Things I would like to do:

Learn to play the guitar – to play cool songs – QOTSA, etc.
Learn to dance – for the laaaaadies
Learn to ride a skateboard – convenience, cool factor and to give insight if I want to design an electric version, etc.

Googlography

So googling my name now turns up this page. That’s after my facebook profile, but before any noteworthy items about myself (namely involvement in various furniture fairs).

I’m ambivalent about it, but it’s amazing how careful you have to be if you want to avoid being traced on the internet. I now have 4 email addresses, and I always planned to keep the hotmail one as a ’shitbucket’ email which I could use to sign up for random sites that may host or provide access to content of questionable legality. The idea was to therefore not use that email to sign up to sites which require both an email and my real name, or sites that require more than one email or what have you. Essentially it shouldn’t be traceable back to me. That plan went out the window a few years ago in a moment or ten of stupidity, but I doubt anything I’ve done so far is going to come back and haunt me. Of course, from now on I’m going to be much more careful

These days it is a bit easier though, with sites like http://bugmenot.com where you can specify a throwaway email anonymously and check it for 24hrs afterwards.

Awesome video game idea

How awesome would a Transformers action MMORPG be? Totally awesome would be the correct answer. As long as there was a way of allowing for a procedural method of transformation (i.e. you can tweak your character’s appearance in a nearly infinite number of ways) I think the actual gaming mechanisms would translate well to a MMORPG format.

You can start by picking either Autobot or Decepticon, then specialise in various abilities such as vehicle mode (wheels, flight), weapons, etc. Quests could be against mega-robots, enemy facilities, Quintessons and PvP is a natural. Leveling up gives you better weapons, new transform options (triple-changers, extra AI-controlled componenets like Optimus Prime’s trailer) and the ability to customise more of your character. Players would have to use both vehicle mode and robot mode for different weapons, ability to heal and take damage, travel speeds, etc.

Naturally the world would be Cybertron, with possible Earth and space expansion packs. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense. That probably means someone is already making it, and while I hate them for stealing my idea, I can’t wait to play it, if they don’t fuck it up…

Random ideas

Here are some cool ideas I’ve had:

1. Saving the atmosphere.

Make a solar-powered dirigible (airship)  with a compartment that contains bacteria genetically engineered to consume harmful gases in the atmosphere. Details to work out – how to effectively condense air for bacteria to consume, and how to engineer bacteria that can sustain themselves off potentially toxic gases.

2. Anti-light.

I remember reading a kids book where a character had a dark light – essentially a flash light that cast darkness. Short of creating anti-photons (which would react… interestingly with normal matter) my idea is to utilise VR goggles, retinal projection or some such method to occlude the users vision of various elements of the environment. Ideally a flashlight emitting IR or some EMR invisible to normal vision would be picked up by a sensor and relayed to the retinal projector, so you would “see”  which parts are obscured by the flashlight.

One problem with this idea is that retinal projectors don’t have a way of generating “black” – it’s fairly obvious when you think about it (if you don’t understand why, look into how LCD monitors work). Ideally goggles or contact lenses that contain a matrix of black LCD or e-ink elements could be used to generate greyscale.

3. Smart contacts.

Continuing on with the idea of augmented contacts – something I’ve always wanted to do is to be able to take a photo of whatever you’re looking at. I won’t lie, the idea always seems to have the most merit when I’m perving on a an attractive member of the opposite sex. Engineering-wise the lenses would need to have an aerial for data transfer (which could be incorporated around the lens), an imaging sensor, a lens or focusing element, a means of telling what you are looking at, and a power source (could be invisible solar cells covering the lens).

If the imaging and focusing elements are placed directly over the pupil (assuming they can be made from clear or invisible materials), the focusing elements will disrupt your normal vision. Instead the imaging sensor could be implanted in the eye, or be located on the lens beside the pupil.

Taking a picture would be as simple as blinking rapidly three times. The trade off is having a couple of extra unintentional pics, but how often do you blink three times in quick succession? Perhaps four times could be a video mode.

The future of Industrial Design

Heres an email copied verbatim that I sent to a lecturer of mine. It probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense so I’ll probably come back and clean it up, but for now I just want to put it up because I’m proud of it.

So you think you’re fucked?

In response to tmimeh’s post: http://stirlace.blogsome.com/2007/06/06/oh-tim-will-you-ever-win

I don’t know what sort of situation you’re in, but it can’t be any worse than mine – I handed in my previous assignment 5 or 6 days late (depending on whether the submission cutoff is at 5pm, midnight or when Venus and Jupiter are in alignment) and thats at 10% a day. This is for an assignment worth 50%

Luckily it was decided to only remove it from the report which was late, not the model, so it’s only 60% off the report section which makes up 2/3 of that 50%. Still following? Anyway the end result is that I failed my assignment, although not as badly as I thought. It’s somewhere in the mid 40’s although I can’t be sure because we now get little sliders with a fat bar which indicates roughly where our mark is. No I don’t know why either :/

So here I am, with the next/final assignment due for this subject, which unsurprisingly is ALSO worth 50%. The good news is that it’s not due until tomorrow at 4pm. The bad news is that I have a cubic fuckton of work to do for it, on account of my plan to finish the other two assignments I had due this week (Monday and today) a lot earlier – ideally over the weekend – flying out the window in a trajectory I could only describe as “predictable”.

Jet…. Ah yes. At some point I forget when this was, despite having a reminder on my phone calender, and the assumed, and then <i>convinced</i> myself it was on Friday.  Because I also have an assignment due on Friday. If you’ve been counting, yes, that’s four assignments in a week. Yipeee. If you do the math, or if I do it for you, that works out to be 39% of my semesters marks all in one week. Anyway, I’m not sure if I will finish this 50% assignment by the 4pm deadline. In which case I technically have until 4pm the next day to make good enough to offset the 10% late penalty. This is hard because really all I need to get is a high pass mark to guarantee that I pass the subject, but to be honest my problem is that I’ve never been capable of producing work of such a low calibre deliberately.

And then there’s the other assignment due on Friday. If I have a report that is of an “acceptable” quality by 4pm tomorrow (definition to be determined at a later time) then I will go to the concert, come home after, do a bit of work and then finish it off on Friday no problems. I have a fair bit of work to do for it, maybe 5-6 hours at a guess. But I have until 5pm on Friday. But if I fuck myself up on the report, then the whole “offsetting the 10% late penalty” likely means that I need to put a lot more work into it, which then means that it’s unlikely I will finish my other assignment on time. I hate this stupid cascade effect, and often if an assignment is late I will endevour to make sure other assignments do not suffer because of it, but in this case passing the first one is much more important than passing the second, for which I am likely close to passing anyway.

If the report isn’t done by 4pm and I don’t think I can offset that 10% by the time the concert starts, Jet is out of the question bigtime. I truly hope that isn’t the case

6 wikis of seperation

A list of what I spent last night reading about. Thats a Jetpack, which is a web 3.0 method of storing links and images and other random crap. They (Jeteye, the people who off the service) claim they’ve been around for ages, but I think the Firefox extension and the web interface are both lacking in features, but for this kinda stuff it’s still cool. Anyway, thats a page of links, started off by the Comic Relief page (which I wiki’d from TheDailyWTF), quickly went to Dr Who, and from there to steampunk, League of Extraodinary Gentlemen, Batman and psychotropic drugs and… you get the idea. An awesome Firefox extension would be to have something track your wiki links and then compile them into a sort of map, which could be presented ala a Jetpack.

Birthday Goodnez
I don’t like advertising that it’s my birthday – it’s nothing to do with my age, I just don’t feel comfortable saying “O hay guyz, its ma bday in a week”. I think most of my uni mates found out through MySpace, so I ended up getting a few belated “Happy Birthdays you old fart” on Sunday. I think it sorta goes back to what I never said about consumerism (half a post is saved here but I can’t quite articulate what I want to say), if I tell people, they feel compelled to do things for me, or buy me things or whatever, and frankly I don’t need it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m human and I enjoy the odd bit of attention. And I’m not being rude when I say I don’t need it. I mean it in the sense of Want vs. Need. Personally, I feel that I am less of a consumer whore than a lot of people around me. Maybe I’m more aware of it, maybe I’m just a boring person, but right now I would say I need for nothing, and the things I want I could count on one hand:

1. New computer – it’s not my fault they double in jigawatts every year.
2. A new HDD – The above is a want, this is a bit more towards the need end of the scale, I only have a few GB left and thats only because I’m not dl’ing any pron
3. Digital Camera – Much closer to need, this would help a bit with uni stuff.
4. 4GB memory stick for my phone – cheaper than buying an iShit.
5. Books – Plenty to buy, but whether I have the time I’m not sure. Ditto magazine subscriptions.

That’s honestly it. Sure you could show me cool gadgets, flying toys and lego sets, cars or consoles and sure I’d drool over them, and probably consider buying them, but then I think of whether I truly need it and most of the time the answer is no. I don’t blame people for just giving me money for my birthday this year. Now that I think about it, it’s probably the first year it’s happened, and in a way its sad, but not many people would have picked or been able to afford the items on that list above. I also remember the first time I opened up a present and thought “Aw, it’s cool, but I’m never going to use it”. And its happened a lot since. I dunno, maybe I don’t have the time, or I’m losing my sense of fun, or a million other depressing thoughts, but I honestly can’t see how these objects are enriching my life. Sure its the thought that counts, and some of these pointless gadgets are funny and cool, but in the end they wind up in a drawer or box collecting dust and it makes me feel sad. On the bright side, I look forward to giving as much of this stuff to my kids.

Frankly, if I didn’t recieve anything at all except a phone call saying Happy Birthday I’d still be a happy guy. The money is nice (I think I’ll put it towards a digital camera), but its just money – I live at home and earn enough to be comfortable in the day-to-day, and I enjoy just going out at random, enjoying a beer or movie with mates. Sure birthdays are a good excuse to get the family together, but that’s only because there’s enough birthdays in a year to make it a regular event – getting together to enjoy company shouldn’t require a motive, or the need to spend money on each other.

And I guess that really explains why I’m not a consumer. I just don’t see the point. I feel no strong desire to buy things, to surround myself with the new, the shiny, the luxurious. I by no means live a spartan lifestyle, I’m no buddha, but one thing I do is respect things, both mine and others. When I buy something I buy with an eye for quality and longetivity. Fashion is something that changes, but style lasts. Buying something cheap and then buying another one when the first breaks is anathema, even if it works out cheaper in the long run. There are plenty of exceptions, but the thing that got me a while back was when we had to value our personal contents for insurance. In other words, what would you miss if your house burnt down? Computer, wallet, phone, watch, personal documents. Most of the other “valuable” stuff can be easily replaced – sound system, CD collection, clothes, furniture, tools and art supplies.

The thing that gets me is that people are so willing to throw things away. With a little bit of know-how I fixed a pair of headphones and a pair of earbuds. The drivers – the most complex bits – were totally fine, but in both cases the cable wiring had fractured. It wasn’t exactly easy repairing either, but it was definitely rewarding and I think they’re now as good, if not better than before, and we’ll get another few years of life out of them.

One thing that really shits me is that people don’t respect objects, especially when they’re not theirs. This is pretty apparant in the uni workshop, when people carelessly and ruthlessly operate machines that have been carefully tuned and are very expensive to repair and maintain. A little bit of understanding may instill some respect but it’s sad that it needs to be done at all. A lot of people also don’t respect models which always amazes me. If they stopped to consider how long they spent on their own models (ok sure, some people may only spend 10 minuts on a model) they would probably have a bit more respect and care, but they don’t. Despite their best intentions they leave fingerprints on paintjobs and knock the models over as they walk past. It is absolutely heartbreaking to see it happen, but how could you possibly feel angry when they turn around and say “sorry?” >_>

But even just respecting cheap ordinary items would go a long way to stem the tide of consumerism. Sure something is cheap, its cheerful, it does its job. Until you throw it around and fuck it up. By treating stuff with more care, or just being more aware of how we use things, most objects will provide a good long service life.

I don’t know. I’m an angry man and I don’t really know how to end this rant so I guess this is as good a place as any. TAKE CARE OF SHIT.

On being a Deviant

That may or may not be a subtle hint to check out my Deviantart page, which I’ve just updated with a few pics I rendered out for my CAD assignment due last Wed.

In case you didn’t realise, I had an assignment due Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and by Wednesday night I was feeling pretty terrible. I had a sore throat and bumpin’ forehead (yo!), neither of which went away the next day, or the day after that. Painkillers didn’t seem to do much about that either. Joy! I think I would almost prefer having my wisdom teeth reinserted and then removed again – at least those painkillers did something then. So I’m feeling somewht better now, thanks for asking, but I haven’t done much work since Wednesday. I’m temporarily burnt out. Boo hoo.

Anyway, more on being a deviant – check out this awesome page – they have heaps of awesome videos, particularly check out the laser tag and LED Throwies pages. The LED Throwies are the precursors to the Mooninite signboards that led to the Boston bomb scare (probably one of the stupidest over-reactions in recent times). I am seriously tempted to make a whole lot of these throwies and plaster them around uni. I’m quite sure that all of the ingredients can be had for fairly cheap over Ebay (ideally this would maybe cost under $100). Making signs from them would be awesome, but I wouldn’t want to be accused of creating a bomb hoax. My ideal target would have to be under the pedestrian bridge over Harris st between Building 6 and 4, or just randomly around uni. I’m wondering if double-sided tape would be as effective? It would certainly stick to more surfaces if it didn’t require too much pressure for application. The most important thing would be to put these in spots that are visible but out of the ordinary persons reach, since I don’t want jackasses just ripping them off the wall and nicking off with them.

Last link for the day- the piece de resistance. Imagine that, but hanging from the top of Tower Building. Need I say more?

How’s this for an idea?

Apologies for the lack of updates, I promise to write more. I know I can keep this promise because it’s an effecticve form of procrastination – for instance it’s preventing me as we speak from doin my assignment due tomorrow

Anyway, this is something I was trying to explain to Timmeh the other day (maybe at the Bavarian Bier Cafffffeeeee) but for the life of me had forgotten what my awesome idea was.

While listening to a somewhat entertaining lecture on interaction design the other week by this guy (yes his name really is Bert Bongers, he’s from the Netherlands) he flashed up a comic, in Norwedish or whatever they speak, that had the evolution of men hitting things, progressing from clubbing an animal, through to hitting an anvil and ending at a user hitting his computer. It wasn’t particularly funny, but as he said, in all of the panels leading up to the computer the person was actually acheiving something by hitting.

So I had the idea for something that would do something for you when you hit your computer. Specifically, I have in mind a large red emergency button that you plug in via USB, and when you hit it, it sends a ctrl-alt-del keyboard command to the computer. The button would be housed in a pretty hefty box that you could mount somewhere solid on your desk so you could give it a real beating.

Taking the idea a step further, you could have a second normal recessed button to restart your computer so you don’t have to lean down to press in the fiddly little one on the front of your case, or better yet it could be a switch that requires a key in it, or better still, one that requires two people to turn keys simultaneously. I think I’ve stumbled into an entire set of gimicky USB peripherals based on oversized emergency props taken from action thrillers.

Admittedly there is already this missile launcher but don’t tell me it wouldn’t be a million times cooler if you could launch it with this button:

Just so you know, I’m convinced this would be relatively easy to do – getting the hardware definitely wouldn’t be the hard bit. Watch this space

Linkety links

While I was watching TV earlier the lights went dim for a fraction of a second (as in waned to almost nothing as opposed to the occasional flicker) and the aircon unit also briefly switched off and then back on again. So coming into the study I wasn’t surprised to see my computer off, even though the other one was on. However when I went to switch it on it beeped a few times and there was an error message about the “Computer Fan” overheating or somesuch thing. Thinking my CPU fan had died I quickly wiped all the dust out between the fins, but I still got the error, and the CPU fan was spinning fine. I immediately looked at the BIOS fan and found it difficult to spin with my finger. Hoping that the bearings hadn’t seized (are BIOS fans standard items or specific to each mobo?) I looked for a way to prise the heatsink/fan assembly off, and quickly unscrewed some tiny screws I could just get at between the fan blades. The fan started moving around but it was trapped between the heatsink cage and a cheap looking aluminium shroud that only covered the edges of the fan, but seemed impossible to get off.

It wasn’t until I shone a lamp into the case that I could see that the fan was screwed in from the otherside, which would require unscrewing the entire mobo – yeah fuck that -_- So i took my little cutter/pliers and cut the shroud at the thinnest points and then fatigued the four sections off, which left a surprisingly clean break right at the base where it was fixed to the heatsink. The fan came out easily, only being held in by the screws, but even after unclogging the dust it was stiff to move. So I unpeeled the back sticker and added in a drop of WD40, and then some proper machine oil (since WD40 evaporates too quickly to lubricate for a long time) and Lo! the fan was spinning OK. Putting it back in everything started up just fine, so thankfully it seems the bearings had only dried out, not completely seized up – but let this be a warning to you – next time you clean out your PC think about taking a few more minutes to peel off the central stickers on all of your fans and just add a few drops of machine oil (Singer is what I used).

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And now the real reason you’re here:

Dick in a Box
(You’ll need to click on the movie to bring you to the Youtube page – it has been officially removed from Youtube, but as always England the internet prevails)

Comedian Movie Trailer
….while we’re on Youtube links – the announcer is Hal Turner. I don’t remember hearing anything about this movie – it came out in 2002.And I figured these belong here too, since I’m just passing them on from an email Slay sent me:

The Herald Sun’s 25 Best Newspaper Headlines of 2000

Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Experts Say

Include Your Children When Baking Cookies

Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers

Drunks Get Nine Months in Violin Case

Iraqi Head Seeks Arms

Is There a Ring of Debris around Uranus?

Prostitutes Appeal to Pope

Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over

British Left Waffles on Falkland Islands

Teacher Strike Idles Kids

Clinton Wins Budget; More Lies Ahead

Plane Too Close to Ground, Crash Probe Told

Miners Refuse to Work After Death

Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant

Stolen Painting Found by Tree

Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half

War Dims Hope for Peace

If Strike Isn’t Settled Quickly, It May Last a While

Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide

Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge

New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group

Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Space

Kids Make Nutritious Snacks

Two Sisters Reunited after 18 Years in Checkout Counter