A six part video blog by Gavin Atkins voyage in his home built open boat Onawind Blue from Spain to Ibiza during the summer of 2009. Clearly a man that is not totally at peace in himself as he begins this voyage. By the end of it his outlook has completely changed. Just goes to prove, Change the way you look at things and things change the way they look.
Part 1
A really great video blog of pure sailing adventure and what you can do on the will to go and a micro budget. Great stuff.
Roger buys a yacht on Ebay and sails solo down the Intracoastal Waterway on the east coast of the USA from October to December. Youtube made the vid/sound out of sync hence blank spells where it catches up and some stills missed. Disappointing upload as video quality also reduced. Weathers hurricane Sandy in Cape May which was not part of the holiday plan!
Errors in the audio – I keep saying the Petuxant River by Elizabeth City and it is the Pasquatank River. And it is the Pungo River not the Pungwe River (which is in Zimbabwe!). And I apologise for my pronounciation which I’m sure is all wrong.
An excellent “Look at life” video clip from The Rank Organisation dated August 1964 looking at the motorcycle culture and the 59 Club in England. Interesting head ware all over the place. How times change.
Hold Fast: Stories of maniac sailors, anarchist castaways, and the voyage of the S/V Pestilence… Over the course of two winters, four members of the Anarchist Yacht Clubb rescued a derelict boat from the inhospitable waters of Ft. Lauderdale, named it the S/V Pestilence, and sailed south to Haiti. Hold Fast describes what drew these friends to the ocean, and tells the story of what they discovered in the sea. It paints a picture of the S/V Pestilence in the context of all the sailing maniacs who have come before them, and ultimately attempts to suggest that the secret is always to begin.
Sinclair FTV1
Our good man from ‘down under’ in Australia, Dave who runs the EEVBlog takes us through a teardown of the venerable Sinclair FTV1 ‘Flat screen’ CRT Pocket Television from the 1980′s. Producing his trusty whiteboard the technical discussion leads through a rough and ready theory of operation together with circuit description – useful if you were too young and penniless to actually own one when it was worth owning one.
Oddly though the £4 million investment in 1980′s money [Och!] to produce the product was never recovered from lack luster sales of only 15,000 units, with some 30 years having passed the FTV1 still puts in a regular appearance on Ebay.
If your gleefully holding one in your sweaty hand wondering if its rare or even valuable, don’t expect it to make a contribution to your pension fund – it didn’t for Sinclair when it was new and exciting, and certainly won’t now 
Published on 16 Sep 2013
US military forces remain in position to strike Syria, if Damascus fails to comply – with France backing up Washington’s threat. An attack would bring huge risks. But also stellar profits for US arms firms, as Lindsay France reports.
An interesting concept of how to visualize Wireless Networking using light, to make the invisible visible.
This would have started off as an idea in the constructors mind, and through his hands, his hands give birth to that idea to the real physical world.
Alan Sugar of Amstrad PLC, the darling of the UK Stock Market
Unashamedly a bit of a book plug as I throughly enjoyed this book, ‘What you see is what you get’, my autobiography by Alan Sugar.
It gives an insight into ‘the behind the scenes’ rise of the UK Electronics industry through the 1970′s, into the emerging 1980′s Computer Industry where Amstrad came up against Sir Clive Sinclair, the man behind what we know as Sinclair Research, was in his early days known as Sinclair Radionics Ltd
The point of this post is to add some visuals to the business rivalry between these two companies as Alan Sugar got his business going in the Hi-Fi industry. Less recognised, this is also where Sinclair Research got going too.
This post is just a container for some of the adverts run by these companies at their early days. To me they bring to life by pciture some of the narration that Alan makes in his book, that Lasky’s being a major retailer in his early days being his route to market where he found his customers. Before the birth of the computer industry it was Radio, Tv, and Hi-Fi that created the waves of new technology where the big brands of the 1980′s found their roots.
Sinclair Z30 advert
Our man Dave Jones down under in Australia presents a five episode fire side chat with the man behind Talking Electronics magazine. While the focus is about Talking Electronics, the whole chat is full of wisdom of business and life skills, such that I find it hard to pass by without posting it up here.
While Talking Electronics magazine was an Australian magazine, the conversation includes other well know titles like Electronics Today International and Elektor.
The talk covers Colins philosophy to doing business, magazine advertising revenue, the competitors and how they started all on their own the war to put Talking Electronics out of business, and Colin’s venture to bring his magazine to the shores of the USA and the challenges he found there plus of course, the prototypes that were the projects presented in the magazine itself.
Part 2 and the rest is available here
Hints and tips on making a small table for a small yacht. Covering useful idea’s for integrated cable management, wood staining, wood finishing using varnish plus steaming plywood into a tight radius all on a micro budget.
As is usually the case when coming up with idea’s for furniture on a small yacht there is more than a handful of conflicting requirements.
The drive for this table was the requirement to improve my hobby space, some where I could do electronics stuff without having to get everything out, do what I could, and pack it all away.
The space available is what is in effect the infill between the two berths in the f’csel. This defines the triangular shape of the table. As Hajra is a Junk Rig, the mast is keel stepped and runs through this area. This is why there is a horse shoe shaped cut out at the apex of the triangle. This aperture is ripe for things dropping down so I determined a fiddle fitted here would be a useful feature. This required steaming some plywood to create the fiddle. There already exists a vertical panel forming the support for the one permanent berth in this area which is caped off using 12mm wood. This defines the level that I need to attain for a flush surface.
The support for the table required a little thought as there exists fixings, the existing berth trotter box, only on one side. Therefore I required something underneath the table to provide the support that I would not find digging into my knees. There was a further issue of cables that run through this area to a flat panel computer screen. To end up with a neat installation these cables needed to be handled.
Further the installation is not expected to be permanent on a ‘forever’ basis leading to considerations that a solution should have the minimum number of holes drilled in places to make good the fixings.
On top of this on a personal perspective I have always tended to go out and buy bits of wood while scrap wood lays around the yard. This time I would use some ‘reclaimed wood’ which means some junk plywood that was littering the boat yard.
I chose a piece offered to me by a small cabin cruiser that was being launched. It was an obnoxious looking piece of scrap with no straight edges and 18mm thick. Just the sort of thing that I would turn my nose up to.
Work in progress. The offcut is what the wood looked like in the beginning
The result is something I feel quite pleased with. So learn from my experience, come on the journey with me, and see what you could do better on yours.