Hot Wheels custom cars

As I'm perusing the world wide weberverse, I found out about another hobby that has been doing the rounds for … oh I don't know, probably for as long as die cast cars have been around.

There are heaps of people who customise and make their own Hot Wheels (and other brand) cars, and it looks pretty nice.

I'd already seen a bunch of tutorials on how to DIY waterslide decals, so that's entirely doable. Drilling out the rivet and either gluing or tap and screwing the base back on are both things I can easily do. Stripping off the paint is likewise relatively straight forward.

The painting … that's a bit harder and not something I have much experience with. I've never used an air brush, but it looks relatively straight forward. The basic techniques at least, I'm assuming that like most things, one gets better with practice.

The down side is that a proper airbrush kit with compressor is over $150 for a basic kit. A bit out of my price range, and that's before buying paints and other things.

The good news is that if was to pick up a gravity feed air brush (as opposed to siphon type) online, they can work with relatively low air pressure - and one hack that I've seen is to use a fish tank air pump (instead of a proper compressor) and adding a 2L or 3L plastic soda bottle for a reservoir. It seems to work, and for something like painting little toy cars it could be done. Considering that we already have a spare air pump floating around, I could cobble something together to run a little $20 air brush gun.

Would the results be good? Probably not. But it could work as a first step approach, and a way to practice. I did have a hunt around to see if anybody was selling packs of old cars in bulk on the cheap, but everybody seems to think that every car is a hyper-collectible classic. Or they are pretty cheap listings but have $100+ postage due to coming from the US or England. Basic cars are only $2 from BigW, but it seems a waste to pull apart and strip a brand new car.

I might have to check out the flee markets or keep an eye out on the classifieds to see if there is anybody selling or giving away old cars.

Or not. We don't really have the spare money for me to be wasting it on frivolous things like this. I'll have to keep hunting and find something cheaper...

Net neutrality

For those who haven't been keeping track, the FCC will vote on net neutrality on the 14th of December. What this vote is about is internet service providers (isp's) will change classification from a utility (such as a water company) to an information provider (like a library).

How does this affect you? In the short term, it won't. It will take time for changes to feed through. But what it means is that isp's will be allowed to charge extra for certain services, if they wanted to.

For example, you may have a 'standard' internet plan that requires you to pay extra for accessing Youtube or other streaming services. You may have a plan that allows you to access Youtube, but you won't be able to access Vimeo.

A water company can only charge you for the amount of water you use. Doesn't matter if you use it for drinking, washing the car or freezing into ice - it's your choice.

A library can't stop you coming in - but they can decide which books to keep on the shelves. They can decide what knowledge you have access to. You can put in requests for a book they don't have, but it's up to them if they get it or not (and how much they charge you).

You probably won't notice anything, except maybe the prices of internet fees creeping up. You definitely won't see all the information you will be getting blocked from. Lucky for us large corporations aren't in the habit of gouging their customers for every cent they can squeeze out of us...

Telstra *sigh*

And of course, internet is intermittant. :(

It has been an ongoing saga with Telstra and the aging infrastructure out here. We're in a slightly regional area and every time it rains, water gets into the pits and pipes that carry all the communications cables.

Technician gets sent out, applies a band aid to the best of their ability, but the cabling is old and the only real fix is to rewire the whole town. Which isn't going to happen. Not in our life times, I wouldn't think.

I think there is NBN available were we will be going to next, but I can't say I am overly impressed with what I have personally seen with NBN. My personal choice would be to get standard adsl instead of NBN. I'd only get the "faster" option if the two plans cost the same and included the same amount of data. Mind you, I get no say, so it's a moot point.