And like any good Curiosity Show experiment, we are going to need a roll of masking tape. Thankfully, unlike the Curiosity Show it doesn't need to be double-sided tape. Where the hell was I going to find double-sided tape as a 10-year-old, Rob and Deane? Where?

You'll also need a not-too-crap record player (if it's one of those built-in-to-the-system jobs, then you might be out of luck) and some satanically encoded records. Anything by Nana Mouskouri should do.

Step one. Make sure you have a record player. This step is just to establish a control group and make sure we are all on the same page. Kids these days might think I'm talking about some kind of futuristic music compression algorithm and associated playback device. But I'm not. I'm talking about the past.

Next, you'll need to unscrew the cartridge head from the tonearm. Make sure that your record player has a removable cartridge head before you attempt this. A good rule of thumb is that if it doesn't go back on, then you shouldn't have taken it off.

Step three. Here comes the magic part. Take the cartridge head and turn it upside down. Re-insert the head and screw the cartridge back in. You should probably chant some Latin or even gibberish as you do this. This helps to open up the record player's psycho-kinetic temporal pathways. Though some say this is just audiophile nonsense, like keeping your gold-plated connectors adequately levitated.

Finally, place your record on top of a roll of masking tape that you have carefully positioned in the center of the record player. Now instead of dropping the needle, you need to raise the needle to touch the underside of the record. To do this you'll need to adjust the weight on the tonearm so it is hovering with an inclination to lift upwards instead of downwards.

And there you go. Now you can continue your search for subliminal messages as you recline in your listening chair, sipping on whiskey or sheep's blood, or whatever you do when you search for subliminal messages.

Next week we'll explore the hilarious world of drilling a hole in a record so that it spins off-centre and plays all wobbly. You'll need a parent or guardian's help to complete this one. See you then.

Play Corporate Best Friends Forever

Your browser doesn't seem to support applets.

Wow, Atari 2600s, 2D games, Java applets... talk about a retro post! What you see above is the JStella Atari 2600 emulator, running a game of my own creation. It all started (and ended) some time back - the year was 2006 and I was enjoying 6 weeks off work for a spot of brain surgery. During one of my Internet-rehabilitation sessions, I stumbled across the Atari programming forum at AtariAge. I was astounded! "Make your own Atari games? That's preposterous!" I thought, in a wondrous internal monologue voice. As I followed more and more links, and read more and more documentation, I understood that I must undertake this programming journey.

You see, the Atari 2600 is a machine not to be taken lightly. It is a hell-beast of a piece of hardware, and it's surprising that ever a single game became available for it, let-alone the 1000 or so that were commercially produced. The complexity lies attempting to push the boundaries of what is possible with the meager hardware on hand: 128 bytes of RAM (bytes!), no frame buffer at all and a debilitating palette of sprites: 2 sprites for player, 2 one-pixel sprites for "missiles" and a one-pixel sprite for a "ball". The machine was never meant to make anything other than Pong.

But the hardest part - the part that will have you wake up in the middle of the night swearing - is the timing. To draw things in the right place you actually have to wait until the beam (the beam!) that draws the screen is in exactly the right place, and issue a command to draw. This means you need to do any game calculations and code when the beam is not on the screen: you have a few rows of beam above and below the visible area of a TV to do your game code! If you take too long (or not long enough), then the whole screen goes wonky. You can see I've bodged things at the bottom of the screen in my game, as the lines don't match up properly. I decided to concentrate on that spiffy intro screen tune, rather than make the game work properly.

The fact that people had to work within such a hardcore environment - without debuggers or emulators - is truly mind-boggling. I gave up on my game after about 6 weeks, but I did walk away with a real sense of achievement. The only thing I regret is not getting an eeprom burner so I could make it into an actual cartridge and play on my real Atari. Ah well, maybe next major operation.

Here's the Plops! bin file, and the code if you're interested. I know you are...

Trying to load...

It was pretty good.

Anyhoo, I think it was called "The Secret Life of Offices", or "The Secret Life of Computerised Office Workers" or something.

Being the ever-resourceful one, I thought I'd look it up on the local library catalogue to see if they held a copy.

I typed "secret life of" into the title search.

The returned result set detailed a shocking titling conspiracy, revealing once and for all: the secret life of The Secret Life Of...

1. The secret life of a college man
2. The secret life of a disciple
3. The secret life of a garden
4. The secret life of a Satanist
5. The secret life of a Secret Agent
6. The secret life of a Amanda K. Woods
7. The secret life of an oakwood
8. The secret life of animals
9. The secret life of Aphra Behn
10. The secret life of bees
11. The secret life of buildings
12. The secret life of cat owners
13. The secret life of cats
14. The secret life of cello strings
15. The secret life of cities
16. The secret life of cosmetics
17. The secret life of cows
18. The secret life of Danny Kaye
19. The secret life of day dreams
20. The secret life of dog owners
21. The secret life of dogs
22. The secret life of dreams
23. The secret life of dust
24. The secret life of E. Robert Pendleton
25. The secret life of Edinburgh Castle
26. The secret life of Elizabeth I
27. The secret life of Eva Hathaway
28. The secret life of families
29. The secret life of fishes
30. The secret life of flowers
31. The secret life of football
32. The secret life of God
33. The secret life of Gujjar Mal and other stories.
34. The secret life of Hedley Wheelspin
35. The secret life of Henry Ford
36. The secret life of Henry VIII
37. The secret life of Houdini
38. The secret life of houses
39. The secret life of humans
40. The secret life of husbands
41. The secret life of images
42. The secret life of insects
43. The secret life of Jamie B
44. The secret life of Jeremy Thorpe
45. The secret life of Jesus
46. The secret life of John C. Van Dyke
47. The secret life of John Logie Baird
48. The secret life of kids
49. The secret life of Lady Gabriella
50. The secret life of Laszlo Almasy
51. The secret life of Laszlo, Count Dracula
52. The secret life of logos
53. The secret life of Maeve Lee Kwong
54. The secret life of Mary-Margaret Portrait Of A Bulimic
55. The secret life of Miss Lottinger
56. The secret life of Mona Lisa
57. The secret life of money
58. The secret life of Mr. Beauty
59. The secret life of Ms Wiz
60. The secret life of nature
61. The secret life of numbers
62. The secret life of nuns
63. The secret life of objects
64. The secret life of Oscar Wilde
65. The secret life of our times
66. The secret life of paintings
67. The secret life of Peter Gabriel
68. The secret life of plants
69. The secret life of puppets
70. The secret life of Queen Victoria
71. The secret life of railroaders
72. The secret life of Robinson Crusoe
73. The secret life of Rubber-Suit Monsters
74. The secret life of Saeed the pessoptimist
75. The secret life of Sally Tomato
76. The secret life of Salvador Dali
77. The secret life of Snowdonia
78. The secret life of Sooty
79. The secret life of teachers
80. The secret life of textiles
81. The secret life of the brain
82. The secret life of the Brunei locals
83. The secret life of the Crown Prince. By one who knows it.
84. The secret life of the dyslexic child
85. The secret life of the Ex-Tsaritza
86. The secret life of the Flowers
87. The secret life of the forest
88. The secret life of the harvest mouse
89. The secret life of the hedgehog
90. The secret life of the home
91. The secret life of the lawman's wife
92. The secret life of the Morris Minor
93. The secret life of the New Forest
94. The secret life of the office
95. The secret life of the Seine
96. The secret life of the soul
97. The secret life of the unborn child
98. The secret life of things
99. The secret life of Thomas Hardy
100. The secret life of tigers
101. The secret life of trees
102. The secret life of Tyrone Power
103. The secret life of us
104. The secret life of Victoria
105. The secret life of vulnerable children
106. The secret life of Walter Mitty
107. The secret life of Walter Winchell
108. The secret life of Wilf
109. The secret life of Wilkie Collins
110. The secret life of wives
111. The secret life of wombats
112. The secret life of woody species

So many secrets. If you were to document yours - what would it be called? Mine would be The Secret Life of Wasabi Pea Sandwiches.

Case in point: Graffiti Wall for Facebook. It provides you with a skeleton tool set - a colour picker, a brush size selector, an opacity selector, and 152592 pixels on which to use them...Not much you can do with that, right?

Well, let me tell you, people... are... freaks. Yeah thanks guys. Way to take the fun out of it.

So what can one do if one is filled with artistic desire, yet has the drawing skills of Ken Done? Is the answer to take a drawing class at the local TAFE, read up on techniques, watch instructional YouTube videos, and practice 1 hour everyday?

Pfft! This is the freakin' internet - we don't have time or the inclination to become good at something - we want impressive and superficial results, and we want them now!

Enter WallBot

The Oxford English dictionary defines progress as "getting machines that allow us to be lazier and lazier, until we have nothing else to do but use Facebook". And WallBot is here to support that vision.

WallBot takes the hassle and fun out of drawing - It will do your drawing for you! Feed WallBot an image, and it will painstakingly draw the image on to your Graffiti Wall application, one pixel at a time! How it does this is a mystery, but basically follows these steps:

1. Reads a pixel from the image.
2. Clicks on the Graffiti Wall colour picker.
3. Presses the "delete" and "backspace" key a bunch of times, to remove the old selected colour from the text box.
4. Types the new colour in to the text box.
5. Moves the cursor to the drawing area.
6. Clicks and draws a dot.
7. Goes back to step one, and repeats until finished.

Seriously.

Commanding WallBot

Of course, WallBot needs instructions from a human to work, and like all robots there is potential for WallBot to go a bit crazy - so it's important you follow these steps (in any order) before you press "start":

1. Select the Graffiti Wall window. This is the trickiest, and most important step - you see, WallBot does not know where it is drawing. If you point WallBot to draw on something that is not the Graffiti Wall application it will click, type, and delete - in a crazy-robot manner. I accidently pointed WallBot at my email client and it proceeded to send hundreds of my inbox items to the trash.

To properly select the window you must first click the "Select Graffiti Window" button. This will disable the WallBot application until your next mouse click. Wherever you click next will be the destination for WallBot - so click wisely.

The correct place to click is somewhere in the Graffiti Wall application - such as in the drawing area (if you don't mind an extra dot) or in a blank space next to the colour picker. Anywhere 'round there.

2. Select your image. Arguably the easiest step. But remember - selecting a file is easy... choosing a suitable file is not so. Due to Flash issues, WallBot can only click, type and draw slightly faster than you could! If you pick an image that will fill the whole screen, you're going to be waiting a long, long time. I suggest starting with a tiny image - such as a 32x32 pixel icon or something - that's already 1024 pixels it's gotta draw.

3. Choose your options. Optional. Here you can set a few different things. First up, the "transparent colour". If you have an image that has a flat background colour (which I suggest you do), select it as the transparent colour. WallBot will skip any pixels of this colour, and save you heaps of time.

Next up, the "render type" - test out linear and random. You'll figure them out. The third option, however, blot rendering, is the coolest - but is only useful for images with a lot of "flat" colours. Try it on the mario.bmp image in the zip file.

The pixel spacing option determines how far apart each dot is - change this depending on the brush size you have selected.

Finally, click delay. As mentioned before, Flash isn't the fastest of things. If you have WallBot run too fast, then you will see mistakes: pixels disappear, and incorrect colours are selected.

4. Select Offset. Use the sliders to change the horizontal and vertical starting position of the image. The lil' image will change size depending on the pixel spacing you have chosen.

It's just an approximation, mind you.

5. Go!
Press start and stand back! WallBot will spring in to action - taking control of your mouse like a virus with a mission. This phase can take a while, depending on the size of the image. Go have a coffee or something.

If you need to interrupt WallBot, try right-clicking a few times - moving off the Graffiti Wall application will stop WallBot, and right-clicking is the easiest way to do it without wrecking your picture. You can always restart it by typing any pixel number into the "progress" text box and hitting start.

Tips 'n Tricks

Don't forget to set your brush size and opacity before you start WallBot. Experiment to get the best results.

For any decent results with photos, you're going to need to do some pre-processing work in photoshop, or paint or something - erase the backgrounds to a flat colour so you can set it as "transparent", and shrink the image down to very small. You'll be surprised how cool even lil' images look once plotted.

The "blot" rendering function is the coolest, but for it to work properly you gotta decrease the number of colours in an image. It looks for groups of 4 or 9 pixel squares of the same colour and draws them with a bit of a "stroke".

Requirements

You want to run it?! Hey? Bad news. You probably can't. It requires the microsoft .Net Framework version 2 which is a 22Mb download. Perhaps you've already got it though... the best way to tell is to download and run WallBot. If it runs, then you do!

Also, as it uses low-level mouse hooks and the .net interop stuff, I doubt you'll get this running on Linux with Mono.

...So get drawing

Now that WallBot has leveled the playing field, you can go forth and dot-matrix-draw with your friends. If you've got some good ideas for features, then download the (reasonably commented) source code and add them.

And if you've done any cool graffito with it, then post it!

Circuit Bending is the art of messing with the electronics inside of stuff that makes noise, in order to make new and more useful random noise. The goal is to augment gadgets, kids toys, guitar pedals and cheap synths with new knobs, buttons, switches and "body contacts" that boldly go where no manufacturer would ever be bothered going.

The idea dates back to the 60s (so I just read on Wikipedia), and is very easy and super fun. And the easiest, funnest way to learn is to attend the workshop run by Nick from Toydeath - If you're going to learn, you may as well learn from the master. The workshop (and this blog post) runs through the two main activities of circuit bending: Soldering and Rubbing Spit on Things.

You can spit all day long and not get a cool instrument out of it, so let's start with soldering...

Solder On!
Soldering. I've always feared it. A mystical and esoteric practice, learned from the ancient and wise soldermonks over a period of several decades, during which time your mortal clothes transgress in to short-sleeved collared shirts that tuck into your jeans.

But it turns out it's really easy.

The trick is to "tin" the wires - melt a small amount of solder over the wires - before you join them. Then just bloody do it. Soldering components to the circuit board is pretty easy too. After about 10 or so goes, my shirt even started to tuck itself in a bit.

[This isn't me, by the way]

Bending Circuits
Let's move now to the good bit - making scary noises. Your best bet is to head down to Chinatown and pick up an arm full of the most annoying looking toys you can spy - the kind of toys that parents give their kids on buses and aeroplanes to make your life more pleasant. A good rule-of-thumb is the more copyright violations the better.

Now pull them apart with a screwdriver. Be gentle, and put the screws somewhere you can find them - you will want to re-assemble the item when you're done.

Once you're looking at the guts of the toy/synth/thing, it's time to find the circuit board (or boards) and start looking for bends.

Trigger the item so that its making noise, then press the circuit board with your thumb. Move around the board pressing and prodding at random. Hopefully (and usually) you will hear things go nuts. You've found a bend!

What is happening is that your thumb is conducting electricity to parts of the circuit that it wasn't supposed to get to. To really get some wacky results, lick your thumb and have another go. Awww yeah! Saliva makes an excellent conductor.

Find the source
Once you've found some crazy noises, it's time to narrow down the source of the new sounds. Get a short length of wire and start joining contacts on the circuit board, approximately where your thumb was pushing. A good way to do it is to pick one "spot" on the board with one end of the wire, then test a bunch of other spots with the other end.

Keep scouring the board until you've found all the bends you can find, or get bored.

Hardwire it
Now that you've discovered the crazy connections, it's time to wire it up to something usable. The choice of interface depends on the kind of noises the bend produces - an "on or off" type effect could use a switch or a push button. If it's a sound that changed as you pressed harder or softer, then perhaps a potentiometer (a knob) is a good choice - or possibly a "body contact".

A body contact is cool if you have found a bend that works best when you pressed the circuit board, rather than when joined with a wire. To make a body contact, you wire each connection point on the circuit board to a screw (or some other metal object) that protrudes from the toy.

When you touch the two screws with your thumb (or whatever body part you want), it completes the circuit, and the toy goes nuts - just like pressing the circuit board directly. Add some spit into it, and you've got instant chaos!

Once you have your killer noise-making machine, it's just a matter of mounting all the knobs, switches and body contacts in an attractive manner on the toy, adding in an RCA output for an amplifier, then putting it all back together. Um, good luck with that.

Rock!
Circuit bent machines in hand, you can now form your post-folktronica-pre-post-post-Nouveau-rock band (perhaps called Soldermonk Hoedown). You'll tour the world, using your lack of electrical knowledge to benefit small parts of Mankind - so if you're not embarrassed to be seen at Dick Smith, go grab yourself a soldering iron and get to it!

So I'm lending some valuable Mr Speaker cyber^* space to The PlusDeck 2c Cassette Player - which transcends the status of mere "good product" and reaches towards the realms of the consumer-good God.

It takes a couple of minutes to comprehend the genius that is the PlusDeck 2c: A 5.25" front-loading drive that plays cassettes. Cassettes!

CASSETTES!

Anyway, I can't stay here yapping about it all day. I'm only up to 1985 Bustin' Thru. After that I've got 1986 Way To Go, then some He-Man, JEM and the Holograms, and Amway motivational tapes. What an afternoon.

After I figure out a killer set I reckon I'll be ready for the 2007 Cassette Jockey World Championships. I just need another PlusDeck, and a microphone.

^*Cybernetic.

It began when I was charged with the mission of retrieving three beers; A Reschs for myself, a New for my friend, and a V.B. for a newly-met acquaintance at our table.

On the return journey I happened across a couple of friends I had not seen for some time. I sat at their table and had a brief "catch up", before remarking that I had been charged with a mission of retrieving three beers and had better conclude that mission with haste.

I picked up the bounty of beers and returned to my table. Then, without so much as a tinge of self-doubt, I gave the correct beers to the correct persons and we merrily drank up.

So, how was I able to avoid the "um, I think this one is yours... No, wait it's this one." that all-too-frequently follows a return from the bar? The answer will amaze and astound you: While waiting for my change, for sub-conscious reasons unknown to me, I re-arranged the drinks sitting in a line on the bar into alphabetical order. Yep. Alphabetical order. Re-distributing the beer to their final destination became as easy as A-B-C. And, you know. The other letters too.

Here is a step-by-step guide to the Formalised System Of Beer Re-distribution.

Step 1. As the bartender passes you the freshly poured beers, alphabetise them from left to right on bar. The naming conventions may cause some alphabetising issues, but as long as you're consistent, you'll be ok.


Step 2. Carry in a manner that is most logical to you. Clockwise, starting from the beer in my left hand seems most natural for me. That could be subject to regional and cultural differences.

Step 3. Upon reaching your destination, distribute them accordingly. Feel the burden lift from your shoulders as you confidently dole out the beers.

The benefits to society are far-reaching. It ensures you don't accidentally give a designated driver a full strength beer leaving you stuck with an icky light beer. And as you can see, the genius lies in the system's simplicity: the alphabet is one of the last things alcohol erases from your short-term memory.

The system is free to use, though royalty payments are owed in the form of one beer per time you see me at the pub. So go forth and alphabetise for a hassle-free drinking experience.

It was a sunny Thursday afternoon, the city was quiet. Yet I was nervous - My Talking Boony was about to go under the knife. Not very carefully I wrapped the lil' plastic hero in bubble wrap, chucked him in a box, and sent him off to Melbourne. A mournful drink was drunk in honour. It was in Tim's hands now.

Tuesday morning. The four days past had been tumultuous and ominously cricket-free. Then, on the fifth day, he rose from the post-pak. And there was much rejoicing.

But he was no longer an ordinary Boon. He now sported a couple of intriguing new features - a small switch on the front and push-button that sat in what was the void of his "microphone hole".

I switched switch. A brief period of silence then.... "Get me a VB, the cricket's about to start"... HE'S ALIVE!!!!! Cheers erupted in the kitchen! Next - the push button... "He's seeing them like watermelons" - More cheers!

There was much button-pushing and cheer-erupting done that day I can tell you.

Now, Boony is not a man to be told what to do - and while he'll be glad to have chat to you when you press the Boon-Button, Tim has wisely added another feature that lets the true character of Talking Boony shine through. If you hold down the button while you switch him on, Boony goes into "random mode". Every half-hour or so Boony will something across the room, filling your life with joy.

And so it is, that our Boonys may now live and talk forever - thanks to the brilliant surgical prowess of our lead reverse boonjaneerer, Tim.

Now, Tim is a man of the people, and his sole purpose in life (amongst other sole purposes) is to spread the joy of the Boon. You may be saying to yourself "Bringing Boony back from the dead... you can't put a price on that." And it's true. You really can't. Except for the low low price of $65 (including return postage)! That's right - while everyone else will be waiting around for a few days of Talking Boony V2 this season, you can impress your mates with a never-ending supply of Boonerisms.

Get in fast, 'cause this offer can't last! To get ordering, email Tim on gatekeeper_man@hotmail.com and don't forget to write back here to tell us all your tales of your new Mega Boon!