Look to your right. Whatever object you see there is your designated weapon in the upcoming Zombie Apocalypse. Comment on this post to tell me what it is.

After getting over 20 replies I had the brain wave that this would make a pretty cool cartoon, so I set about the epic task of drawing everyone weilding their weapons, ready to defend against a brain-thirsty zombie horde.

I’m finally finished. Check it out. Tell your friends. We need to be better equipped.

[Click for the Facebook comments, and the full size version]

In February, just before finding out I would be moving to Australia, Vince and I purchased a brand new all-in-one printer from Hewlett-Packard – the HP Photosmart Premium C309g, to be specific. No complaints, it worked swell. Being a brand new purchse we decided to pay the extra money it cost to ship the thing over to Australia with us, rather than get a crappy second-hand price for the old one, and fork out fresh for a new one in Aus.

Which was a fabulous idea – until this week. The ink has run out in all cartridges. I made a note of the information and went to Dick Smith to buy new ink. None of the cartridges in the store said “364″ on them, but the “564″s said they were compatible with the C309g, and the Dick Smith employee was more than happy to sell them to us as replacement ink for our printer.

I installed them tonight, only to be told by my printer that they are incompatible. A quick google later and I discover that HP – for some reason – lock their ink by region. The cartridge is the same, the ink is the same, the microchip on the cartridge is not: it just tells my printer to sod off.

I can apparently phone HP’s Customer Service line and be talked through the long process of regionalising* my printer. Unfortunately this requires me installing all of the HP software on my PC, and having this printer attached to it via a weird  USB-printer cable. This is probably my fault, but since it’s a wireless printer and we were saving space in our shipping, any printer cables we had got thrown out. It’s a wireless printer! It’s why we bought it!

Problem number two with this solution is that their offices are only open during normal working hours, when I am at work; Not sitting at home with the printer.

My other options are to get Mum to buy ink for me and ship it over – but this means waiting a few weeks to be able to print, plus the fact that the $90 I spent at Dick Smith on ink will be wasted. Or buy a new printer. But that’s what they WANT you to do.

I’m sure they have their reasons for doing this – but pissing off their customers is the price they pay for it. I will no longer purchase HP products in the future, for fear of similar dumb-fuckery.

* Worth noting that while this regionalisation is possible, it is only possible up to 3 times. Not an issue since by the time I’m living in another region I’ll have bought a printer by one of their competitors. But still pretty annoying just for the principle.

Additional: In googling for the region issue, I found out that the microchip are also expiry locked – if you’re still using them past the date at which HP think you should have been out to buy more ink, they’ll just stop working anyway, even if they are full. Which may explain why all 5 of my cartiridges became ‘empty’ all at once anyway.

In the meantime, I have started a new blog (I know, silly right?!). But I recently spent a big wodge of my savings on a nice new DSLR and a couple of lenses. Rather than get bored of that after a few months like normal, I’m trying my best to get really into it. One tip i read was to make a photo blog.

So I did: http://clickclicksnapsnap.wordpress.com/

You can follow smaller versions of my ramblings on twitter here: http://twitter.com/Skels. Should I start posting on this blog again I will undoubtedly let you know about it there.

Twitter is pretty awesome actually.

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

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!

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!

Visit PixelBeads

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!

1. Most programs on Autralian telly are British.
2. 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.

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.

• 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.