blake » DIY

Update

Runeshai — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 03:27:38 +0000

So…been a longass time since I posted. Figured some sort of update was in order, so here goes…

I’ve moved back to VT. For the holidays, but also for the foreseeable future. It’s vacation, then working, saving up, and if all goes as planned, film school starting in the Fall. I’ve taken a two-year detour from what was really my dream, and I’m back on track. So that’s good.

Before I left, I got to check out a MAKE IT! fair and was pretty impressed. I’d wanted to go last year in Vancouver but looked up the vendors that had websites and was pretty turned off. This year I just took the plunge and am sure glad I did. From Cocoa Nymph (awesome chocolates) to Thyrza Segal’s Plantscapes to Daughters of Bastards Warrior Wear (awesome chain mail jewelry, no website, sorry) there was plenty of awesome stuff to check out and to gawk at. Catalyst Reaction had some cool leather stuff and I picked up some great Christmas cards from Hug + Kiss Designs.

Other than that, not much else to report. T-day in Seattle with the bro, a week in NYC with an old friend, then getting settled in here, ready for Christmas, watching the last of my funds slip away.

Moved onto Season 2 of Fringe and giving Leverage a second chance. Finished Dexter Season 4 last night. I’m still traumatized. Fantastic show…they don’t pull any punches. Hoping to start in on Supernatural Season 2 soon. Being Human was a no-go for me; the emo vampire dude was waaay over the top annoying, I couldn’t even look at him. Watched Slither and Gremlins recently. Both were awesome. Definitely to-purchase. Great fun. Excited about Chuck’s Season 3 and Burn Notice’s continuation in January too. Workin’ away at my to-watch lists…

I’ve been on a pretty major Star Wars kick lately. Partly nostalgia (I found my first screenplay – a Star Wars fanfilm, almost 70 pages!), partly reading Death Troopers (fun!) and partly finally getting around to watching Star Wars Clone Wars from Cartoon Network. Pretty awesome series, I’m having a blast. You know it’s good when it gets you excited about watching the prequels. Yea. That’s serious.

Listening to lots of industrial and gothic, generally dark stuff lately…Rammstein mostly but Imperative Reaction, Assemblage 23, Zombie Girl a bit, I:Scintilla, Heimataerde, Icon of Coil and Birthday Massacre. Got Nightwish’s Dark Passion Play on in the background right now. Never a baddie :P. Awesome album.

Hope all’s well with everybody reading. And everybody not reading. And no I didn’t get you presents. Have great holidays! :)

DIY Lightbox

Runeshai — Fri, 15 May 2009 23:03:47 +0000

I wish I had teachers do cool, simple stuff like then when I was in school. Not only is it cheap and gets the job done, but it’s something the teacher took the effort and initiative to do outside of the classroom in order to teach more adequately the material to their students. In general, I think creative, crafty teachers are some of the best kind, and maybe it’s overkill to applaud them, but after the last year of making fruitless tuition payments, I applaud them whole-heartedly. Way to go, bigtreehouse!

The goal was to make a light box for my students to use that didn’t cost me an arm and a leg. Went to the second-hand store and found a florescent light… ($4.99 with 50% off) then noticed a suitcase/briefcase ($3.99 with 50% off). I got them both and started thinking of ways to put them together.

Instructables via Lifehacker.

YouTube Find: ThruYou

Runeshai — Tue, 05 May 2009 18:37:30 +0000

Coolness. I like music/video remixes that come up with something different than the original, and this video is no exception. Been thinking about doing some music type stuff on my own recently, actually. I used FruityLoops once for a high school class, and I had a training DVD for the app once a while back, maybe I still do. Anyway…here’s the video, called ‘ThruYou’, enjoy.

ThruYou via Geekologie.

Also, a couple more of my favorites, just for good measure.

Umm…Mel Gibson?

Runeshai — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:38:51 +0000

My initial reaction was slight shock, followed by a general creeped out feeling. but the more I think about it, it’s kind of cool. In this photo it looks sort of decent. The rest I think it’s out of place. How often has Mel Gibson ever had facial hair?

This guy looks like Lance Henriksen from The Quick and the Dead or a Mad Hatter or something. Either that or an Australian version of The Butcher.

Via Superficial

Mozilla Ubiquity

Runeshai — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 09:41:52 +0000

Ubiquity is a term I associate with the internet, however, after watching this video, I’m beginning to think it may become more manageable in the next few years. Check it out.
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
via NetTuts

Threadbanger and Me

Runeshai — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 14:44:11 +0000

I’ve been a fan of Threadbanger and IndyMogul (and generally NextNewNetworks just because of what they do) for a while now, and I post comments on the episodes and whatnot pretty often. So, I posted last week on a Threadbanger episode, since they’d been having one host for each episode the last few episodes, and I was wondering what was going on. It’s not quite the same when you get used to a couple and they show up separately. So, I asked about it, and this was my response… I thought it was pretty cool, being in a video and all, but mostly it was a funny surprise in the morning while eating my breakfast :P.

Repurposed CD Spindles

Runeshai — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 22:52:18 +0000

This is pretty awesome. I’m using a lot of DVDs recently, so I have quite a few of these spindles laying around. I don’t want to throw them away, but don’t have a use for them, so this video naturally caught my eye, and I’m definitely trying out numbers one and four. Check it out, any other ideas? Let me know in the comments.

Open Source Cell Phone

Runeshai — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 07:32:19 +0000

I found this a while back and saved it to read later, but while cleaning out my list of “to-read” items, I rediscovered it and thought I’d post it. It seems pretty basic in concept, and after thinking about it, I’m actually a little surprised it didn’t come out before now (that I know of). One of the cooler parts about it is, following through with the open source ideology, the CAD plans are available for you to customize and work on for your own design. Manufacturing might be a bit of trouble if you’re not handy with molding plastic or metal or whatever, but it sure would be sweet for the people who can pull that off. I’d love to see the creations when they start coming out.

PVC Cello

Runeshai — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 05:58:13 +0000

This is awesome! I found this earlier on Instructables, the internet’s DIY heaven, and it blew me away. Sweet job, kid, want to teach me?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UonzUXzw998]

Time Tracking & Management

Runeshai — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 04:54:41 +0000

I’ve been working on managing my time recently, a little, trying to be productive and whatnot while maintaining a healthy lifestyle too. I recently discovered a number of posts at Lifehacker (duh) that were pretty helpful in pointing in the right direction. Through them I found both Tick and RescueTime, the latter of which being the most interesting.

Tick
Tick is a project-management webapp that basically allows you to list your projects, keep track of individual tasks on each of them and define how many hours each should take, essentially all in an effort to get you to meet your “time budget.” Tick is unfortunately a trial and only allows you to have one project listed and open (currently being worked on) at a time, with the paid upgrade of somewhere around what I believe was $10. I currently use Anxiety, though, so I’m probably going to cancel my membership with Tick.

Anxiety
Anxiety is a lightweight, free task management app that is… well… a task manager that integrates beautifully with Apple’s Mail and iCal, giving yo all the benefits of different calendars and events within those calendars, separating your work, personal, bigger ideas. It hovers over all applications with the option to hide it and each tasks even have handy little check boxes on the side so that once you’re done, you just check it off, and it’s immediately updated as one less to-do in Mail and iCal. It’s a very useful tool, and its constant visual presence on the screen I find is a reminder of the things I should be doing when I’m doing things like aimless internet surfing or on a YouTube binge.

RescueTime
I really just wanted to post on the blog because of the email verification I got from downloading this app. There’s a required registration for it, but the email was nice enough of a surprise and the app sounds like it’s going to do a great job, so I’m aiming to keep it. From the little I found out about it, it tracks what you do while on the computer and send you a weekly report of how you spent your time, as well as offering a range of full-featured graphs and tools to see how distracted you were when you should have been working. Yup, something I can definitely make use of ;). Here’s a screenshot of part of the confirmation email:

I thought that was a great change of pace from the typical “Hello, thank you, go to our site, goodbye” messages. I was glad to receive something like that from what it essentially makes out to be three guys goofing around with their program for the good of others.

So, three programs that can help you (and me) get things done. The two I use so far work great, though I’ve only had about an hour’s worth of experience with RescueTime running in the background, so really it’s that I love Anxiety. That mixed with Quicksilver and the built-in Mail and iCal on Mac are a wonderful workflow. How do you manage your time and your projects? Let me know!