BlogDogIt

In the last couple of weeks the nogoodniks have taught their robot armies to defeat the Geeklog® Capcha system and as a result BlogDogIt has seen an explosion in new members. I hope that the robot's feelings were not hurt when I deleted their shiny metal asses.

::Ben over at Geeklog.fr wasted little time devising a foil for our Cracking Nemessi. He chose to utilize the slider control in place of the vision test to determine your humanity. Geeklog operators (V1.8.0 and up) will want to pick up Capcha plugin 3.5.2 from Geeklog.fr.

It will be interesting to see how long this little brain storm will hold the spammers at bay.

This device replaces all instances of the old-school Capcha around the site here. Please let us know if it causes you any problems (unless you are a robot in which case you can choke on it.) [smiley:;)]

It's a picture + a few lines of text blog, featuring history, art, old photographs, maps, and more.

Dutch.Man.Amersfoort.Creative.IT.Music.History

 The World upside down

The convention that North is at the top on most modern maps was established by the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy (90-168 AD) and was adopted by other cartographers.

Happy Halloween!

ButterMyButtons

Sometimes when playing pool it really helps to have a bridge stick around for those hard to reach, across the table cue shots. No self respecting billiard parlor would be complete without one. A while back I picked up a couple of shorty pool cues with the intention of fitting one with a bridge head while keeping the other one for the "why is there a bookcase here?" shot.

Today I finally decided I would take care of my "lack of bridge head" problem. I do have a scroll saw and figured if I couldn't use it to cut out a bridge head, what's the point? So I hop on the friendly interwebs and search for "billiards bridge head template" (thinking surely I can not be the only scroll sawyer with this idea.) I turned up some pictures but not a template per se. 

I found a head-on shot of a bridge head with the shape I am most accustomed to and PhotoShopped it into a two-color image and printed it to size. Click on the image below for a PDF template - ready to print out.

Download Template: BridgeHead.pdf

I cut out the printed shape and headed out to the workshop to find a piece of quarter-inch plywood to impart this shape unto. The scraps I had on hand were slightly too narrow (and I would not waste anything larger on this project.) A glance in the right direction revealed a "drop" of quarter-inch plexiglass that would be just the ticket. This plexi had its protective paper covering still attached. I laid the template shape on the plexiglass blank and spray painted over it to transfer the outline.

A slow and steady pass through the scroll saw, a stop at the drill press and some judicious sanding resulted in the handy-dandy bridge-headed shorty pictured above. For the record, the first shot taken with this device in a real game resulted in the successful pocketing of the desired ball - what more do you want?