Monthly archives: September 2009


Yeti spotting


Yeti spotting, originally uploaded by spinneyhead.

I’ve spotted a couple of these. There’s a website attached, of course, so I’m just doing some viral by talking about it.


Little plastic things make me happy

My first order from Shapeways 3d printing has arrived. These are some of the bins, which will go out to model railway magazines to be reviewed. There’s another batch that I’m going to clean and test paint.
Only one problem so far- the second sprue of bins on poles broke off at the base of the poles. There seems to be a weak spot, possibly accentuated by the model’s orientation when it was printed.


Hair solar 1

A Nepali teenager has come up with a way to use hair to replace silicon in solar cells. The melanin in the hair is photo sensitive and a conductor, and can be bought for pennies a kilo. Panels could be made for £23, or less when production is scaled up.

There’s no real explanation of what Milan Karki has done to the hair to take advantage of melanin’s attributes. If I find them I’ll investigate further.


Last train to West Didsbury station

Who knows, in a couple of years trams could be running through here. For now though, nature has it and the track bed is a long, thin pond.


OO modern street furniture through Shapeways

The plan is to produce a few simple models every week and build up a wide range of street furniture for model railway builders. I’ll be ordering copies of my own products, some of which will go to magazines for promotion and some I will build myself and record here. In fact the first batch should print and ship this week, so next week I’ll be painting bins.

Today and yesterday I designed and uploaded some benches-

The cantilever bench comes as a set of five, the other two as sets of four. The price will depend upon which material you use, but includes taxes and shipping charges. There’s a minimum order of $25. None of the models will exceed that individually, but the idea is for you to be able to pick and choose street furniture until you’ve got enough, with enough variety, for your layout.

The benches, and the bins I designed last week, are available from my Shapeways shop.


Four colour Goatse

Warning If you don’t know what Goatse is, don’t go looking for it. Seriously. Don’t. I won’t be held responsible if you do. If you do know what it is then your mind is already broken and that’s not my problem.

Last weekend I picked up a bunch of cheap bagged comics, 6 for a pound. You see them in newsagents sometimes, I guess they’re overstocks- dating back to the late eighties in some cases- that someone’s making a final bid to raise money from. In amongst the ones I picked up was issue 2 of Megalith from Continuity Comics, dating back to 1989.

It wasn’t obvious until page 7, but the hero had projected himself into his own body to fix the damage done by a bomb blast.

megalith number 2 page 5

There’s Megalith, patching up holes by creating multiple naked copies of himself and squeezing realy hard. I couldn’t help but notice the similarity of the first and last panels on this page to a certain notorious internet image.

megalith number 2 page 6

The Goatse echoes continue on page 6, particularly the first and penultimate panels.

Once you’ve seen the original Goatse your subconcious inserts it into otherwise relatively innocent images. Which is why it carries a health warning at the top of this post. Don’t have any bad dreams now.


The Caution Cube

You can buy it, and various other mad devices, from the Oskar’s Puzzles shop at Shapeways.

I’ve been making a start in producing things for Shapeways to print in 3d. At the moment my shop is filling with street furniture for model railways. But I think I need to start learning how to use CAD if I’m ever to produce anything as complex as the Caution Cube.