Inventions galore!

EDITED!!!1!!!

Ok, so, the last week or two should have been spent tid

ying up for my project and arranging everything in a nice orderly fashion so that I am able to return next summer and finish it off with a nice clear idea of where I left off the summer before. But I thought screw it, my brain was made to remember things, so I shall give it this one thing to remember. So yeah, project is still a mess (at the time of the initial edit) with 1.5 days of my placement left to go and I have taken to inventing and crafting.

My most proud invention ever has been realised in the last few days (albeit the fact that it is my first ever full working prototype invention) The genius that is the magna-mop.

(picture to follow when I have bandwidth to upload without making my brother go into a TROLLIN rage) It is basically a mop which is used to pick up magnetic materials from the floor, much like a hoover. But for metal. Perfect for mothers with children aspiring to work in a steel production factory. Ideal for picking those annoying nuts and bolts out of your shag pile carpet.

Here is a picture of one mother who is very proud of her magna-mop. "its very good. It has helped me remove those pesky pieces of computer casing and batteries from my carpet that my regular hoover just can't seem to pick up"

And now onto a more sensible (pronounced "geeky") subject. Pepakura. Think of origami. But a greatly sodomised twisted version of origami involving scissors, craft knives and glue. Yes. That bad. GLUE. And we haven't been making nice happy paper swans either. No no no. We have been making weaponry. OUT OF PAPER?!? To elaborate, we are making a select few weapons and

armour from the halo game series with the aim to re-enforce with some sort of resin mixture and eventually wear them and look AWESOME. or mildly /b/tarded, depending on how they turn out/you view them with your personal opinion of geeks and fake weaponry.

Here is myself modelling the ODST helm craftily put to gether by Marc. I am Boxxy you see!

anyway, pictures to be posted later when my bandwidth allowance increases above 5Kbps(stupidly small I know, but apparently, torrenting at 5Kbps causes warcraft to lag, EVEN THOUGH it has been given top network priority over EVERYTHING else. to me this says that WOW is a weak, powerless game that cant even fight for bandwidth when it has been given top bandwidth priority. Pathetic. Not dissing warcraft at all, the storyline is epic, but MMOs, not for me.)

Anyway, back to Glasgow on saturday so I should be able to update photos etc then. Till next time, I shall leave you with a riddle. "What is the weight of a fish if it weighs 10 lbs, plus half its weight?"

Think about it ;-)

Alex

Hax0rz!

So, I just finished converting an old PC power supply unit into a desktop PSU using an instruction sheet marc found for me on the internet here. The morning was spent on the electronics, the afternoon the aesthetics. Here are the Pictures.

Have to say, I'm quite impressed I could actually make something useful ^_^

Alex

All work and no, Well, I guess I do play at work really.

So, A blog post eh? As the title suggests, I have been playing at work a little. For a start, one of my Comrades (pronounced colleagues) has been showing his poor time keeping abilities and love for the "man-flu" over the past few days so, as any engineer would do, I have decided to keep a log of all of his hours at work and at the end of the work placement, I will have a beautiful little graph with lots of nice colours showing him how much work he has missed and how much he should have actually earned against what he has actually earned. Because I am a nice person like that. If I weren't a nice person the graph would be in a nasty, angry monochromatic format.

Speaking of graphs, I have also decided to stage another experiment while here at work where I mash all of the buttons on a drinks vending machine to see which drink will appear at the magical little thirst quenching hole at the bottom of the machine. Each can that I recieve, will again be noted down and a final graph showing the probability of recieveing a certain can from a random mash of buttons will be shown.

Another little project of mine, which didn't actually take long to complete this morning, was to create a replica "Ben" as a sort of homage to the great ginger that he is. Anyone who doesn't know who he is I have kindly provided a photo of him.

There he is, in between myself and Martin looking all glorious and ginger. "But why make a homage to this jolly ginger fellow?" I hear you ask. Well, the story goes that he travelled to a small little area in the South West of England to study in a music performance course. After graduating with a first class, No word has been heard from him! Word of mouth says that he has been captured by bandits, but personally I believe he is roaming Dartmoor wearing nothing but a loin cloth and brandishing a large fire stick, scaring the public as they enjoy the views of the national park. But we can only hope. Anyway, here is a little picture of my replica Ben in all of its glory. My inspiration for this piece is based on his revolutionary and street artist years. Pretty good likeness dont you think?

And finally, the rest of my time at work is generally spent watching other people work, for example, Graeme plays with balloons all day

Which is much more fun to watch than "actually" working.
So, until next time, Ciao!
Alex

Oh, and for all those people who actually employ me, I do do work really! See!

"It's free? Thats not so bad!"

Wow, free computers! I love it when your in the right place at the right time. Well, slightly too late. The IT department at the college disposed of 50 computers/monitors and all the peripherals a few days before we heard about it, but we succeeded in obtaining a couple of monitors and towers for our own personal usage. I am personally excited about the free 80Gb hard drive which came with one of them, this means I can finally give my laptop the long overdue backup it has been ever so politely been begging me for ^_^

So, when I manage to work until 5 o'clock tonight and eventually get home, i reckon I'll be creating a brand new setup on my bedroom desk (fingers crossed I can find enough power cables) and when that is done I'll get down to updating my project blog up to the point I have reached so far (providing my memory holds up) So yeah, roll on 1700 hours!

Alex

another blog

Hey, pointing you towards alex-gilbert.blogspot.com for my Project blog for, well, updates on my project. Nothing there as of yet but i will post pictures and information when I get the time. ^_^

Alex

Been a while

Been a while since my previous post, 3 months and 10 days too long to be precise. Not really done much since then to be honest with you, took some time off (where I didn't do a lot because I tripped in a rabbit hole and damaged my ligaments in my ankle) before coming home from university and started a summer job in the local college as a research student which I am a few weeks into by now. My project involves playing with batteries and generally messing around with electronics, although I do spend a lot of time on the internet "researching" (facebook and other hacking websites to be precise).

The project which I have been set involves playing with batteries, as previously mentioned. To elaborate on this I have to design a system which someone can connect batteries to to read the charge/discharge curves (voltage against time) and compare them with a brand new battery to see if they are recyclable after a few years usage or whether they are basically dead to the world and no use can be found for them. The batteries which I am looking at are the batteries from safety lights; the ones that turn on when power to the mains lights goes off. By law these need to be changed every 5 years in a publicly used building and cost a fortune to replace. Sadly this cant be overcome, but if I can find a way to recycle them then they will save money elsewhere by not discarding the batteries.

So yeah, basically what I've been doing over the past few months, more news on the project and pictures to follow when i update.

First post

Hey guys, 

This is my first post ever, obviously! No idea why I started a blog in the first place because i never have anything to speak about so for now im just going to post pictures and hope people find them interesting! I've recently started using photoshop and have been playing with a few of my photos. Heres the results:-

This is a picture of my eye, took a close up and made everything greyscale apart from my iris and increased the saturation to make it appear vivid blue

Same idea except no increase in saturation.My friend Marc. Love Irn-Bru and Firefly ^_^

Pint of hand pulled deuchars at a pub called The Pear Tree in Edinburgh. Was an amazingly sunny day.