Gadgets and Tinkering

I Fixed My Laptop with Floss:

That's right, I said floss. One of the weird things about a tablet PC is the unorthodox hinge system they use. Rather than a pair of hinges on the edge, they need one central hinge contraption that also rotates so that you can put the thing into slate mode. This hinge gets a lot of wear, and seems to collect dirt and debris. Dirt and debris makes hinges not only stick, but make noise. A horrid, primordial screeching crackling sound similar to a combination of nails on a chalkboard and bones being crushed by a rabid hyena. You think I'm kidding? The creaking on my tablet got so loud that I was able to wake a person who was in the depths of a dreamless ambien coma, and coworkers have been giving me odd looks. It was LOUD.

Sadly, there's just about jack shit online as far as suggestions go for fixing this issue. Most suggest just cleaning it out, but other people, like myself, noticed that the solid dry lubricating pad had degraded form use and crumbled away. Not good.

The one thing I did find suggested using, of all things, waxed floss. The floss is actually good for cleaning out the metal residue and dust to stop the creaking, and the wax seems to make a pretty good dry lubricant. So what the hell, I tried it out, and holy shit, it worked. It cleaned out the black metal dust and dirt, and mostly stopped the creaking. The joints were still pretty stiff, even after trying to work the wax into the bastards for a while, so just for good measure I zotted each joint with a blast of dry waxy teflon spray that I just happened to have hanging around from another never-finished project of mine. Yeah, that's right, I have dry wax teflon spray just sitting there waiting for a good use. I'm weird like that.

So anyway, after all was said and done, it works again. I had briefly tried some silicon grease that was used for paintball guns, but it doesn't come even close to the amount of viscosity needed, and the hinge seized up after a day. So don't do that: Floss and Teflon spray. It works, bitches!

In other news, I drew a Lemming Toad, seen above, who is now up on Mojizu waiting to make the grade (or not). Fun little guy; I tried out some different line colors, but in the end I wound up darkening them anyway. I can't seem to quite hack the light line styles of some other artists yet. Guess I'll try again another time.

And in YET OTHER news, I'd like to give my personal superfluous and completely ridiculous packaging award to Razer for their Mamba gaming mouse. The mouse itself is superb, and I love that I've gone from a chunky 800 DPI to a nearly unnecessary 5600 DPI of sniping accuracy for gaming, so I'll give them a little link/plug here for a fantastic product (I got mine on Amazon; cheaper!), but holy shit guys, did you need to ship the mouse in a giant plastic display case with an honest to god pedestal for the mouse to be displayed on? I get that you want the packaging to be nice and all, but this is sort of a 'fuck the environment and the green movement and all that hippie shit, let's go the other way and just cram as much unnecessary bullshit into the package as we possibly can! SUCK IT ENVIRONMENTALISTS!!'

I mean, the case comes with a little three tire bureau underneath it with drawers for storing the various parts of the mouse. Why you need these, I dunno, because once the mouse is up and running there's no reason to store anything in them. Well, perhaps it could make a poor woman's jewelry case, as I think about it, it's that friggin huge. And the plastic case could probably make a decent planter for, oh, say, some sort of vegetable or herb that needs good root space.

I do get that I'm sort of hypocritical for bitching about excessive packaging when I'm dropping a chunk of cash on a gamers mouse, but still, I think they could have scaled back a little and been a little more environmentally conscious while also saving themselves and the end consumer a few bucks on the over the top packaging.

At the very core of my being, I think I'm more of an engineer than an artist. I love designing and building things. I tinker and assemble stuff, and I have a deep appreciation for science and all things technical. I possess an analytical mind that's allowed me to learn multiple programming languages more or less self taught, with the occasional tutorial from friends and a day class here and there paid for by work.

The one thing I really, really hate though, is debugging. Debugging makes me fucking crazy. Debugging makes me want to throw my keyboard at a wall, snap a DVD-ROM in half, and use the jagged edges to slash my jugular so I can bleed out into the hateful gaping chasm that is the open case of my dysfunctional PC.

...ok, that might be a little extreme, but you get the point.

I think part of the problem with being self taught is that I have these odd spotty gaps in my knowledge; in particular good debugging techniques. I'm a hell of a lot better now than I used to be, but that's only through hours and hours of painful swearing and tears.

As much as I love tinkering, I have a very short fuse when it comes to machines or programs that are misbehaving. See, I expect people to piss me off, so I have a pretty long fuse when it comes to dealing with other homo sapiens. Machines, however, should bend to my will as a superior tool using mammal.

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

As far as actual updates go (rather than whining and ranting), I'm nearly done building the new Steamvolt website. I still need some new graphics and minor tweaking, but I did manage to build this massive PHP script that should ensure that the only thing I'll ever need to do when I add a new comic page is to add the page number and chapter number, and the code will build all the rest. The debugging sucked, as it usually does, but at the end of the day I got the sucker working.

Kind of makes me want to pick up a wrench, jump on top of it, and roar in victory like a frenzied howler monkey.

The Clipper: a cantankerous beast that hunts down smaller robots and critters. It first impales them with its hook arm, and then snips off useful bits with its clipper arm or jaws that it can add to its armor plating or make repairs with.

It's slow moving, so it typically waits to ambush its prey and is very crafty and cunning. To make up for its slow speed, it has heavy armor plates and is extremely strong. It's still seeking more armor bits to protect its heart and power supply.

This is a contest submission for the movie 9 on Deviantart.

Down to the last minute, my buddy Jim and I burned the midnight oil and finished this up at 11:40 PM last night in a frenzied rush of grinding, cutting, riveting, twisting, blood, sweat, and... well, no tears, I don't think either of us cried while making this. We're still definitely nursing more than a few nicks, scrapes, and scratches from working with all of that metal though.

This was an awesome project though. We procrastinated a bit, of course, so we were sort of scrambling at the last minute, but we managed to get it done without too many compromises.

Components include the following:

1. The guts of a broken wind up clock
2. The heating elements of a burned out electric space heater
3. an old rusty ice hook
4. a pair of rusty hand clippers that had been inexplicably dipped in yellow paint
5. the sheet metal from an ancient rusted out tub that looks like it may have been a still for a moonshine operation back in the prohibition days
6. worn down snow tire chains
7. several armatures from car rear view mirrors
8. an old rusty trowel
9. Half a dozen old electrical relays
10. a bunch of braces and brackets for fixing cabinets that turned into this guy's bones
11. Several old rusty horseshoes
12. What felt like hundreds of feet of steel wire, and hundreds of nuts, bolts, rivets, washers, and wingnuts

I'm absolutely certain there are more random weird parts in there, but that's all I can think of off the top of my head.

I was hoping we could get a more dynamic look, but once he started pushing thirty+ pounds we were more concerned with keeping him upright and sturdy than getting a slick action pose.

We'd like to thank the guys at The Junk Shop for letting us rummage through their piles old rusty contraptions and take a bunch of parts for twenty five bucks.

We'd also like to thank the Sadie Mae Foundation for giving us first dibs on all of the good old junk and tools from their fund raising tag sale.

Well, that's all for now, I've already typed up too much here. We'll find out if we placed in the contest on the 30th.

On a whim, I started doing little 15 minute sketches in the morning on my tablet when I should be working. I haven't been doing much sketching lately, and it's kind of nice to sit down and just whip up something weird and fun in a short amount of time. I think I may make this a running habit. I've gotten a little clunky lately, focusing back on details too much and not trimming out unnecessary detail work.

Initially it was supposed to be 15 minutes, but once the 15 minutes hit, I usually want one extra minute to clean up a few things or add shadows or whatever, so I figured 16 minutes is fine, screw it.

Besides, anyone can do a 15 minute sketch; it takes a true visionary to crank it to 11 and make it 16 minutes.

I think that I am now, officially, a technophile. I love gadgets and contraptions, and now I own a plethora of them. Got the laptop/tablet that I've been doing pretty much 100% of my art work and technical stuff on, and now I've even got an iPhone 3G, which is pretty badass, and I've run a jailbreak on it so I can use it as a wireless modem. I'm putzing around on facebook, got all sorts of tools and electronic devices, including things like infrared ranged thermometers and a custom modified paintball gun, and a lot of other nonsense I probably don't need, but I really enjoy having.

The real concern here is turning into a tool. People being into gadgets is fine, but if they do nothing but talk about them all the time it gets annoying as hell. Of course, anyone who's excessively into any topic is generally a tool. You gotta keep yourself somewhat rounded and not be all up in people's grill about whatever your pet hobby or interest is. Wine snobs, golf guys, lawn guys, car guys, work-out guys, gamers, pet owners, etc, etc... they can all turn into tools in a matter of seconds.

The other concern is people who are so into gadgets that they'll buy any piece of shit that gets tossed out of a factory. I don't think I'm one of those guys; I tend to research the stuff I get pretty well and I only get things that will be useful. Having a gadget just to show it off is the height of tool-dom, and it's something I avoid. The things I get I use pretty regularly.

So my current setup is as follows: Fujitsu 5010 tablet PC running Photoshop and Flash CS3, tethered by USB to an iPhone 3G (using pdaNet) for a wireless modem so I can do work and browse the web from literally anywhere. This seriously beats leeching wifi off of a starbucks out in the parking lot on my lunch breaks like a douche, desperately hunting for a close space so I can get a decent signal.

The iPhone is really good too. It's awful close to living up to the hype behind it, which is a rare compliment to give any technological gadget. Kind of sucks that it doesn't run Flash yet, but I understand the fear of opening up a mack-truck sized security hole in the thing by rushing out support. The 3G network on the phone has enough bandwidth to stream Satellite radio and play World of Warcraft at the same time. That's pretty god damn good.

The whole setup is pretty awesome. The only thing holding me back from absolute productivity in life now is my own apathy and laziness! Hooray!

I think I might want to get one of these suckers when they're available: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29259226/

It's a self-contained propulsion aparatus that replaces the wheel on a bycicle and converts it into an electric bike.

Yep, I has a laptop finally! And it even works!!! I'M USING IT RIGHT NOW SITTING IN MY UNDERWEAR IN BED!!! FREEDOM!!!!

I got a Fujitsu 5010 lifebook tablet...so it's not just a laptop, it's actually an artists tool. Like a digital sketchbook that you can do other stuff with. It took me a while to settle on what laptop to get, with a lot of help from the tabletpcreview.com forum. Very handy.

So far, I've been taking most of my time banging this thing into shape what with all the software updates and installs and generally getting used to this whole new way of making art and doing all things computer.

Yeah, I know, most tech nerds have had a laptop of sorts since at least the early 1st decade of the 21st century, so I'm maybe 5-6 years slow on picking this up.

As far as complaints go on this rig, I really have very few. Fujitsus are rated as making pretty much the best tablet PCs right now, so that's no surprise. I had my eyes on a Lenovo for a while, until I realized that for ~200 bucks more I could get a whole better generation of hardware in the Fujitsu and get a bigger screen. (DDR2 vs. DDR3 in this thing, for example).

I suppose it could be prettier, if I had to struggle to find a thing to complain about...and the onboard speakers suck...but that's no surprise. I'm shocked they sound as passable as they do, actually.

One thing I would love is some more modularity in the tablet cover buttons... I'd love to assign keystrokes and such for photoshop to things like the scroll sensor or the thumbprint security swipe thingy. That would be slick, but not a big deal really.

So far I've been grinding away at flash and photoshop. The new interface isn't quite as smooth as my dedicated Wacom tablet for my PC is, but this thing can crank filters ten times faster and, hell, I can take it places.

I now get to join a prestigious group of people: the starbucks laptop snob crowd. For some reason I've always wanted to be one of those douchebags at a coffee shop doing work or surfing the net while eating some kind of pastry and sucking down over-priced bad coffee. I guess you gotta have goals...

Anyway, so far I'm updating the art on the site here that you're reading, sketching, breaking things in, working on comics, and coding up flash games. Good Times.

Ok, so it's late, and I should crash, so I'm going to go play some video games. Laterz y'all.

Take a look at this:

Yep, that's right, my headphones are held together by paperclips.

You see, I've got an enormous skull.

For the past, oh, say, four or five months, I've been tweaking paperclips to make a sort of toy/mechanical sculpture that bites things during my lunch breaks at work. Why? Hell if I know, I'm just weird I guess. I like making odd stuff like this.

I didn't really plan this out or do any blue-printing, just started bending stuff together to get what I wanted. It's a little clumsy to use, unfortunately, but it is neat looking, and it was fun.

A buddy of mine Jim and I built ourselves a potato rifle. This is actually our second build; the first one was tiny, and sucked, but it was a good proof of concept.

This newer one is...well, just a wee bit more powerful. The videos really don't give the sound justice; it's quite loud, and can make your ears ring off of a particularly strong shot. A bit quieter than a 22 rifle, I'd say.