Diy

A couple of weeks ago, I installed the Varnish Cache daemon on the server this blog runs on to see if it’d speed it up any. The answer is, emphatically, yes. Images and pages load in seconds, as they’re being served from the static cache. The number of hits to Apache has decreased dramatically, which is fantastic! The tradeoff was that Piwik, my analytics package that produces pretty graphs and charts like these… ...

Hey folks! I’m going to start to play with time-lapse photography and one of the most useful tutorials I’ve found out there is this one on Vimeo.

I got to play with some rather hefty Moonblaze-style heads last week and they were excessively fun! The flames were enormous, the chain rig was pretty sweet and overall it was great fun to play with them. However, I did come across something that is, I think, quite a serious issue in poi head design sometimes. The kevlar was so loosely woven that the heads started to disintegrate as the fire had spread to inside the head. ...

After my lovely trip up to the Frozen North to catch up with friends long absent I brought back tunes, videos and stories! So firstly, massive thanks to my perpetually happy friend Corinne, I’ve been introduced to Blogotheque which has lots of delicious, crunchy and smooth music from all manner of artists on. Here’s one that I love especially As well as discovering new music, Corinne, Cat and I got to geek out over poi for about 6 odd hours which was many different kinds of fun. ...

Ok, so as I mentioned in my previous post on the topic – I made some lovely new Tornado wicks (so called after the Tornado weave that is used to make them), following Jez’s instructions on the topic and with some modifications that Alien Jon and I came up with. On Sunday I got the chance to play with them alight and after some fairly heavy thrashing I can now post a pretty balanced review. ...

The backstory So for a while I’ve been researching into making some new fire poi heads to replace my HoP 90mm monkeyfist heads that I got from Alien Jon. The monkeys are great but they’re heavy and because they’re spherical, they tend to smack into one another frequently which annoys me somewhat. Added to which, they have a massive I-bolt embedded in the core and the eyelet of the bolt is absolutely enormous – about 30mm across. ...