hey look at this thing i made: XI

I will often, when bored, browse watch auctions on ebay (more on this soon!). I have no real direction with this, just search for random things. Some years ago I found a watch on there that was apparently the movement from a pocket watch transplanted into a wristwatch case. For some reason this was entrancing to me and I really wanted it. Sadly so did a number of other people and it went way out of my price range. I wish this hadn't happened three years ago and I could bring up the auction, because it's hard for me to do it justice with the above description, but I don't have much to say for it beyond that. I have yet to see another like it.

I was on ebay the other day when that watch popped back into my mind. While I (currently) didn't have the means to make a watch like it, it occurred to me I could just take a pocket watch, then modify the case to make it a wristwatch. I was really high up on the idea because this was something I could do a line of, find some vintage pocket watches, attach strap dealies and make a strap. Of course I had no idea if that would look good, because I don't have a ton of control over the overall design of it. First I wanted to just get a pocket watch to do a proof of concept sort of thing. I ended up just getting the cheapest wrist watch I could find (that wasn't a cheap pos outta hong kong). It looked alright. There's not really too much to be said for the making of process. No real modification was done to the case, I just bent some brass stock and soldered it on. The strap was made in an almost identical process to the strap for HJ1.

It was actually pretty maddening. This managed to prove to me that it could be done, but while I think it looks pretty good, I now have to buy a pocket watch that I think looks really good and try again to see if it's actually a good idea. MY LIFE IS SO HARD.

hey look at this thing i made: -XIX

XIX is a money roman numeral. It got me thinking and I made a power rankings of 1-20 in roman numerals:

1. V. V is a strict upgrade over 5. Not only does it look better, but it's written in only two movements instead of three. Also V is for vendetta. This one time we were watching V is for vendetta at the big house and b was like, hey remember that scene where you see natalie portman's panties? No one did, so we watched and for less than a second you see it. Man has a sharp eye.

2. X. The thing that knocked X down was that it's not a strict upgrade over 10. Both require two movements to write. I suppose I'd argue that it wins in the aesthetics department, but the really compelling thing about X is it adds mystery. For example, if you see Rocky X, do you think it's Rocky 10? Or is it a mystery Rocky, like hacker X. See, I took this web design class in high school and we had to code some stuff in html. I went into other peoples code and while I didn't change anything, I added a comment that said "hacked by hacker X." I did this because my dream was one day someone would say "who is, hacker X?" Which they did, sadly without the news anchor inflection that it had in my head.

3. XIX. This was hurt by the fact that it sort of looks like an emoticon (you know, like, a dead guy with a big nose? I guess it would mean sorrow? I'd be sad if I was dead with a big nose). I'm morally opposed to non standard emoticons.

4. IV

5. VI. The main value in roman numerals is using them to up the epic quotient of something. For example, the only value of the new trilogy is to be able to write: Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope. FUCK AND YES. This doesn't necessarily scale though. In the roman numeral epic quotient power rankings, 1, 2 and 3 are V IV VI. I II and III are weak shit, stay tuned!

6. XIII. This might be entirely because I thought Red XIII in FF7 was badass.

7. XI. The great thing about XI is it's the name of a guy who visited my work from china. Somehow he didn't get any of my puns with the number 11 (no part of that story is true).

8. IX. I was really excited about Ledo and IX when I first read the description. Then I watched it and it was terrible. I just kept sitting there thinking "this has to get good eventually right?" It did not.

9. VII. This tends to be the limit of value when using roman numerals to label volumes in a series, after VII it's all downhill. Interestingly this is also the point where all the rest are downhill.

10. XII. A common theme in this bottom half is they're almost strictly worse than the number they represent. XII offers no improvement over 12.

11. XIV. Little too close to HIV. HIV is a touchy subject, don't let your numbers create unwanted drama.

12. XV. God that looks dumb. Doesn't that look dumb? God that looks dumb.

13. XX. While I've never tried dos equis, I hate it with a passion. As a result I hate things that I associate with it, like XX or interesting men.

14. II

15. III

16. VIII

17. XVI

18. XVII

19. XVIII. These all have the above mentioned problem of being strictly worse than the number they represent, especially XVIII. HOLY SHIT THAT'S DUMB. II almost gets a pass because I like to call people who are juniors the 2nd. For example, big KB II. Almost would warrant moving it up in the rankings, sadly it doesn't come up that often.

20. I. This is just terrible, if it wasn't necessary for making other numbers I'd question it's very existence. First of all, nothing warrants having the I talked on to indicate it's the first of something. You don't ever see Rocky I, that'd be dumb. Expanding on that, one of the other big problems is it duplicates an incredibly common part of the english language. Imagine if Rocky saw something that said Rocky I on it and since he's dumb he thought it was an unfinished note "Rocky I...am leaving you? Rocky I...need you to take out the garbage?? ROCKY I WHAT!?!" Underrated part of the Rocky movies is their lack of taglines. It's not Rocky II, The Rematch. Rocky by itself tells you all you need to know, someone is gonna get punched.

*ahem*

I have some sort of primal need to mod video game systems that I own. Here's the list of all systems I have/had that were able to play pirated games (not all instances required actual modding).

Playstation 1

Playstation 2

While I don't own it, I did mod a Playstation 3

Playstation Portable

Gameboy Advance

Gameboy DS

Nintendo Wii

XBox (original)

Xbox 360

There were three motivating factors in me buying a 360:

1. I thought Blue Dragon was gonna be awesome (it wasn't)

2. I had this coupon for 20% off.

3. It could be modded and as such was taunting me.

Of course the real appeal of modding it wasn't just winning another battle in the ongoing war of Mike Vs. Computers, it was a chance to practice for my dream project. Early 360s were plagued with something called the red ring of death (they might still be plagued with it, I'm no longer current on these things). This meant that your 360 stopped working and the ring of light on the front went red. There wasn't anything to be done about it in those days besides send it in to microsoft. I believe this was free, but took a long time, plus modding it voided the warranty, which meant I was kind of boned if that happened.

The overwhelming belief in the community at the time was that the way the heat-sink was clamped to the motherboard, it put undue stress on the soldered joints and when it got hot enough they would come apart, resulting in the RRoD (I'm not sure if this was ever proven conclusively). This led to a ton of after-market cooling products, fans you could strap on the back of it, replacement fans for in the unit. As far as I know they were mostly snake oil, but a sound premise in theory. The problem was that while heat might have been the nail in the coffin, the real problem was the stress put on the board by the X-Clamp (colloquialism for the clamp holding the heat-sink). People that I take seriously felt that the following things helped prevent RRoD: Replacing the x-clamp with a less stupid thing, replacing the thermal paste (thermal paste goes between a processor and heat sink to aid in the transfer of heat) with less shitty thermal paste (arctic silver baby!), replacing the in unit cooling fan and (and this is the part I kinda like) watercooling the system.

Computer chips get hot. That's bad. To combat that heat sinks are attached that wick away the heat and dissipate it. Different materials have different levels of effectiveness in this regard. Water is really good, but of course a sitting thing of water wouldn't get rid of the heat. The idea then in a water cooling system is that the water is continually pumped through a radiator, so that the water over the chip is always cool. In a normal desktop computer there's no reason to do this unless you're a serious over clocker (over clocking your CPU makes it get much hotter) really there's not a ton of reason to do it in a 360 either, but, fuck, it's cool innit? Ever since the first computer I've ever owned I wanted to have a water cooling system, just something about it made the whole thing seem more high tech to me I guess. Since any custom computer case I made would have a water cooling system in it, I figured this would be good practice. The to do list ended up like this:

1. Mod the dvd drive. This is how you play burned games on the 360, change some sort of software on the dvd drive, this is why you need to open the case up.

2. Replace OEM fan. People seemed to feel that this was a big plus in the fight against RRoD and if you have the case open anyway, it's really easy to do.

3. Move innards to a "custom" case. There are a number of replacement cases you can buy. I went with a clear one for two reasons. First, I've always loved visible man type shit, I like to be able to see what's going on inside. Second, I wanted lights in the thing (I ended up not doing that).

4. Install a water cooling system. Reasons described above.

Let's cover those in order. The modding of the dvd drive was an unbelievably nerve racking experience. This was pretty close to when it first became possible to mod it, so no definitive guide had come out. I was forced to cobble together bits and pieces and despite my best efforts managed to brick the unit. *Luckily* I had taken the necessary back up precautions and was able to fix it. Took a break, came back and managed to get it done. It was infuriating because it ended up being an incredibly simple thing, but I just couldn't find the exact right guide.

Again, the fan replacement is very easy when you have the case open. I don't remember the specific fan I bought, but it was recommended by people I take seriously.

God the clear case was a bad idea. I mean, it looks alright and wasn't terribly difficult to do, but the quality of materials is so bad. The OEM case is a quality piece and when I bought this replacement I was expecting similar things, alas. If I could do it over I would have just installed a window into the side. The main that made me end up so soured on the case was the decision to not put lights inside. I had bought some EL wire and I was going to line the edges, and, in my head, it looked awesome. In practice, when I had finally sat down to do all this work, between pitfalls of the dvd drive and the unexpected difficulty of the water cooling, I just wanted to be done.

I believe I've talked before about my inability to accurately gauge the difficulty of things (or rather, my ability to do things) I tend to either grossly under/overestimate how hard something will be. I believe I thought it was going to be very simple to install the water cooling system. Depending on how you look at it, there are a total of five components. The two blocks that go on top of the CPU and GPU. The radiator/fan assy. The pump. The reservoir. Putting those together outside of a system is easy, just a matter of attaching tubes. Working within the constraints of a case though, it becomes tricky. The physical logistics weren't so bad, I had based my "design" off something I'd seen online. The real problem was power. The pump and fan both required power and of course the 360 didn't come equipped with plugs that you could just attach them to. After a ton of research I came across a diagram some guy had made that told you what points you could solder on the motherboard to get various levels of power from. I then later read that you shouldn't do that because it's bad to sap power away from the system. This, once again, was an area lacking any definitive guide. Eventually I found that the thing to do is draw power straight from the plug. Of course then I was thwarted by my puny soldering iron. /sigh.

At the point I had finally done all this, it was very very late and I just wanted to be done, so having accomplished most of the list, I put it all back together. Looked like this.

Hopefully those aren't too dark, it's always hard to tell on this computer. All in all I was pretty happy with how it turned out and it certainly got plenty of use at that apartment.

hey look at this thing i made: X

My last apartment was well furnished. Oops, forgot some commas. My last apartment was, well, furnished. I mean, it had furniture, in fact the ratio of open floor space to furniture was probably pretty close to optimal (almost certainly a bit too much on the furniture side, but it was an awkward place). Of course when I moved into my current apartment, which is easily twice the size, I didn't have anywhere near enough furniture. The original plan was to goto Ikea, not because I have a great love for their furniture, but I really wanted to get a couple detlofs (still do I suppose).

That pretty quickly fell apart. I didn't intend to start making things when I moved in, but I did and it created a somewhat perfect storm of distracting me from my desire to have an apartment that was conducive to anything besides making things and sleeping and eating a lot of my disposable income.

Then I made a table. Somehow it hadn't occurred to me that I could just make my own furniture. I couldn't envision making chairs as I had zero desire to upholster anything, but a lot of what I wanted was tables and shelves and that was well within my abilities I felt.

So there I was, post christmas sunday night wing night. Donnyk was asking what I got for christmas. It occurred to me at that point that it's kind of hard to describe what an oscillating multi tool is. It's um, well just follow the link. It like, vibrates and shit and um, harnesses the power of vibration to uh, cut shit and uh, sand shit. Listen, it's awesome and I love it.

"What are you gonna do with that?" says Donnyk. "For that matter, what are you gonna do with the rest of those fucking tools you for some reason own?" (He didn't actually say that).

"You know, makes tables and shit"

"That's interesting, because I need a tv stand."

He had gotten a sweet deal on a tv, problem was, it had no real way of standing up on it's own, it had to be mounted. I told him if he didn't care how it looked, if random mismatched wood was fine, then I could probably make one for pretty cheap. And then it was go time.

The plan was to go as simple as possible. The stated requirements were a) mount the tv, preferably as far from the ground as possible b) have a shelf for video game systems. Given that a shelf would be easy to attach wherever, I decided to start with the mounting setup and build off of that. My idea was to get a 4" x 6" x 12' then cut it in half. If the tv was mounted at the top of those two posts, that would put it right at the ceiling of the room it would be in. I felt confident it would be strong enough to hold the tv up (it weighs about a hundred pounds). Then I figured it would need a base, which led to me thinking, why not just make a box and then that'll account for the shelf too. Slot the 4 x 6s into the top, screw it all together and BOOM. Then I had this conversation (with myself, natch).

"I dunno mike, that seems like it's gonna be a bitch to move."

"I don't actually recall asking for your opinion and furthermore.....that's actually a pretty good point."

It certainly would have been possible to move it, but it woulda been tough. When designing things I try and stay within the confines of what I can do by myself. With the 4 x 6s sticking out, there's no way I could have moved it by myself and not with any of the vehicles available to me. I decided to make a slotting system. The posts would still slide in through the top, but instead of being screwed to the frame, they would be held in place with some guides. Observe.

And zoomed in on the guides.

ISN'T THAT COOL!?! And all for like a quarter of what it woulda cost to buy one at the store.