shinyhappyrainbows

With Melbourne having an unseasonably, soaking wet start to summer, I haven't been able to get the welder out. I have all the parts, apart from 56 of the right length spokes for the front wheels and the sheet steel needed for the seat shell, I just need favourable weather to be able to get the project into the only suitable welding workspace I have access to, the driveway. Can't take an electric MIG outside when it's raining, sigh. So, to feel like I'm actually "proceeding", I've been 3D printing jigs and braces to help keep the frame true. That, up there ^, is the jig for starting the side seam on the head tube. Yes, the angle is _meant_ to be -45 degrees, it's a lean steer trike. It works like this schematic... The hardest join in this style of trike is the the cross-member and steerer. I printed a clamping jig for that, too. See the earlier post about that here .

Forgive me reader/riders, for I have sinned and not posted for ages. But yeah, you know that, If I had any readers, you've probably all effed off, and who can blame you?! Anyway, NY rez, ride more and, now the weather is looking dry enough to take the welder outside, start building the bloody trike. But right at this moment, I has an insulated "fridge bag" (xmas loot) and new Blackburn drybag cages for the trusty touring bike, my HIGHLY modified, 2016 Reid Urban X2. Check the pics... The test bag is one of 2 Roswheel drybags from my bedroll system, which will now be moving to my forks because of my "Wild Man" bar bag.

I have a wonderful partner. Dropping suggestions for xmas gifts, on the offy I might get one or two, she dropped the lot on me. Spoiled? Much! The stand out among a standout bunch, a Blues Buster overdrive pedal kit from PedalParts Australia . Named for the "Bluesbreaker" Marshalls, as made famous by that unevolved creap, Eric "the arse" Claptrap, it's a classic and highly modifiable overdrive in the style of a Tube Screamer or an orig' OD-1. I started preproduction on that project today, making sure I have all the bits. It's getting built up in a bright red diecast box. Red ones distort more, right? EDIT: Changed out stock pic from PedalParts' catalogue for drilled and fitted out box. The great thing about pedal kits are the mods you can do so, as well as drive, volume and tone on the front panel, I'm breaking the treble trimmer out to a knob on the front panel for extra credit. However, I may have underspecced the housing. It'll all fit

I have this idea for an app, I'm pretty sure it's doable, just nowhere near skilled inough to do it. It's a peer-to-peer timeline app. No servers, no instances, no corporate control, just a collective of coders, selling the app on the app stores, and putting the money back into improving the app. A $5 app. The concept is something like this... For a medium originally designed to not centralise communications, peer-to-peer on the internet has been given a bad rep by BitTorrent and The Pirate Bay 20 years ago, yet P2P (for short) is used in so many things, app stores, cloud services, etc. My vision is to see it used to create a universal social medium that grows outwards from each user to their real life connections, using standard network protocols, like Jabber (RFC-6120 and extensions ) and WebRTC. ( XEP-0174 ) The major dificulty, as I see it, is getting a connection between 2 peers on different network providers, but the internet was designed to do this, and I know of

The whole takeover of twitter by Elon "Muck." The blatant banning of those who might be seen as leftist. The banning of journos. A haven for the fash. It's not a sign of Musk's actual politics, although I wouldn't imagine him any kind of socialist, either. It's distraction. While something else goes on as we ignore it, completely distracted by the trashing of twitter. It's been bugging me for weeks. Why would he have even made the offer for twitter in the first place? It's been in deep financial shit for a while. You know, 15 years is a good run for a website, but twitter has always been a bin fire of left v. right (I sit well left, BTW), the left wasting their emotional energy on "skoolboi fash" when the real fash are the techno-industrialists. The real "men", with more money than God, don't need brownshirts, they curry political favour with lickspittals in Parliaments and Congresses, bypassing the "Hitler Phase." M

Baghdad Battery - image via Wikimedia. By Ironie - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2091669 Leaving aside the archealogical denial that it was used for electroplating, or even that it was a battery, as a kid I was fascinated by this relic. So fascinated, I built one. I went to the local hardware and bought an iron 1/4 inch bolt (you could still get them from the hardware in 1976) a copper pipe joiner (basically a copper cylynder with flaired ends) and a plastic paint mixing cup. Back home, I got some orange juice out of the fridge, soldered a wire to one end of the copper tube, used a 1/4 inch nut to fasten another wire to the iron bolt, fastened the copper tube to the bottom of the cup with some of my kid sister's plasticene, hung the bolt down the middle of the copper tube with the help of more plasticene and a chop stick, then attached my multimeter. Filling the cup with orange juice to the top of the copper tube, about half a volt ensued

What it says on the label.

At this stage, I'm just kind of making notes here, but my experiences as a musician tells me that anarchism works. Capaitalists would have us believe that greatness can only be achieved by a philharmonic orchestra. That a constituted corporation needs to manage and co-ordinate the composers, resident conductor and musicians. I say that every band I played in was a bunch of musicians agreeing to work together for a common cause. Not every band was anarchist in its structure, many were dictatorships, one by me, many by another bandmate, but the foundation and constituency was essentially anarchist in every one. The height of anachist music co-operatives in recent times, has been punk and the DIY, no label movement. While Bandcamp is essentially heirachic and capitalist, unlike other, more conventional labels, Bandcamp also democratises the production and distrubution of music. The collectivist approach fits. The collectivist approach works. It's more like a private, local reco

I used to play in a band with a guy called Alex. Alex had had some moderate success around Melbourne as a musician and even greater success as an actor, then he moved to Tasmania (ironically where I'd moved to Melbourne from) and that was more or less the beginning or end of the band, despite Tony and my best efforts to keep something of the energy going with a couple of lineup changes. Alex was an amazing songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and a fantastic singer! He sang in his Australian voice, not the fake American or English voices that nearly everybody outside of Australian Hip Hop emulate. To my ears, that almost unique quality was gold. In the 80s, there was an Australian band, The Expression, who stood out for this thing, too. A pop rock group, with all the hallmarks of the 80s, but the lead singer sang without shame of his accent, "I always close my eyes, to look into the sun, I always close my eyes, same as everyone..." It was a defining moment for me, the first