happy reading.
(McChinaman banned, Thu 24 Nov 2011, 6:20, 119 replies)

Days off when the weather is shit....
I got into a conversation with a flatmate about how it would be nice to not be restricted to one meat and two veg for dinner. Surely the more meat the better right? The only time I can think of when it is socially acceptable to have more than one type of meat on your plate is at Christmas, when you have turkey (bland) and pigs in blankets (2 types of pork, or for the more adventurous beef sausage connoisseur would equate to a total of 3). So I bought lots of meat (okay, technically only 4 different animals but 5 types of meat), and spent the best part of a day making the best sausage ever. Pictures and text and shit here.
(Jboy, Tue 22 Nov 2011, 10:15, 14 replies)

My most amazing project
Was my ex-boyfriend.

It took me months to train him not to pish on the toilet seat, leave the seat down, the lid closed, to get him not to sulk when he insisted on coming out shopping with me for the day and I wanted to spend ages looking at shoes. It was an accomplishment!

I hope his current lady is happy with my hard work.
(Catomiagi is in with a chance, Mon 21 Nov 2011, 18:52, 35 replies)

A brilliant project thwarted
Our bedroom is empty awaiting the arrival of the fitter to install new furniture. Emptying it involved removing clothes from wardrobes, cupboard, chests etc. I couldn't help noticing that Mrs AgeingGeek's clothes, once extracted and decompressed, filled the whole of our spare bedroom. Several bags have been disposed of but I suggested that when the remainder are returned to the new wardrobes I could fit RFID tags. With a reader by the door I could produce monthly reports thus assisting with rotation, identification of unused items etc. Instead of being congratulated on visualising the future of wardrobe management I was shot a high power laser vision stare and it is probably lucky no blunt instruments were to hand.

Perhaps female B3tans can explain why my idea is apparently less than brilliant?
(AgeingGeek Father of Two, Sun 20 Nov 2011, 13:26, 18 replies)