candy

John Broder ignited a lithium-ion-media firestorm of Dreamliner proportions earlier this month with his piece "Stalled Out on Tesla's Electric Highway". That story itself became a story as accusations flew back and forth about hidden motives and hidden charging stations. The furor is just now begun to subside among the EV conspiracy crowd.

The Times coverage split the issue right down the middle. it was critical in the text and positive in the Brendan Behan sense. Those cynical shades of Grey Lady are sometimes just a bit too much for me. For that reason, I drank deep when I pulled into a gas station this morning. If you want to get away from East Coast neuroses and so-called Green Energy coverage, you can turn to the Gas Station Radio Network for straight information about your world. I stood transfixed and let myself listen for long enough to fill a pair of large SUVs. Thank heavens for auto-shutoff at the pump. The thing that caught my ear was not the piece 'tar sands: boom or bonanza', which I thought was much thinner than the actual tar sand. It was the ad for candy. You can hear it for yourself here.

"If you're on the go, candy is a great way to power up for your next destination."

You can, apparently, just say stuff like that out loud if you're a trained voice actor. I hear that the gasoline we pump is really millions of years old. Perhaps billions of years if you roll with the abiogenic crowd. This advertising has a similar feel. It dates from a time before subtlety, before Mad Men, before even the actual 1950s.

After 'Candy', I was hooked. I cruised the gasradio.digicastnetworks.com site looking for another score. Would they? Could they? Yes! Cigarettes. That ad was pretty weak sauce. Strangest was 'Cash for Gold'. A sign of the true pre-cambrian nature of these ads can be found in the 20 second spot 'Movie Rentals'.

Perhaps Elon Musk will next re-invent advertising. I might buy an electric car just to hear it piped into a supercharger station. Major League Soccer, Nuclear Fusion, and Dippin' Dots should probably do their ad buys early.

Remember to check back with reograph several times daily for our weekly post. Only reograph offers a free PhD topic with every issue. Smoke break? reograph! Netflix buffering? reograph! Hospitalization? reograph! We've got you covered.

gauge

Isambard Kingdom Brunel stands with the greatest engineers of the industrial revolution. He remains a source of constant inspiration to me in my endeavors as a LEGO craftsman. I reject conventional wisdom about the suitability of ABS blocks for steamship hulls, railway lines, or tunnels under navigable rivers.

Modern life is littered with a thousand minor units and constants with surnames borrowed from small minds. Did Edgar Pi contribute that much? Was Alessandro Volta half the engineer that Brunel was? No.

Where is the Isambard? The Brunel? Kingdom does find some minor use as a unit in some faiths to denominate a single collective afterlife (ex: a kingdom of heaven) though this usage appears to predate Brunel's birth by several of George Millenium's finest.

An obvious remedy is to replace the meter in everyday usage with the brunel -- set at 2140mm. Most people are between zero and one brunel tall. This amazing LEGO model of Serenity is just about one brunel long. That's handy.

The best use of the brunel is probably to describe more than a thousand miles of broad gauge trackage operated by the Great Western Railway in the 19th century. That track was 1 brunel between the rails. Returning to Serenity for a moment, we note that the first locomotives designed by Daniel Gooch for the GWR were the 'Fire Fly' class.

I have been running a Gauge Commission of one at home to try to find a single style of track most suitable for my small children of two and four and their childish father. I simply cannot accomodate a full brunel gauge. We have three gauges in service at present.

The narrowest gauge is one Brio (about 20mm). We acquired a great deal of track in this gauge from IKEA. This gauge allows a tight turning radius with unarticulated cars. On the downside, so little room is available between the locomotive frames for a boiler that these trains are very slow to build steam. Most are pushed. The track itself is joined with male and female connectors. For this reason, prospective rail plans must be surveyed carefully for topology as well as grade. turnarounds are not possible without special adapters. I also find these lines to be especially susceptible to sabotage by toddlers. I would like to relegate this gauge to mule drawn mine carts.

We also have a lot of track in the proprietary DUPLO gauge (about 27mm). Like BRIO track, this track has two concave wells in which narrow road wheels ride. The wheels on typical DUPLO rolling stock are dressed with a flange. In many layouts, the flange is cosmetic only. DUPLO locomotives feature teeth in the flange relief. These teeth engage with matching teeth in a special DUPLO bridge. Powered trains can transition into cog operation nearly as seamlessly as the hybrid rack/adhesion system on the Lyon Metro Line C.

The DUPLO track is genderless and very easy for small hands to assemble without force. Typical DUPLO rolling stock is connected with post and clip fasteners that appear to typify European willful ignorance of the Janney coupler even in scale roads.

Our third gauge is the 'L' gauge used by LEGO in their trains since the 1960s. This track has been offered together with trains of several forms over the decades. Some were powered-rail systems. Some were unpowered rails designed for use with push trains. Others were unpowered and intended for use with a variety of battery-powered trains. L gauge trains have flanged road wheels. Rolling stock often have articulated trucks. The track is unisex. The rolling stock is typically built up from LEGO brick. Specialized coupler pieces are available and the most modern of these use a genderless magnetic coupler. This coupler is much nicer than the BRIO-style magnetic stud coupler.

By nearly any technical measure, the L gauge and system are the obvious choice. It is not an obvious choice for small hands, though. My children can get trains together and trains on rails, but the rails themselves are very difficult to lock together. My four year old cannot do it. For the interim, we have now adopted some LEGO rolling stock on a DUPLO road.

Most DUPLO wagons start with a base that combines couplers, axles, and a flat bed. The superintendent of locomotives at LEGO HQ worked with the early childhood education staff here at the Center for Victorian Studies to build a line of trains to teach children to stay on the rails of life and within their ticketed class. The resulting 'Thomas' locomotives all feature a small tender. This tender rides on a wagon (part 4195cXX) that is just small enough to be a truck under an L scale LEGO wagon. These parts are available from Bricklink for a few bucks each.

DUPLO road with mixed rolling stock
Photo courtesy your correspondent

This is our mode for the moment. The Great Western Railway completed the changeover from broad gauge to standard gauge in a weekend. I'm confident that I could pull off the same when LEGO track becomes the right answer.

rig

I'm an avid reader of www.diyphotography.net. Many crazy cameras and rigs available there -- just beneath the light painting and shaped bokeh stories. Valentine season is at hand so you may have to wade through rather a lot of those.

I take DIY to heart. Don't Impale Yourself is a guiding principle behind most of my projects. This mandate has taken on a new urgency in the years since I became a father. DIY is now Do It Years (from now) for the craziest schemes.

My eldest is now four and very interested in photography and stop motion cinematography. I have so far found the plains of DIY photography for children to be pretty barren.

I know next to nothing about stop motion. I know that the Apple App Store doesn't have the answer. My children use my Canon EOS 40D for their projects. I have a couple of cheap shutter release cables that they shoot with.

Use of a remote shutter alone eliminates about a third of the mechanical error that creeps into our short films. Another third is model errors. The final third is the camera mount itself. I have never found a stable camera mount that kids are comfortable with. The Joby GorillaPod line is as clever as it ever was but it usually slumps during filming. I have many tripods with a variety of ingenious quick-collapse features that surprise and terrify kids.

LEGO and DUPLO are recurring themes in our studio. They are familiar. They stick together. They are perfect for both abstract art and detailed staging.

They are repeatable. This is very important. At any moment, we may have three pictures in production and perhaps all stalled. Union, finance, and insurance issues don't simply evaporate because we're indies. Most of the production deals we have require us to insure our stars against accidental swallowing. You try talking to your underwriter about that! We simply don't have enough LEGO to support this degree of concurrency. We don't even have space for that much LEGO. We certainly don't have space for several partial sets. Models routinely come, go, and come again between shots.

For some time, I have been recording camera positions relative to models with bricks on LEGO baseplates. Only recently did I put a bolt through a DUPLO and mount the camera directly. The result is very satisfying. The mount works for the kids. They build new mounts themselves. The universe of LEGO and DUPLO rail becomes a dolly system that we all love.

Canon 40D on DUPLO plate with generic ball head
Photo courtesy your correspondent

I found that a 4x8 DUPLO plate supports my camera with a 50mm 1.4 USM lens attached. These plates have an injection molding mark right in the center that is a perfect spot to start drilling. The plates are available from brokers for less than a buck.

LEGO themselves marketed a line of movie-themed toys at the turn of the century. This line included several novel prop pieces that could be used when making LEGO movies about moviemaking. Some sets included a cheap USB webcam as well. That camera had LEGO studs. That line added no new moviemaking tools and merits no further discussion.

diamonds

I just finished re-watching Sean Connery as James Bond in 'Diamonds are Forever'. You learn something new every time you watch.

I find the special effects especially dazzling. After Blofeld is dumped in some unconvincing boiling yak vomit,  it is soon clear that the effects budget was spent on making a Triumph Stag appear to move under its own power.

woolrich follow-up

In 'woolrich', I mentioned the strange telephone call I received on my unlisted home number from the ACLU.

I called my local telco to try to get a really unlisted number the old fashioned way -- by disconnecting service. Unfortunately, my home DSL (from Megapath) comes in on the same circuit. Cancelling service would interrupt my DSL.

Megapath offers 'naked' DSL that doesn't require dial tone service. I signed up for some of that and waited for the telco man to come and drag a new line to my house. They said they would turn up

from 8am to 5pm on the appointed day and that my presence was required. I sat no more than four feet from the door during the entire window and got no telco love.

I can't stand to do it again and so I have to unwind the entire Megapath transaction, cancel the existing DSL, and cancel the phone line just to be done with this nuisance. I may try the cable folks.

I was on the fence about it until the next day. Planned Parenthood called the same unlisted number looking for some year end bucks. It is possible, I suppose, that Planned Parenthood and the ACLU are really two faces of the same giant liberal conspiracy and that I've tricked them into revealing it. I think it is more likely that they share an outsourced call center or databases. I think I've lost for good in any case.

resolve

I'm starting in on my New Year's resolutions a little early this year. One is to monetize you readers even harder.

For the curious among you, the core blog concept of negative product reviews that happen only past the sell-by date of the merchandise is not the path to easy riches. I've decided to stick with it and stay true to my principles. You deserve it.

Here's my offer to gadget manufacturers: Are you bringing a new product to market? Does your competitor's product suck? If so, send me one of their boxes for review! My unusually modest fee is negotiable and may be waived completely if your competitor's widget is bad enough to spark a CPSC recall while in my care. No Microsoft products, please.

host

I spent most of Sunday cleaning up after the previous day's holiday open house. Successful hosts know that party gifts take many forms. These range from a plate of delicious homemade cookies prepared in advance to more spontaneous gifts -- a cashmere coat or gently used handbag laden with prescription drugs, valuable photo identification, and other holiday treats.

When the wreckage was cleared away, I found my favorite party gift was a small FPGA board tucked away in the bottom of a hall closet. It came with a delicious lack of documentation or provenance. It was still in its festive red sparkfun holiday gift box.

The board itself is decked out for the season with festive red soldermask. I remember when all the cool kids used to do that. The board is a 'Papillo One' from www.GadgetFactory.net. It must be the cutest FPGA board I have ever seen.

Papillo One (with Betty O'Shannon for scale)
Photo credit: Your correspondent

Some hobbyists like evaluation boards. I'm not one of them. Where others see discount eval boards as a natural extension of the free sample heroin/semiconductor mentality, I see vendor condescension and lock-in. I think that one of the biggest differences between the original Arduino and an eval board with the same microprocessor (like Atmel's STK500) is that the Arduino is marketed to you as a product that makes sense in its own right. No pesky questions about what the size of your target market is and which industry you work in and the number of employees in your basement workshop.

I actually like the Arduino IDE. For me, though, it's enough to distribute the boards without a crippled evaluation version of a larger and more full featured crippled C compiler.

Just as the Arduino is really not very different from a number of small AVR boards, the Papillo One
is not very different from some other small boards for the Xilinx Spartan 3e. I have only spent a few minutes with the board so far. It's 'killer app' appears to be the included AVR-alike from softcores and supporting patches to let the board be used with the Arduino IDE.

For me, the hardware differences between boards makes less difference than the concept of the board. This board is for fooling around with, not for selling the Spartan 3E. I think that's a good thing.

A full review will come as soon as I can get this to replace one of the Arduinos driving my Christmas lights.