bubbles

I keep waiting for Zubbles to be available. For my nieces and nephew. Honest. I personally would have no interest whatsoever in, say, filling a bubble machine with brightly colored bubbles and running it on the front porch. Anyway, the wikipedia entry now claims availability in 2008.

In the meantime, I came across a recipe to make your own pink and blue soap bubbles using pH indicators. You can also find bubbles that glow gold under black light. And a bubble machine to go with. There are even machines that'll blow smoke-filled bubbles.

But nothing yet that's brightly colored.

Follow-up: there's even a wind-powered bubble machine along with directions to make your own.

a million superballs can't all be wrong

Haven't had much time to post lately. Between the MPRE and picking up all the other stuff that I had to postpone because of it, life's been a little busy. A friend sent this link, though, to an ad for the Sony Bravia television. There's something meditative about listening to someone sing while you watch a million superballs bounce down a hill. (And no, I don't want to think about what it took to clean them up afterwards. There are far bigger messes developing in the world right now than anything resulting from a million superballs.)

you know it's the 21st Century when . . .

You know it's the 21st Century when the neighbor kids are playing Red Light / Green Light . . . while riding around in circles in a two seat electric toy car.

Sure wish I'd had a two-seat electric car when I was playing that game.

OK, back to work. The air is thick with "Red light!" "Green light!"

reusable highlighter, part 3

I might not be too bright, but at least I don't give up easy. Behold the implements of destruction for the next assault on the problem of the reusable highlighter. In this episode, our hero attempts to reload a Bic Brite Liner liquid-filled highligher using Noodler's Firefly ink. Here's a picture of the firefly ink in natural light. Since I don't have an eyedropper, I poured some into a Nalgene bottle with a squeeze top. Be prepared to have your fingers highlighted during this process.

Here's what it looks like with the flash turned on. Notice the unearthly glow. Ooh! Aaah!

Right, lets get down to business. Do not take the back end off the highlighter (the bit the pliers are pointing to.) The barrel is sealed inside, so if you try to pour ink in from that end, you'll just get ink on yourself. Trust me on this one.

Instead, take the front end off. Not the felt bit--which, incidentally, pops out easily enough but doesn't give you enough of a hole through which to pour ink--but the housing around the felt bit. Use your pliers to grasp the yellow plastic just behind the felt. If you turn it a little, it will rotate inside the barrel. So rotate it back and forth and pull on it. Eventually, you can work it out of the barrel.

Now you can pour ink into the barrel. Be careful about over-filling it. You don't want it squirting out as you stick the tip back in. After you've filled the barrel (over the sink, just in case you spill--not that I ever spill(ed)), you can re-insert the tip of the highlighter. At that point, it should work good as new. Or almost new, anyway.

So, is it worth it? Honestly, probably not. It's kind of a pain. I may keep doing it just because throwing away the empty highlighter after only a week or two of use offends my rather peculiar sense of aesthetics, but for most people it'd more trouble than it's worth. On the other hand, if someone would make a nice felt nib for a cheap fountain pen with a converter, that'd simplify the whole process quite a bit.

follow-up on fountain pen highlighter

I've given up on using the italic fountain pen as a highlighter for a couple reasons. The first is that the nib on the pen is too narrow and its squared-off shape makes it too hard to lay down a stroke of highlighting ink. As I pull it across the text, it highlights only about half the line, and if I'm not very careful I get skips in the line. The second is that the Firefly ink, while initially fluorescent, seems to fade to ordinary yellow after a few days. Coupled with the narrow lines, it makes the highlighting difficult to see.

I haven't entirely given up on the reuseable highlighter idea, though. Bic makes a line of liquid-filled highlighters called the "Brite Liner" series which I quite like because I can see when one's about to run out. The next time I empty one, I'll probably experiment to see if there's a way to refill it with the Firefly ink.

I wonder if someone makes felt nibs for fountain pens.

Update: follow-up here.

reusable highlighter

Some time ago, I was lamenting the number of highlighters I tend to kill throughout a semester in some of these classes that require a lot of reading. It seems such a waste to have to throw away the whole pen when it's drained.

Well, now I've discovered an alternative and am trying it out. Noodler's Ink makes a line of highlighter inks for fountain pens. I'm using their fluorescent yellow Firefly Ink (which looks yellow on the page but an unearthly green in the jar.) I've loaded it into a pen normally used for Italic-style calligraphy which has a nice, broad nib.

So far, it's working pretty well. The pen's not really designed to flow this much ink at once, so I'm still playing with the technique. I like the fact that I have more control over where the highlighting goes and can refill the pen when it's empty, but on the other hand the pen's a little long for the pen pockets in the backpack. I'll probably post an update once I've had more time to use it.

Update: follow-up post here.

flying qualities report: Micro Mosquito helicopter

I'm doing everything I can to procrastinate working on a paper. Part of the procrastination includes playing with a new toy, Radio Shack's Micro Mosquito radio controlled helicopter.

Yeah, I know, totally geeky. So sue me. I'm having fun playing with it till I can afford the ten grand it'll take me to get a real rotorcraft rating. :-)

The Micro Mosquito is an indoor radio controlled helicopter with counter-rotating rotors and pretty amazing engineering. It weighs maybe a hundred grams, fits on the palm of my hand, and has survived repeated, ahem, "rough landings" from as high as ten feet with no permanent damage, though I do occasionally have to pop a piece back in place.

Helicopters are, by nature, unstable. Most airplanes want to fly--take your hands off the controls and most of them will right themselves and keep going. In contrast, you have to fly a helicopter constantly. The MM's counter-rotating design makes it more stable than most choppers and particularly easy to hover, but you still have to stay on top of it. If it bumps something while moving, or you give it too sudden a burst of forward thrust, it can start swinging around the rotors like a pendulum. If it swings too much, the rotors will eventually bump into each other and you're looking at one of those "rough landings."

The MM doesn't have a vertical stabilizer, which means its directional stability isn't so hot. While flying forward, air currents or friction in the drivetrain might suddenly kick the nose left or right. You have to watch and correct for it, but correct fairly gently or it'll start swinging around like I mentioned before. Our house is a bit drafty, leading to occasionally rough flying conditions, especially near hallways. In fact, the MM will sometimes get caught in up-, down-, or side-drafts that I can't even feel, sometimes too strong for the rotor system to overcome. I've installed the included "for extra forward speed" kit to help punch through some of the drafty areas.

My only complaint with the toy so far is that there's sometimes some odd control lag. For instance, I might tell it to thrust forward, but the tail rotor won't respond for a second or two, and there's an occasional lag in throttle response. The lag can lead to pilot-induced oscillations, where I tell it to go up to avoid the couch, it eventually responds, and by that time I'm saying "no, too high," then later it starts coming down and winds up bobbing drunkenly towards the coffee table. I don't know whether it's in the control system or maybe we just have a noisy radio environment. Otherwise, it's been a blast buzzing around the living room, avoiding the air currents from the wall furnace, and trying to land it on the helipad.