shinyhappyrainbows

This is my best work, to date, and I can't give it away, apparently. $1 digital album. Go figure.

I'm not telling you to do this. If you do this, you choose to. I don't want you to even need do this but life is a bitch and we have a right to know how to keep ourselves safe from harm. Nominally, if we are in danger, we should call the police, but hey, what if you're a woman who lives alone in the country, kilometres from any sort of police response, and a local "creepazoid" "takes a shine" to you and he is totally unwelcome to. I believe there are situations where, even though in law we might not have such a right, we do have "a moral right" to nonlethal defence. I'm not writing in the USA, BTW, the Second Amendment doesn't apply outside that failed state, and is the reason that nation is a failed state. Yeah, pin pulled, diplomatic incident, fuck the USA, fuck off. So, the nonlethal defence option for the rest of us. It needs to be "cooking" rather than "chemistry." It needs to be relatively nontechnical, but sa...

Labor are not the party of the worker anymore. I mean, what can we do about this bullshit... " Stage 3 Tax Cuts will "turbocharge inequality" - Australian Greens. " How the fuck can we ever get fair, sliding scale taxation, where those who take the most from the economy, pay the most to do so, while we have a political donation system where the same corporations and billionaires fund both Labor and the LNP's election campaigns? I'd say "bloody revolution" but I've no desire to be on that watchlist. I will happily knit a stitch for each head if somebody already on that watchlist succeeds, though. Fucken Labor? Fucken sellouts.

The main frame is cut and ready to be welded, if Melbourne will only give me some decent freakin' weather to get outside with power tools. The crossmember needed a rethink. It's all well and good to make a sensible "engineering" decision (I'm a sound engineer by trade, which isn't a field of actual engineering) and use 35x1.6 SHS for all the main parts, but the decision then leads to using 50x5 SHS for making the lean steering wheel tilt brackets and slightly less than 600g of steel for each. Making the same brackets out of 40x3 reduces the weight to nearer 200g each, but requires the crossmember to be made from 30x1.6, also lighter but for no appreciable loss of strength. For my next trick, I might build a version of it out of 31.8x16x1.6 EHS for AeroAdvantage™. Meanwhile, as an exercise in learning FreeCAD, the design is being refined for a later version. A friend is considering an eTrike as a mobility aid and, if mine works, I'll probably start assem...

When I started 3D printing (don't get me started on that at the moment) I started using FreeCAD , found it frustratingly complex, tried OpenSCAD , and something of the mathematical approach (you code your designs in the openSCAD language) of that really appealled to me. I've been using that tool ever since but thought I really should learn a proper CADware. I can't afford Fusion360 (and WON'T pay rent for software), and the free version is too limited. So, it's back to FreeCAD. Fortunately, there is a video tutorial that explains it quite well. So, if you're tired of the big brands' gouging you and leaving you unable to work when they dump older hardware, but there's no download that'll continue to work with your hardware. If you want to pay less for software, generally (do support open source with cash or code where you can, though), then OpenSCAD and FreeCAD are the wares I recommend and use. Give them a try.

However, I'ma have a little humblebrag. I've been a guitarist/bassist and songwriter since I was 9, I'm 61 next month. That's 52 years. If I still had the cassette tape of "Haunted House" (Jay/Dean/Dean) I'd probably destroy it. Phillip was playing drums on a vinyl upholstered draftsman's stool, I was playing guitar, Andrew, Phillip's yonger brother, was vocals(???) It was a start. I remember it fondly. My first real foray into any sort of musical career was in high school, with the high school rock band. We had semi-formal recognition as such, largely because the school's senior music teacher was the instigator of practical music in Tasmania's school curriculum, and my high school was one of the first to trial it. So it was that Stu, me, Eileen, Sharon, Helen (??? sorry), Tim and Tim came to play at school socials and even performed at the school eistedfords one year My adult musical experience begins with Bullet Proof, fronted by the la...

Haze T-style double F-hole semiacoustic review This is the Haze T-style semiacoustic, double f-hole. It cost AU$200 delivered to my door, so I didn't realy expect perfection and, except for a few fixable problems, near perfection is what I got! This is a preliminary review, as I haven't had a chance to plug it into an amp yet, but I doubt anybody could mess up tele pickups, they're the most basic of 1940s/50s technology, so today, I'm focusing on build and playability. What I Expected For The Price. It has cheap strings. I'll play them out but I'm guessing they won't last long. The frets are modern and large, which suits me, I could see that on Kookaburra Music's eBay listing. It's a slim D-profile neck and it's very playable and while the fret ends are a little rough, you don't really notice because they're nicely set back from neck's edge, by a millimetre. The action was a suprise! Low, yet no buzz! The woodwork on this guitar is...

The steel arrived on Thursday, thanks Moorrabbin Steel . I haven't started working on it because I spent 2 and a half days in hospital with a repprise of the ticker problems that got me started on this project. I'm OK, more sleep deprived, than crook, but the angiogram showed nothing, despite feeling like an elephant had sat on my chest on Tuesday afternoon. I have 2.5m of 35x35x1.6 SHS, a half metre piece of 50x50x5 SHS for cutting the tilt brackets from, some 30x30x1.6 SHS for the arm of the pedal bracket (and an old bottom bracket shell from a bike frame), some 38x2 EHS for a head tube and a 190x inch 1/8 steerer from the donor bike that provided the bottom bracket. The rear triangle is also from a donor dual suspension MTB. Triceratops Two.1 will get its own rear tri. Racks will be integrated steel racks, built from 12x1.2 EHS, once I've done a billy cart test. Meanwhile, the disk brake hubs have arrived and fit the wheelchair axle bolts pefectly and run beautifully. ...

Image: ABC News. I make no bones about this, if China were to invade Australia because we took an active role in the defence of Taiwan, it would be a hideous experience for Australia. It would make the German bombing of the UK look like Guy Fawkes' Night. Millions of Australians would suffer. Literally millions. Of this there is no doubt, and Australia's Defence Force is right to model this invasion, they are right to warn us of the consequences. I genuinely believe, though, not even China could support a modern invasion of Australia, anymore than Germany was ever able to actually invade Britain in the 1940s. China would choke on the outback, and the resistance Australia could mount from there. They would choke on their own agribusiness interests here. Take this image. Now, imagine a panorama constructed of photographs taken side-by-side along the tropic of Capricorn from Western Australia to Queensland coasts, stitching together 100s of thousands of images (if not millions) l...

I am more than a little over indexed shifting. In the days of 3x7 (ah, the 90s) you could setup chainrings that would give you near 500% gear range, while never having to change more than one step at a time - eg: righthand 1, 2, 3, lefthand 1 to 2, righthand 3, 4, 5, lefthand 2 to 3, righthand 5, 6, 7 and back down. Indexed gearing really helped with this at the end of a really long day. Now we do the same thing over 10 gears on a single chainring and only the righthand shifter for no better ratio, but the indices are finer, trickier to set up, bump your derailleur, and you're tweaking for the rest of the day's ride. Ugh. On the other hand, in the days of friction shift, the setup only needed to be right on the derailleur stops, the shifting was tuned with every gear change, and it wasn't a hard knack to master. My first adult bike was a Roadmaster Grand Tourer 12, 2x6 friction shift on the downtubes, the best bike money could buy for under $200 Aussie in 1982. That bike t...