How to make boat decking in 11 easy but detailed steps.
It is crucial that you stay away from the edges whilst pacing if there is someone else on board.
It is important to spare a thought for the craftsman who came before you.
I’ve just been on a call with a client. They have Strauss or somesuch a hold music. Orchestral waltzes. The person on the other end picked up exactly at the end of a phrase. It was perfect.
My idea:
On-hold music programmed with meta-information that stores the exact timecodes of cadences and the end of phrases. When the person who is being waited on picks up the phone, the system keeps playing the music until the next point.
There’s an old sailor’s trick that comes in useful when on the high seas, when stuck with safety matches and no box to strike them on. They can be turned into strike-anywhere matches with the use of a hot stove. This also helps pass the time on the long unending days when the ship is becalmed at sea.
Gloves were used because it wasn’t physically possible to get my hand that close.
This was a facebook comment that got out of hand. If this isn’t the kind of pointless string of words that belongs in a blog, I don’t know what is. The first part follows the Rime of the Ancient Mariner reasonably closely. The rest correlates with the worst excesses of Roald Dahl at his most metrically depraved.
It is an ancient housemate,
And he washeth one of three.
‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye
It’s annoying leaning a bike up against something, especially on a train, only to have the handlebars rotate and for the bike to fall down. Or to be carrying a bike on your shoulder and have the wheel come round and smack you.
A simple lock on the front of the bike which could be flicked to stop the steering from moving whilst it’s being transported would solve this problem.
I don’t drive, but being a passenger and a cyclist, I imagine dazzling lights can be something of a problem to drivers.
To combat this, a camera could be mounted in the head-rest of the driver’s seat of a car, so that it was able to see what the driver saw from the same perspective. It could identify where egregious bright lights were coming from.
A liquid crystal matrix could be embedded into the windscreen. An on-board computer could calibrate the camera and the ‘screen’ built into the windscreen. It could then darken in the spots where bright light, to provide a very specialised shield and prevent dazzling.
I strike a match to light my oven or stove, and blow it out within a few seconds. Most of the match is un-burned. Why not dip the match at both ends so that it can be used twice? And you wouldn’t have to get your fingers mucky: it’s not hard to avoid holding it by the end.
After success with a pizza, I’ve decided to try cooking in my wood burning stove. Little steps. Today I tried melting some cheese over some gnocchi.
A good start. If I’m honest, this wasn’t anything more than melting some cheese. Next time I might actually cook something. And that’s pepper not ash in the last photo.
I’ve seen a number of special computer keyboards. These include, for example, five-finger units that require learning special ‘chords’. The idea of a one-handed keyboard is enticing but I don’t like the sound of having to learn specific combinations. What about re-using existing knowledge?
Anyone who touch-types knows that each letter belongs to a given finger. I wondered what would happen if you restricted the keyboard to just one row (i.e. one button for each finger) whether this would make a functioning concept.
Haptic feedback is still an area where real books win over e-book readers such as Kindles. Being able to tell how far through a book you are by the feel of it, by the balance and thickness of the pages adds something instinctive to the reading process.
My idea is to have a little linear actuator with a small weight on it that spans the width of the ebook device. Just a very small motor (the type you get in phone vibrators) and a small worm-gear (like you get in floppy disk drives) would do, and wouldn’t take up much space. The weight would gradually move across from left to right as you moved through the book. This would allow you to assess your progress through whatever tome you were currently reading just by feel.