Friday, October 31, 2014

A must-have item for rich heavy-metal fans

(... there must be a few, now heavy metal has been main stream for 20-30 years.)

It took me a while to recognize the subject, but I think this is great, a very funny piece. I love the turn screw on his ankle, and the chain hair. That must be dang heavy to throw around!



Wednesday, October 29, 2014

About a substance called Sugru

Sugru is a highly useful and fun substance, sort of a combination of moldable rubber and glue. Amazingly it sticks to virtually any surface with chemical glue, including smooth metal or plastic.
It makes many repairs and fun ideas much easier to make. It's not cheap and it takes a day to cure, but it's still worth it. For example I have made grips for a couple of tablets and a camera, and they really help. (Sugru is not very grippy, sadly, so I had to invent a way to put grainyness in. Dabbling the surface with a toothbrush before it dries works pretty well though.)

There is a wealth of ideas on their site. Here is their newsletter.

Below is a grip I made with super-grippy surface. You can also see a strap I put on the tablet case with superglue. I think the strap is even better than a grip, actually, but they are both much better than nothing. I am amazed that four years after iPad One there are still almost no solutions for improving the grip on a tablet, and those that are there demands the whole hand behind the tablet, you can't have the thumb in front to change pages. With mine you can, making one-handed reading much more comfortable.
I cut the front of the case, since when folded back it gets in the way of the strap and grip. You can also put them directly on the device, I've done that with my Kindle Fire HDX.



I could not find a perma-link to this post, so I took a screenshot: 

(clickable)

------
Update: 
I have written to the Sugru people with praise and one criticism. They claim that Sugru is heat insulating. I used 24 packs of Sugru on packing a thick ceramic coffee cup (you buy it in bags of 8 tiny packs). I hoped to keep my coffee hot longer. Even with a broad strip of bubble plastic inside it, it did not work. After a couple of minutes the surface of the Sugru gets quite hot. And of course it takes this heat from the coffee, so it gets cold as fast as normal, even with a preheated cup.
I don't like to complain, but I feel that I had wasted an hour and $50, so I felt it was false advertising. I don't think they did so on purpose or maliciously, for packing around a pot handle it probably does some good. And it is only a minor thing which does not take much away from this fun and useful product. 

Daily Arial View

The Daily View site with the cutesy address overv.eu has some often-interesting areal views.


Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Net issues today?

Here in Lancashire, England, I am having some odd issues with the Net today. Over half the web pages/sites I try to load time out. Don't appear. But sometimes they do, it's all random.

The really odd thing is that I have the same problems whether I use my cable connection or my ADSL connection. (And it also doesn't matter if I use Ethernet or wifi, or if I use my desktop computer or my iPad.)

These are quite independent connections. How can this be? Sunspots?
Does anybody have similar problems? (Argh, if you have you may have given up loading this page...)

AndrĂ© Wickström´s english stand-up in Iceland

I have lost count of how many times readers have asked me: "Eolake, can you please explain, how does Danish sound to a Finn? Particularly one who is trying to amuse people in Iceland?"
And I must admit, for the longest time I have come up short. But thanks to our old friend TTL, I can now deliver!

Update: hmmm... there seems to be issues with the video, try it on Youtube if it does not work for you.