Ramblings – 4-04-09 – Crafting On Mountain Dew

Last Updated on February 24, 2024 8:59 am by Jeffrey Powers

I just bought my first case of 16 oz bottles of Mountain Dew. All I can think about is “10 minutes fueling Geekazine, forever in a landfill”. I need to figure out something to do with these bottles so they don’t end up there.

My mom used to take the 2 liter bottles, cut them up and turn them into wind spinners. She had a template that she cut from, used a soldering iron to make a more precise cut and then decorated it to put out in the yard. Not that our house was filled with those things – but it definitely was a crafty project that she liked to do.

My Dad, on the other hand was into wood crafts. He used to make cribbage boards. It all started when he saw a semi-truck cribbage board. He said “I can do that” – And he did. He then moved to other items. This one is a lighthouse he made a few years ago using an old AOL CD.

Don’t believe me? Well look at the bottom.

Heck, I even do a little bit of building and rebuilding of things. I have parts of old PC’s lying around. I did take apart hard drives at one time in order to make clocks out of them. I ended up using them as art pieces around my office.

I did do a little bit of crafting the other day as I took the Dell D600 that I brought back to life and did some uStreaming on. The Laptop I bought at SWAP (See last Weeks’ Ramblings for an explaination) because I had a friend who had the exact same laptop, but it had a broken hinge. So when I saw this laptop for $5, I thought I’d pick it up for parts. Only thing was – it worked just fine. I put in 512 DDR I had lying around and a hard drive and Voila! New laptop. I then got the other parts to make it complete (CD, power, battery).

So anywho – yesterday I was working and wondered how viable this would be as a ustream machine. Therefore, I went downstairs, hooked up the new Blue Snowball mic I got – along with a Logitech 4000 camera and made a couple ustream videos.

I then decided to show off Alex’s cool trick (that I taught him):

I have to admit, Windows7 detected both the camera and the mic easily. I didn’t have to go hunting for any drivers, although I might want to get the Logitech software to adjust the brightness and contrast. It took care of the stream with little process and about 430 Megs of memory. I suppose I’ll need to bump that up if I do any more video on that machine.

Speaking of Laptops, I saw this cool laptop at the Goodwill the other day. It was a Zenith Data Systems – not sure if it was a 386 or 486 (I believe 486 since it was a charcoal grey). The 386 version was the first laptop I ever had. It had a monochrome monitor and I think 1-2 megs of ram running Windows 3.11.

On the Video side, I recorded the first review video after the CES barrage. It was good to get back into that groove again. I got a lot more videos coming soon – I want to switch up the area I am recording in so I can move. In the WebAround video, you’ll see that space was my enemy.

I would like to thank Andy McCaskey for doing the April Fools Podcast swap with me. I had a lot of fun doing his show and I hope he could say the same for mine. I started to implement some new changes to the Podcast. The result was the Podcast was 10 minutes shorter. I think I am going to try the same format again (minus Andy) and see what happens.

The website also got some changes. I put up a survey on the podcast, which is why I am making the changes. You can take the Geekazine Survey here.

Just looked at the clock on the wall and realized I need to go to a friends’ party. Just found out that he’s moving to AZ for a job and the going away bash is happening in about 10 minutes. So we’ll wrap it up here.

Thanks again to Andy for the swap, Frank for the great articles and Norbert for the CTC this week.