Ok, I actually mounted the flag Saturday.  It’ll stay up until Labour Day.   Same drill every year: Flag goes up the weekend before Canada Day, and comes down on Labour Day.

But this is a damn funny video.

Now, you might think that, given the order of posts, the following project was inspired by the Conan Night I held last weekend, but the two are fairly unrelated. Actually, the inspiration for the following project came during the winter when I started to set aside some heat sinks from old PII Slot 1 processors, just because I thought they were a neat and nasty looking piece of industrial design. See for yourself:

Pentium II Slot 1 Processor and Heatsink

Any rational human being is going to take one look at that hunk of metal and think to himself: “I can make a weapon out of that.” At least this human being thought that. And I’m pretty rational. Most of the time anyway.

So the idea emerged to wrap them around the head of a baseball bat and create a nice looking mace. Problem was my boss frowns on me making weapons on company time (go figure), and my shop at home isn’t heated, so I had to wait for spring to get a chance to work on it.

Stage one was basically gathering up the parts I’d need. I collected four heatsinks from the old slot 1 processors, and some neat memory heatsinks from some really old servers to attach as runners down the side of the bat. I ended up going out and buying the cheapest wooden bat I could find to complete the parts list. Here’s a pic of the assembled necessities should you decide to try and imitate the project.

The Collected Parts

Stage two was squaring off the top of the bat so I could attach the heatsinks. I cut the very top, bevelled part of the bat off with a chop saw so I had a nice smooth surface on the top to mark out. Basically, to mark square, determine the centre of the bat, draw an X at right angles through the centre, and then connect the points of the X to create a square. I took a pic of the bat with the bevelled top off, but forgot to take a pic of the markings, so I photoshopped in the X and square. Oddly, I was less accurate with Photoshop than I was on the actual bat, but you get the idea.

Topped and Marked

Next was to cut vertically down the bat along the square lines I had drawn, to an apropriate depth to accommodate the heatsinks. I used a carpenter’s saw for this, and made the cut by hand, because I have pretty good control with a carpenter’s saw and can make a nice accurate cut that way. A band saw or some other mechanized means would be just as good. Just use something you feel comfortable with. Once down to depth, I used the carpenter’s saw to cut across the grain and remove the wedge at base.

Cutting the Square

NB: You can see the line I drew to mark the depth of the cut I needed.

This created a square tipped bat, but the square was just a tad small for my purposes. To increase the size of the square, I cut some shims out of 3/8″ plywood to wrap around the tip. I then glued and clamped the shims onto the tip and let that dry.

Shims and Glue

Leave the glue to set at least overnight. In this case, it got set aside for a week, just because I ran out of time that weekend, and didn’t get a chance to get pack to it until today.

The rest was pretty straightforward. On the squared end I created, I lined up the first heatsink, and drilled pilot holes for the screws to match the existing mounting holes in the heatsink, I made sure to line up the first heatsink well, because all the other heatsinks would be based on the placement of the first. The third pic in the following series is just me lining up the second heatsink. Make sure to drill a small pilot hole for every screw, so you don’t crack the wood, and also so the sink doesn’t move or slip as you drive in the screws. Also, use long enough screws so that it penetrates the shims you added and gets a good purchase in the wood of the bat. It’s a good idea to use a screwdriver to drive the screws, instead of a drill driver. With the torque of a drill driver, it can be a little easy to over drill the screw, and just bore out the hole.

Pre-Drilling Holes

Screwing on the Heatsink

Lining up the Second Heatsink

After I finished attaching all four heatsinks, I screwed the bevelled top back on to give it a bit cleaner look.

Side View of Finished Head

Top View of Finished Head

After that, it was merely a matter of lining up the runners, pre-drilling some holes to match up with the existing mounting points of the heatsinks, and screwing them down.

Runners Attached.

And Voila! I have my own customized medieval looking mace. Kinda steampunkish in mixing modern equipment with an old design aesthetic. Only much older design than steampunk. As far as being an actual weapon goes, I really don’t recommend it. While it’s pretty well bolted together to a solid chunk of good Ash bat, the heatsinks themselves are aluminum. If you hit anything substantial with it, the aluminum spikes will just bend. Also, it has horrible balance, very tip heavy and unwieldy. Which could probably be said about real maces as well, which might be a good part of the reason they fell out of favour. Still, could you see a burglar (or door to door salesman, or JW or Mormon) arguing with me if I answered the door with that thing In my hands? I doubt it.

The Urban Viking

]]> http://grelmar.com/2008/05/25/weaponize-your-pentium-ii/feed/ http://grelmar.com/2008/05/19/conan-night/ http://grelmar.com/2008/05/19/conan-night/#comments Tue, 20 May 2008 02:24:16 +0000 grelmar Humour Pointless Posts Video http://grelmar.com/2008/05/19/conan-night/ Subtitle: A Little Backyard Guerrilla Theatre

A few weeks back a friend and I got to talking about old movies we loved when we were kids. Eventually, the conversation turned to Conan the Barbarian, which I have in my video collection. One thing led to another, and I decided to do a bit of guerrilla theatre in my backyard. Here’s the email I sent to a couple of friends:

Subject: Exercising your inner barbarian…

Hi everyone:

Saturday night we’re going to be doing a Conan night at my place.
The plan:

Light up the fire pit and scorch some red meat, then as soon as it gets dark, watch Conan (the original) on the big screen in my back yard. What could possibly go wrong?

We’ll have the pit fired up by 5pm-ish, and the movie probably around 10. Bring your own slab of flesh for cooking.

I’ll be headed to the farmer’s market to pick up steaks early in the afternoon, so if you want to join, just let me know.

Thanks out to Pat for loaning the projector for the evening. I promise to have at least one computer working to hook up to it.

- John

It actually went off pretty smooth. I took some pics of the lead up to the showing, by which time it was too dark for the camera to be effective, so, sorry, no pics of the movie being shown.

First: The fire pit in full blaze. The computer in the background would later be hooked up to the projector, but at this point, it was just kickin’ out some MP3s.

Next: A sampling of some grilled flesh. Mostly steaks, and a chicken breast. All the meat was grilled over the fire pit.

A typical plate of food. That’s a fine looking hunk of steak.

Everyone getting down to business:

My wife laughing at a joke I missed while I fiddled with the camera:

The Projection Rig all hooked up. Someone commented it looked kinda white-trashy. Personally, I prefer to think of it as hackerific. The sawhorses with a tabletop are to give the projector enough height to shoot over the heads of the audience.

And finally, the screen set up in front of the garage. I used an old school “silver coat” screen. They stopped making them in the late 70s, but man, do they produce a nice imaging surface.

The screen looks white in that image, but that’s a result of the flash. In person, it looks opaque grey. The reflectivity on that thing is just amazing. Nowadays, you can get similar “High Contrast” screens, but I just don’t find they produce as good an image.

Everyone had a ball, and my neighbours from both sides even joined in for the movie portion. I learned a couple of things about outdoor theatre doing this, and there’s a few tweaks I have in mind for the next time I do this sort of thing. Probably sometime in the fall when it gets dark earlier (around 9 pm-ish). We actually didn’t get the movie going until 10:30, because we had to wait that long for it to get dark.

This video actually was taken on three different occasions over the past couple of weeks since I posted the last video. This time, we take out some monitors.

As a result of viewer feedback from the last video, we shot a couple of specific sequences.

First, we made use of the forklift, based on an e-mailed request from a friend - there you go Danny, are you happy now? No? Oh, that’s right. You’re a Doom Cookie. Happy isn’t your thing.

Second, because some mamby-pamby was upset about us wrecking a Sun Ultra 10 (read the comments on YouTube from the first video), we made a point of taking out a Sun Ultra 60 this time.

Without any further ado - here’s some Dead Tech Destruction Pron:

(Sorry gang. Can’t explain, but had to
take the videos offline.)

The first time I used a computer was back in the late 70’s. My dad used to take me with him to his office if he had to work a few hours on a Saturday (I think to get me out of my mom’s hair). He’d plunk me down in front of one of the terminals, get an ASCII game of 21 going (great entertainment for an 8 year old), and then wander into his office to do whatever the heck it was he had to do.

I can remember those green screen TTY terminals surprisingly well. They were hooked up to a UNIX mainframe that, at the time, was one of the most powerful computers in the city. It didn’t take me long to poke around and find other games, specifically Rogue (which later evolved into uMoria) . I’ve had Rogue or uMoria on every computer I’ve owned since.

Through the 80’s I was strictly a DOS boy. Not really by choice, but mainly because that was the operating system for home computers. UNIX was always, in my mind, for real computers, and real geeks new the ins and outs of them. I even resisted Windows until the mid 90s, because that GUI interface was for wimps.

Eventually I succumbed, migrated to windows, and have kinda been in that mode since. Linux intrigued me, but life had moved on, and I just needed my computer to work. Linux, I knew, was a great up and comer, but it was a hobbiest OS for a very, very long time. I tinkered with different Linux releases off and on, but none of them really cut the mustard. I just didn’t have the time to devote to the ins and outs of Linux.

About 3 years ago, that started to change. I caught on to an up and coming distribution of Linux called Ubuntu. It got me at just the right time. I was, for the first time, financially in a position to have several computers up and running in the house at any one time, so it wasn’t that big a deal to dedicate one of them to a “Hobby” OS.

Fast forward to now, and the picture has changed. 3 years can make all the difference. I have 3 PCs in the house, and one laptop. 2 of the PCs and the Laptop are running Ubuntu, and only 1 PC is running Windows. The Ubuntu Linux machines are all “working” computers - office apps, e-mail, coding, image editing, video and audio editing, and on and on. The Windows machine? Basically, it runs Windows so I can install video games. Really. The only reason I’m hanging on to windows is so I can make sure I can play Call of Duty 4, Rainbow Six Las Vegas, Civ 4, etc.

Why? Because things that are a pain on Windows are a breeze in Linux. Want to share files and drives and printers over your home network? If you’ve got a bunch of Windows machines, good luck with that. It’s a pain. I’ve done it, it’s doable, but don’t tell me it’s easy. Especially if the machines are running slightly different flavour of Windows. With Ubuntu Linux, it’s both simple and intuitive. My Home network is mroe networked now than it ever has been in the past. I’ve set aside a 250Gb drive as the “shared” hard drive, and all the computers at home have access to it, and nothing else. I’ve been able to give away my extra printers, because all my computers now share a common printer.

Sharing devices is uncomplicated on the Windows machine only if it’s hosting the device, otherwise it’s a pain. It never knows where to look. The Linux machines all know how to spot a shared device with the slightest of prompting, and also know how to use it.

And I’m not an uber geek. Really. I’m a half decent hacker, and get more out of my computers than most, but I really don’t have the time or patience to spend “tinkering” just to get something that should be simple, but often isn’t, to work.

I could go on, but I’ve learned from friends and co-workers that really, it just gets annoying when I do. All I can say is, if you have a spare old machine around (a pIII class or better will do), click on the picture below, download, burn, install, and…

Play.

Pretty soon, you’ll end up where I am. Windows will be the quirky hobby computer. All your work is going to get done in Linux.

So, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it here, but I changed jobs yet again a couple of months ago. I’m working at a “Technology Re-Marketing Company” now. Basically, we collect old, surplus tech from large companies, refurbish and sell what we can, the rest we sell to recyclers for various rates depending on the scrap value of the components.

Friday was a “slack” day, and we got a little bored. So a co-worker and I pulled out my digi-cam and got creative. Here’s the video:

Apparently, Futurama went back into production in 2005 and 16 new episodes have been created and are slated to be released on DVD today. Then, the episodes are set to air on Comedy central sometime next year.

By the time it airs on Comedy Central, it will be almost 6 years since the show was cancelled on Fox, but we’ll finally get a 5th season. That show should have never been cancelled.

All Hail Bender! The Robot Freedom Alliance supports Bender for President! Only this time, no stinkin’ Nixon head on a Bender body. We want an all Bender presidency.

Hmmm… Looks like I completely skipped September, as far as posting here. Oh Well.

Anyway, some Ubergeeks in California have built a 21 Foot scale model of an X-Wing. Which wouldn’t be that big of a deal, really, because lots of geeks have built largish scale models of this venerable Rebel Fighter.

The big deal here is that they built it with the intent of actually flying it (unmanned). They’re going to cram four M-Class Rocket Engines into it, and plan on launching it on October 10th. The’ve even added an electrical motor and gearing system so they can change the position of the wings in mid flight. (I’m not sure if they’re planning on going from the closed “cruising position” to the open “attack position” or vice versa.)

Here’s a pic of the team beside their oh-so beautiful creation. Click on the pick to follow through to an article and interview on Gizmodo.

I dunno, maybe it’s just because after over 2 years of working nights and now I suddenly find myself dealing with rush hour traffic again, but I really, really, want one of these. God bless the US military industrial complex for coming up with newer and better ways to off each other. (err, I hope you get the sarcasm intended from that last sentence).

Anyway, cue the video: