Here’s an odd one – Volkswagen have joined forces with a guitar manufacturer and put a pre-amp in their stereo systems. They’re even giving away free FirstAct GarageMaster guitars with every new car for a limited period.

At the very least, it’ll give most drivers something more entertaining to do at traffic lights than pick their noses, I guess.

I can’t see the appeal for an in-car guitars, but I gotta say that if all the VW dealers look like this I’ll definitely want to go for a test drive!

Olympus are bringing out the smallest ever digital SLR. I’m sure a lot of people will say that it’s just too small. You need something to get hold of with an SLR, and this will have less than any other.

Still, I think there will be a lot of people who want something a bit smaller, and may even find most DSLRs a bit unweildy. I don’t think I personally would want a DSLR so small, but I’d guess there’s a market for it, and it’s good to see Olympus trying new things. Of course, it’s easier for them to try new things – they have a lot less market share to lose than Canon or Nikon have, but the incentive for the biggest players to avoid doing anything too different can be a real problem for them.

Unfortunately, there’s no information yet on the price – will that be smaller too, or will we have to pay for the shrinking? I don’t think the people who want small DSLRs aren’t going to be willing to pay extra for them, and Olympus seem to have a habit of making their cameras just a tiny bit too expensive to quite be compelling next to the competition – and they’ve got to be compelling to steal sales away from the bigger players.

Latest Update: I’ve now opened the pen up to see what’s inside – that gives us a better idea of what needs to be done. So far, so good…

I’m trying something a little different with this museum exhibit – turning into a bit more of a story. This is just the first part – getting the pen, and having a look around the outside of it. Next, I’ll update this post when I’ve opened it up, and checked a bit further into what needs doing with it. I’ll keep updating as I work on it, and try to turn it from car boot sale junk into a nice usable pen.

If I succeed, it should make a nice ‘how-to’ for getting and fixing a vintage pen. If I make a mess of it, it can act as a warning to you all on how not to treat a vintage pen.

The story starts at Radcliffe Car Boot Sale…

Getting It

This pen was my first car boot sale find. After reading so many stories of other people finding a barely-used Parker 51 in its original box, under the table at a car boot sale, from someone who was hoping to get £2 for it, we’ve been hitting the car boot sales pretty hard. We’ve had a few interesting bargains, and picked up a few assorted pens, but no vintage fountain pens at all.

I spotted this one, and although it’s not in great condition, didn’t argue over the price – £1. Not bad.

Examining It

At first glance, quite a nice looking pen, in fairly decent condition.

The nib is realy quite dirty, but that usually turns out to be just dried ink, and rinses straight off with cold water.

Ah, the first bit of bad news. From the underside, we can see that the tipping is only still there on one half of the nib. Well, the camera helps us see – without the picture, it was more feel that told me what was wrong. Must get a jeweller’s loupe sometime soon.

The lever looks good – it’s a simple design, and looks ok. It doesn’t move much, but it’s probably just down to the sac having dried out inside.

By this point, I still don’t know what the pen actually is, other than a Burnham. Peeling off the price sticker answers that question – a Burnham B48.

A closer look at the cap shows more damage – there are small chips all the way around the edge of the cap. This is fairly common. If the caps are tightened too far, it puts a lot of stress on the plastics at this point, and many of these early plastics were brittle.

Opening it Up

Fortunately, the Burnham opened easily – the section was just a screw fit into the barrel, and wasn’t stuck. If it had been stuck, I’d probably have started by rinsing it with water, then soaking it if that didn’t work (since it doesn’t seem to be made of hard rubber or casein). As it was, a quick unscrew, and we were there…

No sac? There should the a rubber sac in there, attached to the back of the section – that’s the bit we were assuming would have hardened or turned to goo. A quick tap of the barrel against the desk, and out it popped…

The sac has hardened and dropped out as a single piece. The ‘nipple’ at the top of the section still has the remains of part of the sac attached to it, which will need to be scraped off, but the rest came out cleanly, and the lever now seems to work ok. All fairly lucky so far – a replacement sac is fairly easy.

What Next?

It will need a bit of repair work doing…

• It needs a new sac before it can be used. I’ll need to get the right size sac from somewhere – probably Cathedral Pens – and fit it. I’ve resac’d a Sheaffer Snorkel, so this one shouldn’t be too difficult. Hopefully.
• The nib will need some work. I’ll probably start by attempting to break the tipping off the other half, and see if it can be polished up to a usable state from there. If not, it’ll either need cutting back, or a new nib.
• The chips in the cap will need something doing about them. I’ll probably try filing the cap back slowly, until it’s been shortened enough that the chips are all gone. Then, try reshaping the new edge to a smooth shape – maybe not too thin, so it won’t chip so easily in future.
• The gold parts look like they need a good polishing, but I think the clip at least is probably more worn away than just dirty. A good cleaning should get it as good as it can be, anyway.

There are plenty of options for what to actually get started on next. I could work on the nib, and try to make sure it writes when dipped first, or I could have a go at fixing the chips in the cap. I also need to try to find out what size sac I need to order, or just order a selection of sizes, so I can get that replaced.

To be continued…

Update: Probably never to be continued, really – I lost interest long ago, and more interesting pens have been along since.

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Rounder Records/Zoë Vision is set to release the first-ever music DVD from Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant on October 24th. The set includes Led Zeppelin classics and tunes from Plant’s solo career, including “Freedom Fries,” which has a political twist. “The spirit of rock’n'roll is live performance,” says Plant. “Studio recordings can be captivating, and live albums can capture some of the synergy in a concert, but there is really nothing like being in the moment when the music is connecting you to the people-it’s truly a communion.”

Now you can drop hints to people that they need to clean their office, and let them see infinity at the same time. Nice. One to bookmark for when you need it.

Latest Update: Added Splice – a sequencer you run in your browser – sounds like fun.

A collection of online gizmos for making and sharing music.

Online Collaboration

• NINJAM – Novel intervallic network jamming architecture for music. Via Make:

• eJamming – Via Make: -

“Just plug any digital instrument – a MIDI-enabled keyboard, a MIDI-enabled guitar or MIDI-enabled bass, MIDI-enabled drums, or a MIDI-enabled wind-controller — into your PC or Mac computer, fire up the eJamming Station and we’re connecting you over the Internet to a whole world of musicians across town – or across the ocean. In Sync. In Real Time. Or in as close to real time as the laws of physics allow.”

Virtual Instruments/Music Toys

• Splice sounds like a bit more than most online music toys – it’s a basic sequencer that runs in your browser, and you can even feed it your own sounds to mix. I’ve not had a play yet, but Music Thing seem impressed, and that’s good enough for me.
• Desktop Blues – turn on the radio for the basic backing, then just click away to make music. It’s quite easy to make it sound surprisingly good. (Thanks to Thumbrella.)
• Ken’s Virtual Drumkit – Get in touch with your inner Lars Ulrich with this fab virtual drumkit. Thanks, Darren!

There were posts all over the place a week or so ago about paper made from sheep poo, and I resisted. I only showed such restraint because the information was pretty limited, and the company making it wanted around £1 per sheet for the product. A bit pricey for paper that is, after all, shit.

Anyway, here’s a how to on making paper from elephant poo. If you can get hold of an elephant, or at least borrow one for long enough to catch a poo or two (better get a bucket), give it a shot.

Via Boing Boing, but you didn’t imagine anyone else would be posting about that sort of thing, did you?

MaryAnne Moll writes at Notebookism about making her own notebooks, by just printing lines on nice paper, then wire binding them.

We’ve been playing with even simpler stuff – just punching the sheets with a 4-hole punch, then either using clip-shut rings from Staples, or just tying them with four lengths of cloth. The result is pretty rustic, but works ok. We may nip out soon and pick up some leather thongs to tie them with – that way we can claim they’re ‘leather bound’.

I think Sam’s always wanted an excuse to go buy leather thongs.

(This is more for the benefit of Bloglines themselves than for anyone else, but might be of interest to any other Bloglines users…)

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The recent changes at Bloglines look pretty damn good to me, on the whole – a couple of things could be improved…

• As Josh mentioned, the ‘are you sure’ prompt when marking everything read is great – I’ve done that accidentally a couple of times, with over 2000 unread items, and just ended up losing everything. It doesn’t seem entirely reliable yet – I daren’t try it, but my wife has tried it a couple of times, and only got prompted once. There might just be a threshold before it kicks in, though – no point in warning you if you’re only going to be marking ten items read. An option to turn it off would probably be useful to some people, though – I imagine some people always read their feeds that way, and the prompt could get annoying. Even better would be an undo button so you can undo your last action – quickly unmarking the things you just marked read.
• A minor thing, but it would help if the yellow highlights lasted longer – they appear to show you where new items have appeared, and are great, but they usually last just long enough to catch my attention, but not long enough to glance across and see what’s been updated.
• A brief countdown to refresh could be helpful too – a few times, I’ve gone to click on a folder, just as an update has happened. If the update causes folders to appear that weren’t there before, I’ve ended up clicking on a different folder to the one I was pointing at. It used to be a very minor risk, but with the left pane refreshing itself more often now, it happens more. There’s the little ‘updating’ the flashes up at the bottom, but that’s quite quick, away from where you’re looking at the time, and on a slow connection can be a few seconds before the actual update happens, so hasn’t saved me every time.

The quick updating is much better, though, on balance, and the interface feels more immediate now. I still think it’s the best online reader (though I’ve not done much testing of Google Reader since their recent update), and the work they’re putting in is paying off. Glad to see Jeeves is looking after his aquisition