Archive for January, 2009

Striped House Makes Neighbors See Red

I don’t see a serious problem with this but then again I’m not Japanese. I don’t have conformity drilled into my brain since birth.

Renowned manga artist Kazuo Umezu (official web site) decided to go against the flow of his countrymen and painted red and white stripes on his new home. Rather fetching I say. His neighbors were not amused by his artistic antics and did what pissy neighbors do best, took him to court. After the case was reviewed by a judge the house was deemed to attract attention but not to destroy the view.

“Umezu, who attended court wearing a red-and-white striped tie, told reporters after the ruling, ‘‘I would like to live showing respect to others.’’”

Ha! Take that you repressed geezers!

Court turns down neighbors’ plea for cartoonist to remove stripes from house

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Mechanical TV, Steampunk Style

This is a wonderful project to build a working Baird mechanical television (televisor) that uses, among other things, a real working steam engine and a record as it’s ‘Nipkow disk’. It’s a great idea, Steampunk with real steam, I can’t wait to see some stills from it.

Mechanical TV has been an interest of mine for years now. The very idea that in  the primordial age of television the best solution was a big spinning disk and a flickering neon lamp. I have a model of a Baird Televisior that I built from a kit. It benefits from modern electronic timing and low voltage parts (LEDS not neon bulbs). It clearly works but only produces the most rudimentry of moving images. I have transcoded a few video clips to play on it (it comes with an audio CD of video sequences) and for what it is I’m impressed. I still want to build a camera that I can use to display live motion on it. Perhaps I’ll design it with a Steampunk theme.

SteamTV Part 1 — first looks at my newest project

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DIY Plane from a Broken Helicopter

I had a toy helicopter that had lost it’s tail rotor in an unfortunate accident. I didn’t want to part with it because the main rotor still spun and heck it’s a remote control helicopter. I proceeded to turn the once state of the art in toy chopper technology (OK, once of state of the art) into a regular airplane. This is a photset of my ‘proof of concept’ adventure.
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