Photos from the Fucking Daphne Kick Off Reading at City Lights Bookstore are up in Marlo Gayle's Flickr Stream. You can't tell from the photos but I am completely chuffed to be reading at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's shop.

A recording of my portion of the reading is available at DubLit

It looked a lot better in person. And it tasted fantastic.

I just repaired the gas guage on my old biodiesel mercedez. It wasn’t entirely broken but would get stuck at the quarter tank mark.

The problem was 23 years worth of gunk clogging the bottom of the guage, which is pretty common for such an old car, running such gross fuel. It runs biodiesel now, which actually cleans the tank quite a bit, but also contributed to the problem, since it loosens a bunch of the old diesel gunk up from the rest of the tank. But now that its clean, it won’t happen again.

This project took a grand total of 30 minutes, and I won’t ever get stuck on the highway again because I forgot to estimate how much gas was in my tank.

In case you’re interested, I made a tutorial on flickr to show how.

After reading through Retro Thing and contemplating SteamPunk's keyboard project, I remembered that I hadn't ever posted this, though I meant to.

For about a year and a half I lived in a sketchy section Oakland. My car was broken into on a weekly basis. I didn't really care much about it when I had a car I didn't really care much about, but when I traded up for an '83 Mercedes ready for a BioDiesel Conversion (You may be saying to yourself "That was trading UP?!") I actually cared, not because it was an awesome car, but because it was new-to-me and my pet project.

In the first week I had it, it was broken into and the radio was stolen. This was a factory installed radio from 1983, complete with tape deck. Apparently the theives knew more about resale value than me, because when I processed it with the insurance company they told me that the original radio was actually worth more than the car (approx. $1300) and I had to negotiate with them not to total the car out.

In the end they gave me enough money to make repairs, replace the golden radio with something fancy and new, and have some left over.

The new radio had an iPod attachment that I wired through the glovebox, but more importantly it had a removable faceplate (tre modern!). The catch with the removable faceplate, is that even when you take the faceplate off and have the car off, there is a blinking red light on the empty dock, alerting theives to the fact that there is a nice radio in there, and possibly a faceplate tossed around somewhere too.

But I wasn't going to let my fancy new radio get stolen again - my insurance company was already getting suspicious from my once-a-week calls. I had a plan.

I found an old faceplate holder from (surprise!) my housemates stolen car radio. I cut one half of the box off (lengthwise) and dremmeled out a believably radio-sized hole in the center. I wrapped some electrical tape around the back, just to have some kind of rear surface and taped in some jagged wires - conveneintly left from the stolen radio. Then I stuck one side of sticky velcro to the back of the tape, and the other side to the empty radio face (the fuzzy side didn't impare the face-plate-attaching as much).

Its not perfect, but it does cover up the blinky light and looks pretty jacked up, especially if its dark out. So now when I'm parking the car overnight, I take the real faceplate off and put the janky faceplate on. I've only had one break in since (2 years!) and they didn't even notice the radio.

Peace Action West: Stay Strong!

This is something I set up for Peace Action West this week. I think it's pretty cool. It's essentially a prettified LiveJournal Blog, with VoicePosting enabled, thanks to some friends at LiveJournal.

Yesterday, Peace Action West sent out an eAlert to all of their members (around 40,000 of them) and gave them VoicePost instructions. You can also get instructions and post, by signing up on the page (this also signs you up for the mailing list, so there is a bit of marketing involved too. But isn't there always?).

I've been monitoring all the posts as they come in, and we've been transcribing them too. It's been pretty amazing to hear everybody, especially the people in places I would otherwise never really hear from...
...like from Lexington, Kentucky.
107K 0:32