Just clean the fan

This is like every repair job on someone elses computer I've ever had to do. Loved this song :D



If the embed player is too narrow to show the whole player, check the youtube page here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OpCJzdWxEbQ

Refurb outdoor oven

I scored a somewhat weathered outdoor oven from a mate at work for a reasonable price. Still not sure why he got rid of it, but this thing is gonna get me through some sweet open fire marshmallow action for the rest of my life!!


"The Aussie, Est 2001, Heatwave". Fairly new. Looks prehistoric. Cast iron hates rain.


The base is in reasonable condition given water flows off the bead shaped oven and directly onto the ground instead of pouring over the stand.


The cover after a first pass with a wire brush. Looks like this will come up nicely with a little work.


The right tools for the right job. Nooks n crannies are no match for incrementally smaller tools!!


The big boy gets special treatment from my custom wire disc. A modified bench grinder brush with a custom dowel bushing and a whopping bolt jammed through it.


Ended up using sash clamps to hold it at the angle I was working at. The bulb-base made it difficult to work with otherwise. It's coming up really well.


Awesome. Prolly 2 hrs of stripping work. Took a lot longer than I realised. It should be noted this thing weights a TONNE.


Mat black exhaust enamel, also good for stoves.


Two cans of paint later.


Looks fantastic. The finished base is in the background also.





Like new.


"Suitable for radiators, exhaust systems, pot belly stoves, and barbecues". $20/can. Heat proof to 650C. Cures at 200C. Naked flame can exceed this to almost double, but the paint is not exposed to naked flame. I suspect the top rim of the stack will show signs of burning first if the paint isn't up to the job. We'll see how it goes but given it's a 3M product listed for such applications, I'm sure it will be fine.


Very happy with the way this came up!! Looking forward to its first marshmallow evening :)

Fun with left overs

Trav threw out his old bed base so I ripped it down and decided to salvage some of the timber. One of those fake-matress ones with castors that's essentially a timber frame with a material outer over a cardboard shroud. It's pretty ordinary, really soft knotty pine. Not quite good enough to bother dressing down for real furniture. So I knocked up a frame to become a weights bench of sorts for my clutter. The top rail is actually made up of two T-pieces with a 10cm gap between them, so that loaded dumbells can sit safely on top without rolling.


The other side of the room however, still needs work!!! I think a 2nd shelf, and possibly another rack entirely will end up in here soon.

Putting on weight for fun and err...no profit.

In the last 8 weeks I've been madly rushing to increase my weight to 80kgs. The pre-story is long, and the information I've learned along the way is a-plenty. I'll try and break it all down into factoids and snippets.

Pre story
- ~2008 my weight managed to drift from 75 to 85kgs. I'm a raging ectomorph with a swath of related cortisol issues, so this was a BIG deal.
- late 2008 stumbled into http://www.whatyououghttoknow.com/show/ which put me onto the book "Body for Life by Bill Phillips". Seriously, buy it. You need a starting point, and this is it.

- Began a beginners workout regime with some limited equipment, supplemented by a slightly curbed eating habit.
- Throughout 2009 this got more serious, including lots of reading and experimenting trying to get the eating and workouts right. This was REALLY hard.
- ALMOST ALL of the information available is built around success stories. Which evolves around the EXTREMES, which is generally WORLD CLASS title winners. These are ENDOMORPHS of the highest order, who have worked hard. Most literature is built around these guys and simply does NOT work for ecto's.
- I plumetted to 67kg's, learning the above information the hard way.
- Crappy relationship with a self destructive woman at the time was absolutely no help at all. Get rid of garbage people in your life. Your best friend will tell you when you're being a dork (Kudos Tux btw), without pulling you into the soap-opera-scene. Keep those people, ditch the rest.

- End 2009 I managed to scraaaaappe my way back up to 70kg's, but I'd lost a lot of the hard work I'd put in. The original goal was 80kg's and CUT. 2009 summer fail.

Picked up a fairly serious Smith Machine/Gym at the end of 2009 as I'd spent the better part of a year tripping over the beginners mistakes already. Garrick is pretty tough, as demonstrated here ;)

2010, correct the madness.

- Mid 2010 finally read enough literature to work out what was going on, and started to re-take control of insane gain and loss, and reclaim muscle mass I'd aimed for.
- stopped ANY cardio exercise. Almost no cycling for 6 months. (It's cold anyway)
- Switched to a 4000 calorie / day eating regime. Avg for most people is around 2000+ if they're very healthy eaters. Take-away food eaters blow this out of the water.
- Switched to a technically-simple compound weights plan here. This is a short term training plan, but a good mix.
- 4000 calories with clean low fat food is HARD. I took some advice and simplified this by mixing in some dirty-weight gain. Double Whoppers and Strip-Sub combos 3-4 times a week work FAST.
- increased protein intake from about 160grams/day to over 250. Getting enough protein daily is hard yakka, and also expensive. Best price/quality I've found is http://www.proteindirect.com.au/ which is about 3 times cheaper than supermarket/mainstream retail costs.
- increased omega fats from 2 to 3 grams / day via supplements. Decreased ratio of omega 6 due to take-out diet.

SO. Today (9.9.2010) I weighed in at 79.5kg's this morning at 7am. I bought 3 pizzas yesterday for dinner and have finished them off this evening. Dirty...dirty, naughty gain :D
- This was an exercise in weight gain while still maintaining a vigilant workout regime, not a specific muscle gain plain, though for the first time I've had the fat reserves to feed my body effectively.

What now?
- Essentially do what I did in 2009 for the next 12 weeks, but with a few revisions.
- Will aim to maintain just over 3000 calories per day of lean food.
- Sticking to ~250 grams or more protein.
- lifting Omega 3 to 2-4 grams, and keep 6,9 at around 1000mg as supplements on top of whatever the diet manages.
- Alternate between the 6-week progressive overloading plans, and standard weekly plans.
- Pick up the cycling (cardio) again in October.
- Stay above 77.5 kg after cutting. I think this is achievable given the protein, calorie and omega changes. I'm seriously going to cry if I drop below 75 as this will indicate muscle loss again.
- End Feb next year, switch to a massive calorie loading again and aim for an 85kg fat-fest, with a cut weight after that of 80kg by June.
- The long delay to gain again is because I'm happy to idle at a maintenance stage over the summer period, and I also need to measure the current eating plan over a reasonable period. Previously ~2500 calories / day was resulting in loss, but my protein intake was low, and my cardio regime was too intense.

A few tips and things learned.
- Double check the advice and material you're reading. There's LOADS of stuff that's written as "common sense", that is completely WRONG. If it reads as common sense, and makes logical sense from a non-technical standpoint, it is probably wrong!!
- Most of the material available is for cyborg tank men from planet Krypton. Read that stuff, but supplement it with data for your current build, weight, and body type etc.
- PILATES in all its forms is complete rubbish.
- The exception to the above statement, is if you're a 45kg skeleton with no muscular motor control, and need a starting point. That is the extent of it. (Kat says I'm not allowed to say it's rubbish. :P )
- advice from anyone without abs, and/or below the age of 28 is to be dismissed immediately. They don't know, and anything that comes out of their mouth is based on their own bodies experience...which is still in a nubile Kryptonian cyborg state of improbable good looks with little effort.
- You're doomed if you don't love chicken.
- It's not really about eggs. It's all about chicken.
- Frozen vegetables FTW. Fresh is too much work.
- Hungry Jacks Onion Ring farts will continue for 2 days. True story :)
- Putting on weight is harder than losing it while still working out.
- Losing weight comes with anxiety, because you're looking in the mirror for results. Keep long term viewpoints in perspective. Use fortnightly or monthly photos as reference, not what you looked like yesterday.
- Losing weight has mild headache effects with most people. Remove stress and learn to play computer games.
- Keep other hobbies in play and active. I'm so damn competitive that gaming sometimes reaches a point where it fails to reach the relaxation goal. Find a girlfriend who will play computer games with you. Hobba I hate you. :P
- You'll always feel tired if your sustained carbohydrate intake is low, and exercise activity is low, a perpetually catabolic weak state is bad. (really common if diet and exercise are poor.)

- Failure is an option. Expect to see huge results, and fall flat on your face a couple times. Your face looked like a dropped pie anyway. :D

- mmMm, pie.

mobile TV

The TV corner is getting out of control, cords, cables, plus the whole thing is immobile. When we were growing up our main TV was on castors and we would move it around the house to suit what we were doing, rather than commit to sitting in the lounge room to do nothing but view the screen. Time to remedy this error of the future.


Removed the rear panel, it adds a lot of light to the inside when viewing the DVD library now. Used some castors I'd salvaged from a bed-base that Skev was throwing out.


Support blocks required in the corners. The cheap castors are heavily supported by the plastic shroud.


I stained and varnished the piece of my desk that I'd cut out for the keyboard-well, and attached it as a shelf to the side of the cabinet. This will give me a spot to put the PC-TV-controller, and keep things mobile. Cut-outs were req'd for the castors. All the white dots are drill-holes from using this piece as scrap for a considerable amount of time. Other side looks new though :)


Mobile PC stays with the cabinet.



Came up looking great, and now zooms around the room. Very quick easy job!!

...yes...those are christmas lights that I've failed to remove...there are three christmas stockings still on my lounge room walls too!! :D

USB Laser Duck will end us all.

Not much to say really. Laser Duck is the embodiment of the future slavery of human kind as we know it.

http://www.instructables.com/id/USB-Laser-Duck/

Exponential function

I keep forgetting to link this video. Caught it a year or two back. Presents in laymans terms what you learned in highschool, but forgot to apply later...

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6A1FD147A45EF50D

edit: On the same topic; Wow, in the Age Newspaper today State Parliament proved they're failing to even look at our own growth statistics by proposing an irrelevant tiny expansion to the city boundaries. http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/green-land-cut-back-as-melbourne-grows-much-bigger-20100729-10wvi.html?autostart=1

I've seen these before!!

So I'm in Big-W looking at the electrical stuff to track down an all purpose DC-output gizmo for various devices, and I stumble into this!! How completely awesome! Seems like I was making these over 2 years ago though :)

More Climate Denialist stuff

Sim sent me a great compilation of direct quotes from the world leaders in climate science, business, and the likes. It's kinda past the point where this can be "discussed" any longer, we're 20 years behind where we should be on the attack front.

http://logicalscience.com/consensus/consensusD1.htm

The other great, in fact AWESOME resource, is of course ye olde how to talk to global warming sceptic articles page. He's got a master page, with topics more easily categorised now also.

Don't forget to do something about it at home.

Please uninstall your Anti Virus Software

OK, so I've just finished an epic 12hr session over the course of 2 days fixing three peoples PC's. I've seen all 3 of these PC's before, I've worked on them many times in the past. One might surmise that I'm a crappy repair-man given the repeat work. It's really easy to simply re-install the Operating System and return a perfectly fine working machine. It's another situation entirely to return it to them as though nothing happened. There is however, one recurring theme that is out of any well buffed, good looking guys hands.

The abomination that is "anti" "virus" "software".

You're driving down a road in your Triple-A-Safety rated car. You drive off a cliff. Your air-bags deploy as designed when you hit the ground. You're dead anyway. Had you not been driving as though you were invincible in the first place, this never would have happened.

Over the course of my entire lifetime, the #1 biggest virus I have ever worked against is anti virus software itself.

- 100% if the time it has been the underlying cause of an imaginary sense of security.
- 100% of the time the user has CLICKED AND RUN something they should not have, which resulted in malware, spyware, phishing scams, loss of data, loss of privacy or otherwise critical system failures.
- 100% of the time anit-virus-software has been directly responsible for automatic updates being stalled, halted, broken or otherwise not working as a result of some sort of security settings alteration it has made (of which there are literally several thousand). I cannot express how common, serious, and disastrous this is.
- 100% of the time the anit-virus-software has MADE IT DAMN NEAR IMPOSSIBLE to remove the ACTUAL PROBLEM without UNINSTALLING THE anti-virus-software first.

There are long, oh so very long, lists of variation, complexity, and just blatant stupidity associated to all four of those bullet points. The most offensive component is when anti virus software has broken something first, which resulted in situations where the user was FORCED to click something they should not have.

This includes broken script warnings that weren't broken until false-positives are reported. Popup warnings, cautions, and the like. The end user becomes SO DISMISSIVE with the continuous clicking of "yes" to make warnings go away, that they lose any sense of discerning decision making, and will click on any old rubbish. No I mean it. Anything.

Without spending HOURS explaining some of the finer technical points of why anti-virus-software is by every definition, the worst virus of them all, let me finish with a few pointers.

- If the porn site you're browsing tells you that you need to "install a media player" of any sort, and you click "yes", it's already too late for you. You need CODEC'S, not PLAYERS. Once you're running their software, you're done. The only exceptions are the the big 3: adobe, sun-java, and apple plugins.
- You're browsing the local football scores webpage, and you see some sort of official looking window, message, or popup that says "you might be infected, click here to do something about it". The host of the web page does NOT have any means of determining your actual security status. Try and be a little discerning in future please!!
- If you click ANY file to run it, without knowing its extension type, you're done.
- Why did you download the virus in the first place? What did you think you were clicking on? Were you REALLY duped? So there were no indicators that the file you ran wasn't legit?

Everyone knows the rules about web browsing, secure connections, and porn. Stop making it someone elses responsibility to protect you from yourself. I have never seen a situation first hand where any virus software actually STOPPED, PROTECTED, AND KEPT THE PC UNHARMED. I hear about it all the time. Have you? If so, do you have the technical knowledge to determine if what it told you was true, and not a false positive? Like I said. Never seen it do anything but harm.

STOP DRIVING OFF CLIFFS !!!

Thinking with Portals

Portal: Awesome game. Complete it, then try these. Skip to step 3 if you don't have Portal. Or go download it on Steam. It's worth your $10.



1: Rens test maps. Hard, single room maps. #2 is awesome. #1 is ok. #3 has some good concepts but has some other issues where I don't think it qualifies as portal. (trying a known tactic over and over and over until the physics works just right for what you're doing) #2 is well worth your time.
http://www.fileplanet.com/184974/180000/fileinfo/Portal---Ren_Test-3-Mini-Map-Pack

2: Portal Prelude, 19 level story-based maps on the events leading up to the original portal game. Fan made, supreme quality, very fun, very immersive.
http://www.portalprelude.com/download.php

3: Fun 2d web-Flash version. Good fun.
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/404612

4: Proper Portal Mod created from the 2d flash version. Great implementation!
http://portalmaps.wecreatestuff.com/

5: Unlimited stuff to try at one of the primary fan sites.
http://forums.thinkingwithportals.com/

6: Awesome original song and machinima for Portal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6Q_koTHB54&feature=player_embedded#!

Another scale of the Universe

Another great "scale of the universe" animation. Apparently to scale. I really liked the reference to 70-light-years being the extent of our furthest radio transmission. An irrelevant spec in space. So much for the Seti project.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U&feature=player_embedded

Scale of everything

Great little flash zoomer representing the scale of pretty much everything. Very simple, very well presented. Worth your time to have a zoom :)

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/525347