First of all, I’d like to say a massive thank you to our good friend Antirealism for buying me and C such an interest Christmas present.
Secondly, I’m not sure what you all did for New Years eve, however thanks to Andy, me and C were kept occupied by the Haynes Internal Combustion Engine.
As we hadn’t planned on going out, to stand in an packed pub, which we’d spend a fortune to get into, to only have to spend the majority of the night queueing at the bar….we decided to get some beer in, and build the engine
I had no idea these thing existed until the Christmas special of the Top Gear …however after watching it, they were firmly on my radar. You can imagine how grateful we were when Andy turned up on Boxing Day with our present
The tech spec on the description gives the below
The engine you will build is a simplified version of a real car engine. The model is designed to be fun to put together and to help you understand how a full-size four-stroke car engine works.
Includes a Haynes manual giving you clear step-by-step instructions to guide you through the build process.
Comes complete with all of the parts and tools you need to assemble the working model.
The on/off controller includes a sound chip which reproduces the noise of a real engine.
For ages 10 years and over.
The engine took us around 2 1/2 hours to build, which wasn’t bad as we were drinking at the same time.
Below are the unboxing and building photos, and a video of the engine running.
Apologies for no posts for a while, however I’ve been mad busy on one of my other projects.
About a month ago, myself and a couple of my resident posters over at Red Dwarf Forum decided it was time to do a Red Dwarf based podcast. We’ve been discussing who will do it, what we’ll talk about for a while, and last Monday we recorded the first episode.
The podcast itself took about 5/6 hours to edit together, which for me was quite good, as I’m still quite new to all this podcasting stuff.
Below is the software I’ve used to put the whole thing together, there are probably a lot quicker and smarter ways, but open to suggestions
Initial recording was done using skype, and a piece of software on the mac called “Skype Call Recorder“, which does the job well, however recorders all inputs as 1 file with no channel separation. This although good for the job, makes editing a bit of a pain, as we found Antirealism was too quiet, and Ori-Studfarm was too loud. I’m pretty sure this can be fixed quite easily by using hardware, and probably something I will look at as the episodes come along.
Once I had the audio file, it was editing time. I ran the file through Adobe Soundbooth, to hopefully clean up the background hum of a 4 man skype conference call, and attempt to increase Antirealism’s voice, and lower Ori-Studfarm’s. I then went to town on the editing, we recorded around 90 minutes worth of audio, however in the end, there was only around 35 mins used.
Once I had the cleaned audio, it was then time for GarageBand to work it’s magic. Dropped it into Garageband, chopped the audio into sections, then added stab music in between the little breaks. It was time then for the intro music, the intro message from Kyten (thanks to Tony Lunn), the outro music and the background track. I was planning on having just the clean vocals without a backing track, however there was still quite a lot of background humm, and thought the best was of applying a “sticky plaster” was to attempt to mask it out with an audio track.
The final work that needed to be done, was to add the images, I’ve always wanted to do an enhanced podcast, and was the main reason I bought the mac in the first place. This then meant listening to the podcast, listening for key points in the episode review and getting screen shots from this point. This was done with a peice of software on the mac called Snapz Pro X, which allows you to take a screen capture of anything on the screen, as the Cmd+Shift+F3 doesn’t allow you to take screen captures when you are running a DVD.
The final peice of the jigsaw was hosting. As we plan to do all 55 episodes of Red Dwarf (currently 52 + the 3 Easter specials), I made the assumption that these would be around 50Mb each x 55 which would be nearly 3Gb of space, and if only 10 people downloaded, we would need 30Gb of bandwidth. I took the advice of a fellow podcaster (CarBozman), and went with podbean, as this is a dedicated pocast hosting site, and I can’t describe just how happy I am with this. It gives more stats then I know what to do with, and after a discussion with Tony, we will probably be moving all the other projects to podbean.
That’s it, episode 1 in the bag, and everything set up for episode 2 and the other 53 episodes.
If you wish to have a listen yourself, you can find them either on Itunes by searching for scuttercast, or by going to the podcast site for the Enhanced version or the MP3 only version
Also please check out the newly WordPressed version of www.reddwarfforum.com, many updates on the new Red Dwarf episode.
Antirealism popped in to see me today on his way back from London and dropped off a pressy.
Over Christmas when myself and C when to see family in sunny Yorkshire, we popped in to see Anti, and I ended up sampling his homebrew wine. I had a small glass and it nearly took my head off. Apparently, 3 glasses will make your face go numb, according to the father of said homebrew.
Anyway, Anti popped in as I mentioned, and dropped off the full kit for brewing my own. The deed is done, it’s currently sat in my airing cupboard bubbling away, and in a matter of weeks, I’ll have a gallon of homebrew wine.
My feeling is, that it could take me a while to drink, as I was pretty much a mess on 1 glass
Anyway, cheers Anti, counting down the time till my face goes numb and I spend the evening being sick, lol
