21/07/2008

A brief history of XSS, and of friendship part 1 - The early days

Day 2 of my university life at Southampton Uni consisted of a 151-155 Selborne trip to Asda. What a cave of tasty treasure it was! More to the point, I spotted a girl with bright red hair walking out the store in front of us with a longboard. Do I give chase and say hi in my fresher-like innocence? I think not. I'm carrying roughly 8 kilos of frozen food and booze. As luck would have it she was sat at the bus stop. I say hi, we chat a little, and a couple of days later we meet up for some sessioning longboard stylee. Kim, (not single) female lawyer, longboarder; a personified chunk of adrenailne and energy.

Longboarding Happened.

Before uni, I hadn't boarded all that much. It was slowly building, but not all that quickly. With Kim to drive me, and me to drive her, our standards improved immensely. Simon appeared via texts flung from kim's mobile; croupier, badass longboarder of over 8 years now, riding the same wheels for over 6, the same trucks for 8, on the same 52" beast of a board. 3 of us, lots of hills. Awesome.

As time goes by, now 1/3 the way through my first year (think xmas 06) we have recruited a number of boarders, and Kim's mind turns towards somethign she's thought about for a while: Longboard club. Emails are sent but to no avail, whilst the sessions continue and new and interesting hills and slides are broached as the year continues. Broken boards, replacement boards, upgrading of hardware happens commonly within the group as we strive for new ways to let gravity take control.

Closing on the end of the year, the union has still not responded to multiple attempts by the tenacious Kim to say hi to longboarders. Then the summer happens. The summer session happens...

'Til next time....
Keep it surreal

Wall-E and an interesting weekend!

So my parents are away in sunny old Minehead for a week! Pot noodles for lunch and takeaway for tea now...
But seriously, it'll be a bit of quiet in which I can do what the hell I want (but no houseparties, the walls have just been re-painted). Here I am blogging away at this godforsaken hour with my music on speakers, the lights on, drinking fizzy drinks and eating fajitas. Its a fun evening to end a really nice weekend which went something like this

Friday after work, Louise comes over! Louise, who I haven't mentioned much so far as the posts have been about personal projects, is my girlfriend of almost 3 years. I won't steal her thunder by describing everything, but instead link you to her blog for her course, HERE. The evening however involved Louise sleeping off the middle bit of a heavy cold, so I got on with making the gun as seen in the previous post. It needed to be done so all in all it was a productive evening for on saturday Lou woke up quite refreshed and much better and I posted the gun off to Matt without too much hassle. Then we went to see Wall-E.

REVIEW: spoilers alert!

Wall-E as you probably know is the brand new spangly and much lauded film from Disney-owned Pixar featuring a robot left on earth for 700 years compressing trash. My initial skepticism was that the film would lack emotion and the content would be somewhat lacking storywise. How very wrong could I be.
The first half an hour, and for that matter most of the film contains very little proper dialogue. Within the opening it's even more present as the feeling of isolation that Wall-E experiences. Amazingly huge landscapes and real film style camerawork based in a rendering engine pixar had to design to cope with the level of detail created such an immersive and somewhat eerie world. Here was Earth, portrayed in a way that looked almost real, but in a state which is totally uninhabitable, deserted, devoid of life. In a way this is unsettling, and as the plot moves on you realise that under the "lonely robot meets friends/saves humanity" is a sci-fi plot that although not complex, does raise a couple of issues; destruction of our environment and our responsibility for it. Also it reminds NASA our spaceships should look as good as the ones in this film, or no-one will buy into space travel.
I digress. The film is gorgeous; the graphics are amazing, it benefits from the low amount of dialogue by impressively making the body (chassis?) language do all the work, the camerawork is "live action" in style so it looks like an acted film would, the story and pace are good the whole way through(even if the ending is a bit idealised), and there are enough laughs for everyone. Once on the ship "Axiom" (definition here, number 3), the later scenes reference 2001 A Space Odyssey numerous times. A mark of how good this film was was shown by the rapt attention of the massing hordes of kids less than 7 in the packed cinema, whilst the atmosphere when leaving was of intent, happy discussion by the other cinema-goers. Keeping that many kids quiet for 98 minutes is no mean feat. GO SEE IT! Next major project may well be a lego Wall-E

The evening was spent lounging around the free house, drinking some cider, browsing the net and such, but included tidying my room. Chronicles of Riddick is also a damn good film, but kept us up past midnight. Sunday was very much a lazy day with an awake time of noon, and a curry at 4pm. A frankly most relaxing weekend, up until louise left and I started playing half life 2, episode 1,(millwall 1), at which point I got a massive adrenaline buzz which I'm currently trying to dissipate.
Keep it surreal!

Just also like to say thank you Louise for such a cool weekend! <3

19/07/2008

The varying degrees of success with card Part 2

The second of my exploits in card related matters comes from a request from a mate called Matt, who wanted a gun built for a cosplay event next week in the Great And Sunny Southampton. Yes cosplay would likely fall under the heading of "geekery", but it's a creative medium based around prop construction, custom tailoring, and if you feel inclined, amateur dramatics: Here's Tab (in red), Christian (in suit) and Matt (as a Catholic priest) being characters from hellsing. A lot of people now buy factory made items, but for the purists, it's not just pretending to be someone, its an application of skill, time and effort...So I made this gun. Out of card, but based around a plastic gun to get the trigger and mechanism detail. The gun, Hades, is owned by Train Heartnet, former assasin for an organisation called Chronos who leaves and becomes a bounty hunter or "sweeper". The series is " Black Cat" if anyone is interested.
Clicky for larger images.

First stage: Butt (hehe I said butt) extensinon, trigger guard extension, hammer modification.

Second stage: Attempt 1 at main body shape. This looked wrong, because the underside of the front is joined by a curve thats not yet present. On realising this (when i took the barrel bit off the top and stick it along the bottom the next photo happened. (pics to follow! Haven't found that elusive SD card)




Third stage: New front body, barrel, front, and sides beside magazine.






Fourth stage: Polyfilla. Yep! Well, homebase brand. You'd be surprised how well it works, and its very cheap. The grey mountboard didn't like it much, but the high quality white board held up well.


Beyond: Paint, with Tulip fabric paint for the gold edging and detail. The rest were Halfords spray cans. 2 coats of primer, 1 of silver, 1 of black, 2 of gold. Red spray on the string bit.


Holster: fake leather and card. Velcro fastenings. simple really!

17/07/2008

The varying degrees of success with card Part 1

For those of you interested in the oyster card dissection, it kinda failed. The method I used was too violent for the NEW ANTENNA (I put it in a curry jar and shook vigorously for 5 minutes before letting it stand for 30). Yes folks, the newer oyster cards have very thin metallic strips embedded into the middle layer. I left the card in for a little too long and the crumpling of the card in the jar had split this track apart. Into itty bitty pieces. I then proceeded to lose the chip; it was most probably disposed of by a parent; however while I still had it, simply putting an inch square of silver foil onto the two antenna contacts didn't work.

Pictures to follow once I find the bloody SD card.

02/07/2008

Longboarding part 2

So what is the physical difference between longboards and shortboards? It's not necessarily the length. Slalom boards are around the same length as shortboards, and slide boards match the shape. note: shortboards are between 28-33" long

Rundown of longboard disciplines:
  1. Sliding: 28-40" boards, but any board can be slid using the rock-hard sliding wheels. Hard wheels means less grip and slides/rotations /drifting can be performed. Skate wheels have too small a contact area with the road and tend to grip because of the higher force per unit area. Here's some extra-pro stand up slides.
  2. Slalom: 20"-34" ish boards, very soft grippy wheels, normally grippier back wheels than front wheels. Done like any other slalom, but with foot high cones on smooth steep hills, normally in parallel with another person in competitions. Video!
  3. Cruising: Anything from 20" to 80". Any w heels. Freestyle riding -just enjoying mellow hills, flat beachfront etc. This includes cross-stepping as shown here by Adam Colton, superpro.
  4. Carving: 20"-80" ish boards, but steeper hills. All about cutting across the slope to give a snow/surfboard feel and slower descent. Don e with medium-soft wheels with decent grip. Video!
  5. Bombing/downhill: 30-44" boards. Medium /soft wheels. Ddifferent type of truck (the bit that holds the wheels). Fast. Very fast, no prisoners steep mountain runs, drifted corners. Full leathers and full face helmet required for all downhill competitions. At the downhill speeds, soft wheels can be slid to stop in an emergency.Video!
Engineering of Longboards
  1. Decks: laminated wood, normally maple, bi rch, bamboo or any mix of these.
  2. Wheels: polyurethane of different hardnesses(durometers) with a much harder plastic core to hold the bearings.
  3. Bearings: 608 steel bearings; 22mm outer diameter, 8mm bore, 7mm thickness. Abec 7 is rated to 30,000rpm, because these bearings were first specified for grinders and circular saws. 2 bearings per wheel
  4. Trucks: here's some pics; Skate style (used for any discipline), carving/downhill, slalom/carving, downhill. The plasticy bits are polyurethane bushings, and these are what give the truck resistance to turning.
Thats the basic tech stuff!
Seeya soon for another post.

Oyster cards and their impracticalities



So, you've bought an oyster card when you last went through London. Good! Where is it? No? Don't remember? Well I intend to break this cycle so you will never need to cash in more than one pile of £3 TFL shares. The first stage goes like so:

1) As Skeptobot's blog (may he be respected for scientific endeavour) shows here an oyster card can be gutted to leave the small chip and antenna intact.
2) As I will elucidate once I have completed the process, I intend to embed this into a wristband or watch strap to allow you to not forget your oyster. If the Oyster is the only form of proximity RFID card you have (others include the barclays one card, that uses a similar tech to allow you to pay for oystering, and Southampton uni-link pre-paid student cards) then it could be stitched into the body of your wallet (or taped in in the case of duct-tape wallets). Other RFID cards tend to interfere with each other and the garbled mass of signals means you pay penalty fares.

Edit: Here's some more info about antenna arrangement!

The ultimate advance of this concept is the touch to pay visa card stripped apart and then implanted in, say, your forearm on the back of your wrist. You would sacrifice standard card payment as the chip'n'pin chip would not work (your hand wouldn't fit in the bloody reader), but the average londoner could go a whole day without even carrying a plastic card around.

If anyone knows whether mobile phones would be a liability in terms of disrupting or hacking/reading the oyster data, let me know as one of the other tests will be to place the circuit on the back of my nokia 6230i (10 mins searching: nokia have released roughly 200 diferent phones up to the curen gen: Proof here!)

Catch you guys later for another longboarding post.