u/TygerTung

I have been doing research for the last couple of hours, but everything I see seems to be a couple of years old at least really, or even if it isn't, the places are often no longer offering it?

Is BYO a dying breed of thing? What reasonably priced places offer it?

So my daughter is learning Ukelele, and I think she would quite like an electric ukelele as a Christmas present.

I was looking them up on the internet and saw there were a bunch of instructables for making them. I was also looking up these vintage '70s electric guitars and saw there were these ones which have a one piece solid wood neck and body.

So my question is:

Is there any reason why I couldn't laminate up some nice rimu (I have a bunch around) and make a one piece solid body electric ukulele?

I have a CNC router at my workplace which I can use, and I can design stuff in CAD no problem and I can machine the CNC. I figured I can do most of the cutting on the CNC, and use the CNC laser cutter to cut out the pick guards and things.

Would rimu be OK for the neck, or do I need to laminate a difference type of wood into the rimu for the neck?

Does this scheme seem feasible?

Thanks.

Main View

My 10 year old son likes to listen to audiobooks on CD, especially when he's going to sleep at night. He has been using a discman hooked up to an amp module, but it keeps going through batteries so it was always a temporary solution.

I bought a bunch of broken CDROM drives for $1. This one apparently won't work on the computer and the plastic frame is cracked inside (well at least that is what's written on it). It still reads CDs just fine though. The power supply module, I scavenged from a junk pile at work, most of the internal wiring is from a broken PC power supply, as is the power socket and switch. The amplifier module is one of those cheap TDA7297 modules from Aliexpress. It sounds pretty good actually. My son built the passive tone and volume module himself.

The CDROM drive wants 5V as well as 12V so there is one of those dirt cheap buck converter modules as to step down the voltage for the 5V rail. All the metal parts are earthed, so there shouldn't be any shock risk.

I made the acrylic case on the laser cutter at my work. Came out pretty well, although I got the hole for the power inlet the wrong way around and has to made it a bit wider :(

Still fairly happy with it though. I think see through stuff looks cool.

View from the upper front

View of the guts

Installed on the shelf.

So I posted a few days ago about attempting to make an optical drive bezel I painted white a little darker to suit the rest of the machine. I gestated it for 24 hours in tea, and it made a very slight difference I think, so I steeped it in some coffee for another 30 hours. To save on costs, I boiled up some coffee grinds out of my moka pot. I also added a little instant coffee. I didn't want to use precious new coffee on this.

I think it has become a little darker and matches a bit better. It is quite similar to the paint on the case, and a little lighter than the floppy drive, but still more more pale than the front plastic of the case. I think it is worth while, but can't expect a big change.

First picture is of before the treatment, second is sitting in the jar of tea. I didn't get a picture of it in the coffee, but it looks much the same except more murky and oily. Third picture is of after the treatment process.

Looking at these pictures now, I think it does look a lot better. If you try to do this for yourself, you need to gently rinse it under a tap after, else you get tide marks as it dries.

Before attempting to dye

In jar of tea

After steeping in tea and coffee

So I'm building a sleeper in an old late 90s Supermicro full tower case. It is a yellowed sort of beige of course.

It is very tall, and the 5.25" drive bays are up the top and the motherboard is down the bottom, so all my IDE cables are too short, as the IDE socket on the motherboard is right down the bottom of the motherboard, so I can't really use a factory beige colour optical drive.

All my SATA optical drives are black, and none of the bezels from the old IDE drives would fit the newer SATA optical drives, so I thought I'd paint one of the black optical drives with a spraycan.

Unfortunately the shoppe only had white spraypaint. It is matt white so the sheen level is good, but it looks too white compared with the yellowed case.

Has anyone had any luck with artificially yellowing painted plastic? Would soaking it in tea or coffee work perhaps?

I think it would look nicer if it were more yellowed.

I went out with my wife for a date, last night, maybe the first time this year? The place we went had really nice ambience and decor, but the food was just OK.

I was thinking that actually my favourite type of restaurant is actually the type with terrible decor, and rubbish ambience, but the food is really nice and the cost is very reasonable.

What places do you think are like this nowadays? Don't get out very much now due to finances really, plus it gets expensive if going with my kids as well.

Now that landline telephones have been removed from almost every household, children have become isolated. When I was a kid, I used to ring up my mates on the blower all the time, chatting away for fun, arranging to go over to each other's house, and just having a fun social time. It was good connection outside of school. Probably something to do when I was bored.

Conversely, now there are no landlines, my kids cannot call up their mates. I'm not giving cellphones to my kids until they reach high school, and I don't think many other parents are either. Giving smartphones to kids is going to be a disaster anyway unless the operating is highly stripped down as otherwise they would just watch mindless videos all day, and quite possibly view a bunch of questionable content.

I feel the loss of landlines has had unforeseen consequences. This may be a contributing factor to social media addition.

I am trying to work out a way of bringing back this technology for my kids and their friends, but it isn't a trivial task without paying some kind of subscription.

I have an idea of getting old defunct android phones, building a stripped down android version with no programmes whatsoever on it, and only installing a programme capable of calling other android phones configured the same using wifi, but I'm not a programmer or anything so it will take a little working out. What's more, it will possibly need a separate build of the operating system for each different model of phone.

I'm just a little sad and disappointed for the loss of this wonderful technology for the youth of today.

Bring back old school phones!

Went past the Cashmere playground and saw the Pizzalicious van is back. Great news, as the wood fired pizzas from there are off the charts excellent.