How to Make a Cricket Bat For a Costume

DIY Cricket Bat

At the last second I decided to go ahead and make a Halloween costume. I was inspired by a commercial for the movie Shaun of the Dead. Funny zombie movie. How cool would that be? I mean I’m going to go out and oversee my kids why not wear something fun? I quickly collected that basics, white shirt, red tie, name badge, and a cricket bat. The first three are easy, I can either make or buy those but a cricket bat is something that I’m a bit short on. I’ve held one before so I know what they look like up close so armed with that and a few photos off the ‘net I can come up with something that should look pretty close to a bat.

 

DIY Cricket Bat

New Water Crystal Discovered

Water

Humm, just when you think that water is water you find out something new. At least they didn’t discover a real life form of Ice Nine.

Mao’s team subjected water to a pressure 170,000 times greater than atmospheric pressure at sea level. Then they bombarded it with X-rays, causing the water molecules to split and reform into a previously unknown crystalline solid made of H2 molecules and 02 molecules.

Brand new substance created from water

TWiT is Dead, Long Live Net@Night

net@night Sweet! I was a bit annoyed when I found out that my favorite podcast, er, netcast, ‘This Week in Tech’ (TWiT) had been put on hold because no one was available. Thats burn out, pretty sure of that. Anyway, Leo Laporte is back! He and Amber MacArthur will be doing a tech review show so we can still get our dose of Leo. I’ll miss the grumpy Dvorak but maybe he will be back as a guest. The cool think about all this is the show will be netcast’ed live so people can call in. I love that! That to me is the one big dynamic thing that podcasting, er, netcasting (I’ll get that right someday) has been missing. Radio call in shows have been doing it for decades but that works because of the serious money used to get phone lines, equipment, and hardware. If this software they they are using (Talkshoe) works then this could be the start of a true revolution in Internet entertainment. Think if Sirius used this during their regular Internet radio broadcasts?

Amber and I are proud to announce the first live TWiTcast. We’re reinventing Inside the Net, and renaming it net@nite. You’ll still be able to listen to the show as a podcast every Tuesday, but you can also listen live as we record it Sunday nights. Even better, you can participate.

Web 2.0 on TWiT 2.0

Vista Home Basic is a Lemon?

Microsoft Vista

Ok, so I’m asking myself how is this news? I mean, what do you expect from a company like Microsoft? If you don’t pay for the gold you only get brass. It’s like if you buy the standard version of Office, you get Word, Excel, Outlook and Power Point. That’s at a suggested retail price of $399. Now what you don’t get is Access, that’s their database application. If you want that you have to buy the pro version and that’s another $100. Life would be so much better if they included Access with their office suite, people do the worst things in Excel just because they don’t have a good (read any) database app. Man! Well, ok this post was about Vista so I had better say a little bit about it. I have a copy (legal, Bill sent it to me himself) of RC1 at work and it runs OK. I don’t have a *&%$ expensive graphics card to power the system so the Pentium 4 3GHz with 1 GB or RAM is only benching at a 2.2. Geeze! That’s some heavy software! The ‘Aero’ components remind me of the transparent Linux windows from about three years ago so nothing big there. The Widgets or Gizmos or whatever the hell they call they desktop cycle wasters are OK but dated. Other than that it’s much like working on my Mac but has more a Windows feeling. That means the OS treats me like child and offers advice and won’t let me see all the goodies until i much with the settings. I’m sticking with XP, I can’t afford paying $200+ for a un-crippled version of Vista.

"The new [Vista] experience you hear of, if you get Basic, you won’t feel it at all. There’s no [Aero] graphics, no Media Center, no remote control."

Vista Home Basic is a lemon

Halloween Way Back When

Halloween2000

Back in 2000, in another life when I lived in a house and had space, I set up a quick and dirty haunted laboratory for the local kids that came around to trick or treat. I had lots of black lights, party gels (the red lights), green glow sticks, dry ice, a Jacobs ladder (15KV at 30mA), and my home brew Tesla coil (output about 50KV). The kids loved it! I had a ball firing up the Tesla coil on the un suspecting kids. The spark gap on that monster is LOUD! I was the only house in my neighborhood that did any thing close to this and my attempt was pretty half assed. I’ll say this, once I get another home I’m pulling out the stops and doing this again.

Halloween 2000 on Flickr