Things I Won't Be Buying

The cats. Would go. Completely berserk.

I suppose the Flytech Dragonfly is more of an entothopter than an ornithopter, technically.

There's a lot of porpoising, but it flies quite well, for a (expected-to-be) pretty inexpensive and durable toy.

This is much more elegant, but also far more fragile.

This bird's pretty much got it down, but I bet it's not cheap.

This one's cheating.

You can start ornithoptering with free-flight (no remote control) rubber power...

...(note cat in this video that wants nothing whatsoever to do with the thing), then move on to something fancier...

Full-scale versions are about as practical as you'd expect:

Not actually guaranteed to make you think

Putty at 24mm

The makers of the "Crazy Aaron's Thinking Putty" I reviewed a while ago are still in business, and have as is their wont come up with some special limited-edition colours for the holiday season. The stuff makes an excellent gift, and I have of course got a profit-skimming affiliate link.

But wait, there's more.

M'verygoodfriends at the RLT.com empire of nifty toy sites now have the inventively named SuperPutty.com, wherein they sell their own whimsically tinted dilatant compound variant.

Colour aside, SuperPutty is exactly the same stuff as the Thinking and Silly versions. There's not a lot in it pricing-wise, either.

One fifth-pound can of Thinking Putty (that's 91 grams, a decent handful equal to seven standard Silly Putty "eggs") is $US6.95, $US7.95 or $US8.95, depending on whether you pick an exciting colour (including the temperature-sensitive colour-shifting versions), or something more traditional (like good old basic pink).

Fifth-pound jars from SuperPutty are $US7.95 or $US8.95, except for the "Mystery Colour" option where you get whatever they're having the hardest time selling, but only have to pay $US4.95 for a fifth-pound.

Thinking Putty sell one pound bags for $US20 to $US28. SuperPutty sell half pound jars for $US14 to $US16. SuperPutty also have combination colour sets for all sizes of putty (including their little tenth-pound jars), which are as you'd expect a bit cheaper than buying the jars separately, except for the three-colour half-pound jar sets, which are for some reason a bit more expensive than the separate purchases. Perhaps I'm missing something there.

Both companies have reasonable delivery prices, too - SuperPutty will deliver one fifth-pound jar within the contiguous United States for $US5.95, while SuperPutty Crazy Aaron charges about 50 cents more.

Both ship outside the USA, too, though that'll (a) be rather expensive and (b) quite possibly not get the parcel to you before the 25th of December.

If all you want is putty, SuperPutty have a fine cheapskate last minute gift option in their Mystery Colour fifth-pound jars. But for everything else Thinking Putty definitely have the edge. A lot more colours, better priced big bags, and better containers for the standard-sized putty. The wide Thinking Putty tin works better than SuperPutty's plastic jam jar.

So if all you want is putty, and the cheap Mystery option doesn't grab you, go to Aaron. It continues to be an excellent gift for almost anybody, including yourself.

RLT have tons of other stuff, though, which you can roll into one order along with your SuperPutty. All of the RLT sites share one shopping cart.

They have, for instance, got trebuchets (and many other catapult kits - one day I hope to have time to build the Mini Mangonel they sent me), Shot-Blades, Zero Blasters, Airzookas, remote controlled fighting tanks, Catapult Watches, and various other toys including some I reviewed in the same piece as the Thinking Putty.

They've even got a bunch of "Extreme Exercise Equipment" now, though I hesitate to recommend devices that so obviously want to kill me.

So, to recap: For rapid emergency bouncing-putty gift purchasing: Thinking Putty.

For a Santa-sack full of weird stuff more than sufficient to make all of your relatives' children into your glassy-eyed slaves, and putty: RLT.

Shoelectricity

First, there were Pikashoes.

Then ELECTRi-FRiED.

Now, behold: ELECTRi-FRiED II!

Beats using dinner plates on a linoleum floor

Life board kit.

A while ago, the Make: magazine people told the world about a neat little circuit board kit that plays a four-by-four version of Conway's Life. The kit's made by Dropout Design, one of the front-runners in the recent nerd-craze for LED-lit disco dance floors.

It was, regrettably, not actually buyable at the time, but it is now. $US19.99 from Make or, ahem, ten bucks from the manufacturers.

Four-by-four Life is kind of like four-square Tic-Tac-Toe, but the boards can be linked together at the edges to make a larger playfield - and you could presumably use long wires to link the edges of your playfield to each other for some good old toroidal wraparound action.

The docs (PDF) don't explain how the cells actually get populated in the first place, but this is the sort of thing that I presume they've, you know, thought of.

A more serious problem is that making a reasonable-sized playfield would get expensive pretty quickly. A mere 64-by-64-cell field would cost more than $US2500.

Those of us without the money to cover a wall with Life boards may prefer to try the disturbingly complete Mirek's Cellebration, which plays Life and just about every other cellular automaton anyone's thought of, probably including the rules which will turn out to govern the behaviour of quarks.

(Note also that the Life "Glider" is the Universal Hacker Emblem. I'm not entirely sure that I'd want to be represented by something that tears off in a straight diagonal line to nowhere until it dies, but the Glider certainly is an excellent nerd shibboleth.)

Side note: I've found two games in which Life is an easter egg. ADOM's herb bushes obey Life rules, and so does the fungus in Populous II.

This can be used to devastating effect in both games. Create an R pentomino in either one, and you'll be rolling in herbs in the first game, and turning the entire population of an area into wet sucking sounds in the second.

Anybody know of any other hidden Lifes?

Investment advice

Don't spend nine thousand dollars on a Playstation 3.

Spend several hundred dollars on a 918, a 920, a 924, a 926 and, drum roll please, a 928. Boxed and hardly played with, apparently.

The Galaxy Explorer by itself is a $US200-plus item. Which, of course, is why (comparatively) sane people just build their own. Paint "LL 928" on a 4x1 blue brick with White-Out or something, if you must.

I was wondering if nobody would notice this lot, but no such luck. It got too rich for my blood a few days ago - place your bets on the winning bid!

(The same seller's got some less gold-mine-ish sets on sale as well. If you're an Australian who's always wanted one of those hideous-but-excellent-parts Robot Command Centres, now's the time.)

Electricity versus booze

25kV(ish) flyback transformer versus rum:

See it battle with beer and pancake syrup here.

On Oobleck

Small scale:

(A real scientist wouldn't have interrupted an important experiment for such a silly reason.)

Large scale:

More information.

I've made PVA/borax polymer before (I don't think you really need a lot of ventilation when dissolving PVA glue in water...), but not oobleck.

To the supermarket!

Do not be the unplugging

The instructions for the fire syringe I bought from Educational Innovations are quite entertaining.

Helpful instructions

I've only used the syringe (a.k.a. a "fire piston") with bits of paper or cotton so far. They work, but they're not very exciting. This page suggests match heads or flash paper (or "punk", which I'm afraid only means stuff that smoulders, not what you might think).

I, of course, have some flash paper, which I keep in the red-painted ammo-box along with my other Stuff That's A Bit Too Much Fun (it's flash cotton, actually, but that's the same stuff).

So I anticipate being struck on the chin by the rapidly rising piston of my fire syringe in the near future.