I'm quite impressed by the level of finish of these 3D printed items.

It was a nice sunny day so I got out into the shed and after a bit of tidying was able to have another go at casting the bronze pendant of The Horned Reaper from Dungeon Keeper 2.

In the end it took me two goes because I didn't get the bronze hot enough the first time, but I'm quite pleased with the end result.

If you're interested in the process, you may prefer to start here instead.

Still there after all these years:

I thought that Vince Cable wasn't the sharpest tool in the box when he proposed a graduate tax. It sounded like an inefficient way to fund higher education and risked begging the question as to why people who benefited from free education in the past shouldn't also pay the tax.

I thought that he was foolish to say that he might not vote for his own legislation. He could have just said that serious discussions were in progress and avoided an embarrassing "clarification" later.

I thought that he displayed a somewhat inflated sense of his own importance when he said that he thought he could bring down the government by resigning.

Today we've heard the recording of him telling the two women he thought were his constituents that he was going to block the Sky buyout of the majority of BSkyB shares, but couldn't talk about it because it was a legal matter!

What kind of idiot do you have to be to say that you're doing something that you know is wrong? After the battering that MP's reputations have (rightly) taken as a result of the expenses scandal, you might reasonably expect that MP's (and certainly ministers) would have the sense to keep quiet about anything they wouldn't wish to have broadcast to the world.

I'd never really noticed before, but my local branch of Morrisons has placed the pot noodles next to the cans of fish. I only know it now because my quest for sardines (or pilchards) took me directly past a notably large lady who was dropping the things into her trolley.

but this one made me laugh out loud. :-)

I find it deeply ironic that the the followers of a man who chose to hang out with with twelve other blokes are so intolerant of homosexuality.

The contract finally ended last Friday and I am now free to do whatever I want until the money runs out. :-)

In practice this means that I must now tidy the garden and the house, sort through the accumulated piles of junk and take the useless stuff for recycling, update my cv before I forget what I've been doing, look around to see what sort of work can be had within a reasonable distance from home and then acquire any new skills that I need to get the next contract.

If you think the above sounds trivial, that's just because it's the edited highlights from my to do list. :-)

This afternoon, in a fit of enthusiasm brought on by the sunshine, I decided to mow the small patch of weeds, wild flowers and grass in the back garden. This is a job that I usually manage to put off until everything is horribly overgrown and the end result after 10 years of neglect is a less than smooth patch of ground with several highish lumps from old ant hills.

Our lawnmower is an excellent device which was clearly designed to keep a well maintained lawn trimmed to a sensible length and its little plastic blade ought to be good to cut one the size of ours many times over. On our lawn, they last until you hit an anthill, a twig, a dense patch of overly long grass, or whatever else is lurking in the depths of the grass.

After the second blade broke, I decided to make a metal replacement to see whether it would do a better job and after a bit of snipping, drilling and filing I had turned part of the metal case from an old floppy disk drive into a passable copy of one of the plastic ones.

I fitted it to the mower and finished the job, giving the ant hills an extra once over for good luck. The results were everything I'd hoped for: a flatter lawn and no visible wear to the new blade. Of course I'll have to be extra careful not to run over anything I don't want sliced, but I grew up with proper mowers with whirling blades of death so I'm always extremely careful to keep the cable from going under the blade.