February 2012
1 post
September 2011
2 posts
4 tags
Questions about 3D Printing
How long before toy manufacturers go for the “3D printed look” to cash in on the trend?
Is 3D printed jewellery the epitome of Pokemonetisation? When will 3D printed jewellery trend and what pokemonesque combination will it take to go mass-market?
But can 3D printing be mass-market? Isn’t it the home-made within-your-grasp nature of 3D printing that’s popular? What...
August 2011
1 post
July 2011
1 post
Corgi Swingball
A new sport introduced for the Diamond Jubilee/2012 Olympics - Corgi Swingball.
June 2011
1 post
January 2011
2 posts
“One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties...”
– Douglas Adams, Chapter 1, Mostly Harmless
Once again, Douglas Adams understanding human nature. The current evidence for him being right is Twitter - the instant-gratification toss-off bad news amplifier. Pacific tsunami panic messages spread by people sitting miles from a different coast. People...
December 2010
3 posts
Personal Information Stack
On Saturday morning I awoke in a hotel in Ascot to the worst hangover and heaviest snow of recent memory.
By 1pm leaving the hotel became an inevitability so we checked the train times from Ascot. With conflicting information, stale websites saying one thing and local people saying another we were torn between driving and taking the train. I had a hired car and a determination to get back to...
November 2010
4 posts
RIPE Atlas using XPort Pro →
The RIPE Atlas project appear to be using (at least for the prototype) an XPORT Pro as a very lightweight, widely distributed performance monitoring network.
The XPORT Pro is essentially a programmable, USB-powered ethernet interface with brains, and formed the basis of the Botanicalls Twitter circuit for talking plants. This is a really very interesting mass monitoring system, giving extremely...
Boys' Life Magazine, June 1984 →
Distantly-recalled but I never expected to see them in their entirety on Google - what appears to be the complete set of Boys’ Life Magazines, a magazine for Scouts in America. I was a scout there for a few months in 1984, initially dressed in green English uniform when everyone else was wearing dark blue.
Shortest Path First
When a major transport link changes in a city, the topology of the city’s links changes like a dynamic routing protocol in a network. Areas which were previously hard to reach suddenly become accessible at very low cost (ie. time) to the user.
The London travel times map (http://stamen.com/clients/mysociety) was originally made in 2006 by the late Chris Lightfoot, and the work lives on as...
October 2010
3 posts
Thoughts on Bletchley Park
I visited Bletchley Park again this week and again was left with the impression that it misses an opportunity to explain itself.
There have been press campaigns, fundraising, petitions, even “donate a day’s salary” for Bletchley Park, and they’ve certainly come a long way and done a lot to preserve it, but when you get there it all seems a bit shambolic. I appreciate that...
September 2010
7 posts
“Congratulations, crouchingbadger, you are now an administrator of Cats That Look...”
– Thanks, flickr. I think.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/1121868@N22/pool/
Flightradar24 →
I’m addicted to playing with this little website. Next time you look at a plane leaving contrails across the sky, bring up flightradar24 and find out where it’s flying to. It makes me feel ‘augmented’ in a way, like my senses now extend to the Internet.
August 2010
3 posts
“Cancers of the food pipe in Britain have doubled in men over 25 years”
– BBC News’ website carefully ensuring we don’t get confused by the difficult word “oesophagus”. (At least they updated the headline from last night so it uses big grown-up words.)
Humbrol Beginnings
On the short walk between my house and the corner shop there is a downstairs bay window of a house that always catches my eye. Instead of a widescreen telly or a pile of kids’ toys stuffed into a corner there’s a simple desk, a telephone and a green craft project cutting board. Occasionally on this board there’s a plastic model kit of a car or something being constructed.
...
February 2010
1 post
1 tag
Kitchens of Distinction
We’ve finally exchanged contracts on the house and we’re having to make grown-up decisions like “what kind of kitchen extension do we want?”
I got Google Sketchup out and watched a shedload of tutorials. I still didn’t really understand it until I’d built our new house several times, each time somehow misaligning the walls by 1 pixel or filling in the entire...
January 2010
1 post
December 2009
1 post
October 2009
1 post
Bracknell
Bracknell Forest of toy houses, sticky notes, sticky traffic, hub & spoke, stop, start. Heart of concrete, high-tech solutions for everything but pleasure, and a gap where the weather used to come from.
June 2009
1 post
Playmobil Security Checkpoint →
Halt! Ihre Papiere bitte.
I suggest reading the reviews also.
May 2009
2 posts
The Kessel Run, West Virginia →
I had no idea the Kessel Run was in West Virginia. Looks about 6 parsecs to me.
April 2009
1 post
March 2009
1 post
WWF Earth Hour, Sat 28th Mar 2009, 8:30pm
On Saturday 28th March 2009, at 8:30pm you can make a statement about the urgent need to do something about climate change.
For one hour turn off the lights. See how much of the planet we can plunge into terrifying darkness. If you’re not sure what to do with this hour of darkness, here are some suggestions:
Light some candles
Have a seance
Have a candle-lit dinner party with the...
February 2009
1 post
Weasel Shit For Fun & Profit
My new Current Cost meter arrived today. The CC128 is much the same as the original Current Cost meter, but slightly better looking. Under the facelift it offers the chance to monitor several sensors around the home which has possibilities for things like water usage and smart thermostats, but today I’ve been fascinated with the developments of the Current Cost crowd and the National...
December 2008
1 post
Sloe Win!
Well, we cracked open the sloe gin and decanted it into pretentious little bottles for xmas gifts. Very pleased with the result, which is quite surprising after less than two months in the kilner jar. Went very nicely with a Badger Industries mince pie, I think you ought to know.
Next year we go into full production.
October 2008
10 posts
Sloe Gin for teh Win!
Update (Sep 2010): You may have arrived here by asking Mr Google “how to recognise sloes”. It appears I didn’t give an answer here, sorry. The easiest way to describe them is by the skin.
The skin is dark blue/purple/black with a greyish patina which makes sloes look like blueberries or tiny, tiny plums.
Sloes occur in clumps on the branches, unless you’ve been...
How I Beat the Credit Crunch with...
In another edition of what appears to be a series of money saving tips from Badger Towers, I decided to give some love to SaveMyPrinter.co.uk for saving me money.
I have an HP Laserjet 1100 which sits on my desk doing very little to justify its existence, occasionally printing a boarding pass or a coupon because it can’t cope with a big job any more. I used to have an HP Laserjet 5L which...
Badgerpower
Not long ago I bought a Current Cost smart electricity meter from Southern Electric’s eco gadget shop. It works by induction, clipping around the mains cable by your real meter and then wirelessly transmitting the reading every few seconds to an LCD display.
When I first plugged it in I got the urge to turn things on and off to watch how much electricity they were using. The house in...
YouTractor.com - Welcome →
100% Tractor Videos.
“If you had purchased £1000 of Northern Rock shares one year ago they would now...”
– Google Finance: HBOS plc
Rissingtons
On Friday I had a rather pleasant visit to the folks at Rissington (Jon Hicks, John Oxton, Jon P Dennis and Simon Clayson), which was only slightly marred by the failburger four of us had at The Eagle & Child (Stow-on-the-Wold), and the pint of rancid Hooky.
This is what the outing looked like, once we’d avoided the biblical traffic queue into the town by taking a 10 mile Oxton...
September 2008
1 post
Large Hardon Collider Day
It was Large Hardon collider day all day yesterday. I’m wishing the site http://largehardoncollider.com/ was funnier, but unfortunately the comedy comes in italics for the hard of understanding.
Also, talking of momentous announcements, there’s a lot of iTunes 8 today. iTunes 8 is still rubbish at almost everything, but now it has a “we’ve heard that something has a...