smaller water bottle

I decided to paint the water bottle I got a few years ago during a gambling awareness presentation.

 

The bottle holds about 1/2 L of water, and is well used. At this point it is falling into disuse because I got myself a larger metal water bottle to keep in my bag.

super cheap bike lights

One evening I was sprinting to catch a city bus, tripped, and smashed the back light for my bike. After that I was using some electric glow sticks for front and back lights on my bike for a while. Finally I found some bike lights at the local Dollarama, so I got the pair.

When I tried to install the bike lights the mounting clips broke off. Being a person who does crafting with things like plastic canvas this only drove me to find a way to make a mount to put them on my bike, since the lights themselves still worked fine.

The end result was a little box, held closed with a twist tie, attached to the bike with twist ties, holding the light part of the Dollarama bike lights, and they are working quite well.  The picture is the rear light, and the front light is basically the same.

Total cost to me: about $3 and about an hour.

Rainbow lighter

I had a quiet evening in Fredericton on one of my trips, and a couple of lighters in my kit bag, so I decided to start coloring them.

This is actually the third rainbow painted lighter I made.  The first one got borrowed at Eclipse and did not end up getting returned. The second one I gave to Pixie Sun Child before we went in opposite directions in Ontario. Finally the third one I made when I got back to Halifax.

Winter ready hammock

Last winter I spent most of my nights sleeping outside in a hammock.  This may sound cold, but it really was not.

This hammock is 3m wide and 2.5m when the ropes are not installed, and has slept three people comfortably.  The liner is thick fleece fun fur. The shell is coated rain wear nylon, which is both wind and water proof.  With the tarp and everything tethered properly it is ready for any weather except extreme heat.

I also have two fun fur blankets that I use as the temperature gets lower. I have gotten to almost -20 degrees Celsius with just two fun fur blankets and some warm clothing, and about zero with almost nothing in addition to the blankets.

There are zippers on the ends so that the foot end of the hammock can be zipped up to both keep the blanket inside the hammock around the feet, and keep the hammock closed by the feet.

In a pinch the hammock can be used as a warm sleeping bag on the ground as well.  This year when I took this hammock to Evolve I did not actually get to sleep in it because it was always occupied by someone else who was sleeping. I only hear good things about the comfort and warmth.

new water bottle

About a week ago I was shopping at a local thrift store and found a good sized metal water bottle.

This was good, except for the water bottle being branded, and I prefer to not have visible brands on my stuff.

The response was completely logical for me:

I covered the bottle with strips of white hockey tape, with as little overlap as I could.

Then I painted the bottle with acrylic paint, freehand, trying my best to color each strip one color.

Finally I glossed it with some of the gloss that my sister uses to make her masks shiny, though this step was not even really necessary.

I am happy with how the water bottle looks now, and it holds a pleasing amount of water, some time in the future I will actually measure how much water that is.

Neon yellow basic hammock

I learned how to make basic cloth hammocks about two years ago, they are quite comfortable and most are easy to transport.

This is one of the recently created ones.  I got the material before I left for Eclipse, and hung it as a no-sew hammock there for casual napping.  Later on one of the stops on the way home I sewed it at a friend's place to make it hang easier, and even more recently I trimmed it down to 2.5m in length so that it would hang between my regular two hammock trees and fit under my rain tarp.

The fabric is a fairly thick raincoat nylon.  This particular one does not stretch at all so it takes me a little while to get comfortable enough to sleep.

Combined with the rain cover this hammock is good for all summer weather: wind, rain, and clear.  I have also slept out in all of these with it already.

The main thing that keeps the rain off the hammock is the metal rings that divide the rope on the tree from the rope on the hammock.

The reason I created this hammock was because one of my hammocks that I took to Evolve left to go on an adventure without me.

Joining audiobook mp3 files together

I like to listen to audiobooks sometimes when I am walking and relaxing, and I like to listen to them on an iPod, but usually when I find them they are split up into a large number of mp3 files, and the iPod does not deal with them very well.

After getting sufficiently annoyed at the problem I decided it was time to find a way to join the files together into one, so it was easier to manage, also it would be nice to be able to reliably resume in the same place as I left off, it would keep resuming several minutes away from where I paused it.

The results of my tinkering was a small script to decode a directory of mp3 files, and then encode the resulting audio stream into a single constant bitrate mp3 file. I used a 64kbit rate since I was only dealing with speech.

#!/bin/bash
[ "$1" ] || {
  echo use: $0 directory
  exit 0
}

for file in "$1"/*; do
  ffmpeg -i "$file" -acodec pcm_s16be -f s16be -ar 44100 -ac 2 -
done |
  lame -r -x -b 64 --cbr -s 44.1 --bitwidth 16 -m j - "$1".mp3

The script takes a directory as a parameter, and outputs an mp3 file by the same name. Remember to leave the trailing slash off the directory name, unless you want to get a hidden mp3 file in that directory as a result.