The World’s Geekiest Earrings
Posted by: skelseh on: June 29, 2010
I tried making something a bit different today, while Vince and I watched some new Marble Hornets style vids on YouTube (Get your Slenderman fix with EverymanHYBRID!). I wasn’t sure these would work, but I’m actually pretty pleased with the outcome.
Space Invader Hand-beaded Earrings in Green on PixelBeads by Skels
We’ll see if anyone likes them! I’ve been adding a lot to the shop lately in a bid to get more traffic. I’ve actually sold three little charms since being in Sydney and one was even a custom order. Fun fun.
Check out the shop while you’re here!
Night x
Edit: Seems someone did like them enough to buy them. Thanks Pablo 
How to make a Shoddy Lightbox(™!)
Posted by: skelseh on: June 20, 2010
Being the generous boyfriend he is, Vince has given me his cold. Right on a weekend. The rain I was complaining about a couple of weeks ago has since vanished into a cloudless sky, the gorgeous 33°S sun pouring over Sydney, warming the chilly winter air to a very pleasant 20ish degrees C. But we’ve got colds. Smeg it.
As a result, we haven’t felt like doing much this weekend. We managed a couple of trips to the shops and back, but nothing to write home about (or blog about?!). As such, indoor persuits has been on the menu. I, ashamedly, have restarted my subscription to World of Warcraft, more out of interest to see if it works than anything, and Vince has been enjoying a mixture of Left for Dead, Splinter Cell and Battlefield.
I have also been making a few more beaded thing for my Etsy shop too though, and today I got around to constructing a sort of lightbox to photograph them in. It’s a bit shoddy and cheap as, but it does the trick and costs only a few bucks. If you want to build your own Shoddy Lightbox™, follow these simple steps!
DIY Lightbox
You will need:
- Tape
- Stanley knife
- Steel rule
- 3x A3 sheets of tracing paper
- 1x A3 sheet of layout paper
- A box!
Since my spare room is currently doubling as a cardboard box graveyard at the moment, I wanted to use a box I already had kicking around. Ideally I would have liked to use a squarer box than the one pictured, so that the panels are all at similar distances to the items I am photographing, but it’s not completely important. Just make sure the box it at least big enough to put your items in and shoot, without getting edges in the shot.
Because I was using A3 size paper, my box’s largest sides had to be at most the size of the paper. If you need a larger lightbox swap out the A3 for more suitable sized sheets. Please note though that due to the shoddy nature of this box, large sized boxes might have some issues with stability!
Using your steel rule as a guide, start cutting out the faces of your box. You will need to leave a 1-3 cm edge as you need something to fix the tracing paper to, and the box needs to maintain as much of its stability as possible.
Work out which face of your box will be the back; you don’t need to cut this face out.
Cut your tracing paper to size to cover the two sides and the top of your box. You don’t need to cover the bottom, as leaving it open means you can photograph your items on any surface you like (see the blue mushroom photo below, where the box was just sat on top of a map to get a different background). Shoddy Lightbox is thrifty and versatile!
Cut your layout paper to match the inside width of your lightbox. Position it inside so that it forms a nice curve at the back edge of your box. This gives you your continuous background for your photos. Top tip: fix it in place with some tape or blutac, but don’t make it permanant as you may want to use different colours in the future!
Get shooting!
Position your light source (or sources) outside the box fairly close to the sides. The tracing paper will diffuse the light, spreading it through the box nicely. Using one, two or even three lamps will get different results so play around. I don’t have any lamps yet, so have been using Vince’s ridonkulously bright torch for now. I could use a touch more brightness, but have been getting some OK results as is, so far.
And there you have it. The results aren’t perfect by any means, but they are good enough to allow me to get some new things up on Etsy. Next step will be investing in a couple of good lamps to get brighter results. Hopefully I can find a good, cheap solution to that too.
Laterz!
The Re-launch
Posted by: skelseh on: June 16, 2010
Amongst all my lovely shipped belongings were my beads and stuff. I had taken down my Etsy shop before leaving the UK, as I packed all the ready-made keyrings and baggy upon baggy of colourful beads into one of the boxes. Now I’m here in Aus, all set up, I thought I’d better get the page up and running again.
I’ve renamed the shop. I thought it was better to have a named shop rather than just “My Shop”. “PixelBeads” isn’t very inventive, but it does the trick. Now all I have to do is knock up some artwork to go with it.
Which reminds me, work are sending me on an Adobe InDesign course next month. Woooo!
Laterz!
Australian TV
Posted by: skelseh on: June 13, 2010
Two things I have learned in the last day of having Television here in our Australian home:
- Most programs on Autralian telly are British.
- Australian adverts don’t sell products.
The first point might be because we have only the analogue channels they still broadcast to our aerial, and I’m still not entirely sure where – amongst the chaos of unpacking – the TV remote has got to.
The second point is absolutely true though. At the moment, this channel is showing Russel Brand’s Ponderland; not something I would normally watch but it’s late and I am remoteless. In each of the ad breaks in this show (of which they manage to cram twice as many as in the UK) I think the only products that were being advertised to actually buy were two breakfast cereals.
- There was the Quit Smoking ad, featuring footage of a recently deceased cancer patient, days before he died.
- An ad for a cancer research charity
- An ad for a fitness scheme, raising money for a cancer charity
- A charity against child abuse
- A charity for unwanted dogs
- A chartiy for the homeless
- A charity for the jobless
- An environmental warning
- The volunteer army
- The blood doner dudes
It’s no longer about parting with your money for products and services, it’s about how you actually live your life.
Even the only two adverts I remember that were featuring products weren’t happy just telling me how awesome their cereals were, they also felt the need to tell me that normal human beings with worthwhile lives actually need their breakfast cereals in order to do all the running, riding, swimming, climbing and jumping that regular people do every day. I.e. why am I sitting on my sofa like a fatass when I could be eating nutragrain cereal and mountineering?
(Probably because nutragrain cereal tastes distinctly like dog biscuits, but you get the point).
It kind of pissed me of for about……………………. that long. I mean, I don’t smoke so can’t quit, I already donate to cancer research funds, I don’t abuse children on a regular basis, I don’t abandon dogs, I’m not army material, and they won’t let me give blood here. I even give homeless people spare change sometimes, though last time I did it the woman in question spent it on a bloody Whopper. Homeless and high cholesterol: great job.
At least product ads apply to most people watching; even for the products we don’t need. Everyone should eat a nice breakfast, everyone needs clean clothes, the majority of people own cars, all women are worried about looking old, and everyone’s homes smell funny. And the best thing is if we decide not to buy said products, we don’t feel guilty about it later.
So when Russel Brand led into the second ad break by saying “Now some people are going to show your adverts to make you buy things” what he probably should have said was “Now some people are going to tell you how you should be living your life“.
…you hopeless, lazy, uncaring, ignorant, self obsessed, worthless individual, you.
Not to be confused with the way marketers now try to sell you a lifestyle instead of a product. That’s a different type of witchcraft altogether, Mr. Jobs.
Shipping Delivery Day!
Posted by: skelseh on: June 10, 2010
12 weeks and a day after our 10 shipping boxes were collected from our Banbury home by a nice man in a TNT van, the day has finally come for their delivery to our Sydney home. Hopefully not by the same nice man in a TNT van – that would be way too weird – but hopefully by someone just as helpful and considerate.
Our quote was for 6-12 weeks, so while it feels like an age has passed in the time we have been waiting, I can’t really get on my high horse about it being late. But that’s okay, the company we selected to trust all our favourite belongings to have already given me cause to write them a shitty email, shouting at a guy named Blake. That’s another boring story however.
Some venting was probably necessary though; 12 weeks is a long time to wait for… well… what have we shipped 10500 miles across the globe?? It’s like one of those magazine questions; “if you were going to a desert island and could only take one box of things, what would you take?”. Well, I can’t remember all of what I ended up putting in our 10 boxes, but here are the things that I’m looking forward to having back the most:
1) Tee Vee!
It’s a 40″ LCD and it’s not mine; it’s Vince’s. Vince worked out that it was actually worth the extra £50 it would add to our shipping bill, rather than try to flog it 2nd hand and then buy a new one when we got here. Great! Except for the last three months we have been watching only TV on the internet through our netbook’s 10 inch tinyscreens(tm), waiting impatiently for the day that we no longer have to squint, and we can finally catch up with things like 24, SGU, Lost and Burn Notice.
2) Copies of awesome British TV
We pipe these uncultured Aussies a fair bit of British telly, but apparently are too bastardish to share many of the best bits. I’ve been bigging up things like Green Wing, Spaced, Screenwipe & Newswipe etc. And now, finally, I will be able to prove just how cool I am through what TV shows I watch. Yeaahhh!
3) Vince’s Bloody XBox
The poor bugger has been a touch bored I think, and whenever I ask him how he’s enjoying Sydney, he usually says “I’ll be alright once our stuff gets here”. By “stuff”, he mostly means “XBox”, and unfortunately I dragged him out of the country mere seconds after the launch of Baffy 2, leaving our friends to muddle through mini wars without him. I sense an XBox marathon is on the horizon. Cue my living room turning back into a combat zone.
4) Coats!
Sydney gets COLD. I know you probably don’t believe me, and if you look up the weather forecast for this week you’d probably exclaim, in an embarassingly high-pitched tone, “9 degrees isn’t cold!”. Well you’re wrong; in Sydney, 9 degrees is flippin freezing. It also doesn’t help that I used many of my warmest items of clothing as extra padding in our shipping, thinking that I probably wouldn’t need any of it, and certainly not in the following 6-12 weeks. Hah.
5) My photographs and paintings and things
It’s time this shell of an apartment started to feel like a home. Filling it with framed versions of badly taken photos of our silly friends seems like a good place to start. Oh how I miss their stupid happy faces.
Short Bursts
Posted by: skelseh on: May 26, 2010
- Sydney is very very wet of late. Nearly 2 weeks of shitty weather. Though I must say I didn’t think I’d ever complain that it was cold when 14degrees.
- House very cold. This will be awesome come summer, but at the moment it sucks. No central heating to just flick on to take off the chill. This isn’t the Australia I signed up for.
- Feeling fat of late. Think I have put on 4 or 5 lbs. Going back to diet for a few weeks. Would ideally like to shift a stone. Would be happy with a half. Actually for this to work I think I need to post about it as I go. Step 1: purchase scales. Yeah that would help.
- Nothing over here is labelled with kcal. Going to have to learn the language of the kj. Am allowed 5000 per day. Also going to try to start thinking in kg instead of stones. I want to lose 6.3 of them.
- Started new job! Bit scared. Most tasks seem either good or awesome. One epic task a little daunting though. Gulp.
- Going to Melbourne! And Brisbane! And Aukland! All for work. Rock on July.
- Our belongings are now somewhere in Sydney.
…in which she it takes one Narcissist to know one Narcissist.
Posted by: skelseh on: May 17, 2010
The BBC website recently held a ‘Have Your Say’ inviting readers to share their opinions on Facebook’s privacy issues. I use Facebook very often, but as someone who has only ever put minimal information on the site and only added people I’m actually friends with as friends, I’ve never really found any reason to worry about the privacy settings, so I thought I’d take a peek at some of the comments to see what the fuss is about.
To start with, many of the comments were from people in the same situation as me; already wary of information on the Internet, so already using high security settings and not putting our phone numbers and addresses online for all to see.
Very quickly though another type of posters started ringing through; The Facebook Phobe. People who outright refuse to use Facebook or Twitter etc (that’s fine – it’s all about personal choice) but who also think that anyone who does is a waste of space.
Here’s a comment by someone who calls himself (or herself) Aristotles23:
Facebook,the internet version of an add in the personals page of the Daily Sport.For every one of you with fair enough reasons to advertise yourself and your friends,contacts,relatives,there are thousands of purely idiotic,narcissistic,self-obsessed attention seekers who seem to think that all and sundry may be interested in their new haircut and where they went to get drunk the night before.what a sad and sorry bunch of losers,to think that any of us give two hoots about the petty inconsequentialities of their day-to-day existence.Maybe in the future,when to go outside is to enter an airless,radioactive wasteland,I’ll see a reason to have a facebook page(but I doubt it),until then I will continue to disdain such witless exposure of the intimate details of my life,after all,who but an extremely bored housebound individual,could care less about my day-to-day life and its details?
Ouch.
If I were in a petty mood I might say that that’s a pretty harsh judgement from someone with such a poor grasp of grammar and punctuation.
I’ll conceed that most of the content of Facebook is pretty inane. I’ve posted boring tidbits like what I’m cooking for dinner in the past, but honestly these things are no more inane than any topic of a standard morning chat at work or weekend telephone call home to Mum.
“What did you get up to last night?”
“Oh not a lot, cooked a badass curry and then watched some Brooker on TV”
Seems pretty standard to me, it’s just now we’re using a whole new type of communication. It may not suit everyone, but please don’t be so pig-headed to say that everyone whom it does suit are a sad sorry bunch of losers.
Now there are a lot of things I don’t like about Facebook; constant friend requests from people I hardly, or don’t even know at all; the endless games and apps I’m invited to and the people who just hit ‘select all’ when picking friends to invite to things. Oh and the horrible morning after worry about what photos from the pub have been uploaded already!
But in general I’m all for Facebook. If email is the internet version of a two way phone call, Facebook is the internet version of having a chat in a common room; anyone can join in if they want to and actually many status updates – no matter how seemingly dull – result in amusing or interesting exchanges between friends.
Since moving to the other side of the planet I’ve found Facebook to be even more valuable as a way of keeping in touch with and updating friends and family on our progress here. Time zones, insanely expensive phone calls and poor internet connections meant that talking on via phone – Skype or otherwise – wasn’t particularly convenient, and using Facebook meant I got to update everyone at once. Then for them, rather than sitting down and making time for reading and replying to a big long email from me, they could just log in to FB whilst watching TV and comment if they felt the need.
Sure, it’s not quite as personal as a letter or a phone call, but we live in the 21st century now, and I don’t see why I should lose touch with so many of my friends back home just because I run out of time writing to them all.
Aristotles23, by the way, has made over 6 pages of posts in the last month on BBC’s Have Your Say; some of which are long walls of text about a range of different subjects that (s)he seems to feel very strongly about. Another poster, Doug of Durban, classes any and all ‘Facebookers’ as;
…sorry people who have too much time on their hands, and no lives outside their PC’s or Blackberry’s…
I wonder why he, Aristotles23 and various other ‘Have Your Say-ers’ assume that they are in any way better – or even different in that respect.
…in which it’s a small world, after all.
Posted by: skelseh on: May 16, 2010
Life is governed by telephone numbers.
At least, this is an idea addressed by Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. While this idea may seem as nuts as the thought that the Earth is just a giant science experiment run by little white mice, there sure have been a fair few coincidences in my life so far which could be taken as good evidence that it isn’t so much of a daft idea than you would think.
One example of this is my candidate number for my GCSE exams. I’m not going to type that in, because I’m paranoid, but for the sake of this example my candidate number was 4183. Every exam would see a little red card with this number printed on it, sitting on the corner of my ricketly old grafittied desk. As such, it soon became etched into my brain.
A couple of years later, when I was given the mobile number of a guy I had a huge crush on, I was able to remember it pretty easily because I instantly recognised the last four digits: 4183.
A year or two later I was at university, finding myself in dorm room 418.
Up until a few weeks ago, my extension number at work was 4813.
There have been various other occasions where either some of those numbers crop up in order, or all of the numbers crop up in different orders. Perhaps it is because I tend to notice patterns in numbers (and as a result have a slightly scary memory for phone numbers and birthdays) that I have noticed this, but it’s there all the same.
Most people would say that it is just a coincidence, but there are some people out there who believe that there is no such thing as a coincidence. To them, these recurring numbers would mean something bigger and far more philosophical than the 418th room in the building, like whatever the writers were intending to do with the lottery numbers in Lost. You know, before they gave up on a structured plot alltogether.
I wonder what those people would make then, of another weird coincidence I keep noticing every now and then…
In year 8, so at about 13 years old, I went away for an activities week with school. This week was organised for kids of both my year group and the one above, meaning that for the first time we got to know some of the older kids.
One of these kids was “Mark”. I never really got to know him that well, but this was the first time I became aware of who his was. After that though, I seemed to bump into Mark all around school and around town. When working on a closed site in the middle of nowhere during my gap year he showed up at the office – he was working somewhere on site. When I moved to Brighton for University I spotted him on a train to campus – he was at the other uni in the city. When I moved back home and started working in the town I saw him walking to work many mornings.
I see him, and I’m pretty sure he sees me; but the sad thing is that, since we never talked very much on that first trip in year 8 and have only passed each other since, we’ve never said a word.
The other day, whilst cyberstalking friends on Facebook, I noticed in the top right hand corner a ‘friends suggestion’ based on 2 or 3 mutual friends. Sure enough it was Mark. Even from the other side of the world this guy is bumbling around in my metaphorical peripheral vision.
If he showed up in Sydney in a few months, I would be totally unsurprised.
…in which… Blimey Dingo! There’s a Possum on the Roof!
Posted by: skelseh on: May 1, 2010
A few nights ago, whilst snuggled up in my brand new Ikea bed, I was stirred from my slumber by a scraping sound coming from the wall outside. The noise went on, and eventually I opened my eyes and started to wonder about what it could be. It was pretty loud and on the wall of the bedroom, but getting louder and definitely outside.
I looked toward the window on the wall the noise was coming from. Light from the streetlamp on the road was shining through the window, casting shadows of the leafy bush outside onto our venitian blinds. There was a slight breeze, but it could not have been a branch making that racket.
Suddenly a small shadow appeared at the bottom of the window. For a moment I was convinced it was the hand of an intruder, climbing up a ladder to the window. I started to panic, fumbling around for a torch or my phone or something, but when I looked back, the shadow had moved all the way up the window and instead of an arm of a burgler, it was a small animal actually climbing up the mosquito mesh on the outside of our sash windows.
I got out of bed and went over, waking Vince as I went, and I sharply pulled the blind up.
I made the little bugger jump, and he lost his footing falling to the window ledge. Here he stayed though, curiously looking back through the window at me, and I peered at him, exclaiming, “Bloody hell Vince, I think it’s a Possum”.
For a minute or two we just looked at each other. I tapped the glass and he barely even flinched. I even got the torch and lit him up to have a good look and he really didn’t seem to mind. Eventually though he got bored and climbed back into the bush to start eating flowers, leaving me to go back to bed.
Since then we’ve heard him another three times, only one of which stirred me enough to get me out of bed. Again that time I opened the blinds to find him perched on the window ledge. I said hello, shut the blind, and he was as quiet as a mouse after that.
Apparently possums can be a bit of a pest in rural areas – eating peoples flowers and getting into loft spaces. But for now, our little Ringtail Possum is being pretty well-behaved. He can chew on downstairs’ flowers as often as he likes.
…in which she makes a list of stuff.
Posted by: skelseh on: April 27, 2010
The benefit of Twitter and other such microblogs is that you don’t really need a whole lot of time to keep them updated. Short random bursts of information are all you need to write. Of course this also means that short random bursts are all you can write, unless you want to end up like my friend @bobbyllew by using each individual tweet as one paragraph of a much longer message. I love ol’ Bobby, but even I sometimes can’t be arsed to read the whole schpeil.
The problem with proper blogs on the other hand, is that you feel compelled to do the opposite. – especially if you’ve gone a good week or so without saying anything. It feels as if you think that you need to think a post through, structure it correctly and make it entertaining. It can be quite taxing.
Today though I’m saying “sod it”, and posting a list of random twitter-like musings that may or may not be connected. I don’t know – I haven’t even thought them through yet. I’m wreckless that way.
Random Musings Re: Living in Sydney – So Far:
- We’ve now lived in Sydney for 5 weeks. In some ways it feels longer – that Taxi ride with the Korean chap seems so distant now. In other ways it feels less – it means I’m over half way through my stint working with the concepting team, and I’m not sure I’m ready to start thinking about leaving them…
- It’s cold today. OK; not England cold, but my toes are nippy and I could have used my scarf. Sydney does experience Autumn and Winter too and while it isn’t “COLD cold”, there’s no central heating to just flick on to take off the chill. I’m actually sitting under a blanket right now.
- We had our first house guest!
Just hangin' out
It’s a Huntsman. They aren’t venomous, but can bite and this one was a good 8cm in diammeter and moved in that fast and creepy way that only spiders can move. Alas – he had to go.
- Spider spay works! Kills em dead.
- They don’t sell PG Tips here. I can buy pretty much anything from home at a normal supermarket here – HP Sauce, Marmite, Coco Pops, Frozen Yorkshire Puds – even Tetley’s Tea – but not a single pyramid bag in sight. Barbarians.
- Shopping is a case of just learning a different language. Replace shop names with new words and you’re plain sailing. Sainsbury’s is now Woolworths; Tesco = Coles; B&Q = Bunnings; Poundland = Red Dollar; Debenhams = Myer; Comet = Harvey Norman; Dixons = Dick Smith. Yeah – we find that one amusing too.
- I miss driving, but I can’t afford a car yet. Public transport isn’t too bad though, and for 48 bux (currently £29 in real money) I get a weekly pass that lets me pretty much travel anywhere around Sydney on trains, buses and ferries. Could be a touch cheaper, but it is very handy when your other alternative is walking, and your cheap Tesco trainers have already got holes in.
- I’m worried that our house is going to look like an Ikea showroom. We’ve yet to find other inexpensive places to get our furniture. Hopefully a trip to a place called Fantastic Furniture on Thursday will solve this; the name sure sounds promising.
- Our massive lounge area now has a massive sofa suite to go in it. A very awesome chap at work has just had a new suite delivered to his beautiful home (that he built himself), and just gave us his old one. It comprises possibly the world’s most comfortable armchair, 2-seater and 4 seater with chaise. After it was delivered on Saturday Vince and I did not move for 2 hours.
- I want my shipping to arrive. Boats are too effing slow.
