I’m not a huge fan of golf, but I do love flash and I do love seeing flash being put to great use.

The World Golf Tour experience allows golf enthusiasts to play the world’s most challenging and exclusive courses with HD graphics on a PC or Mac platform for free. WGT’s online community allows friends, families and golf fans to play a round of golf simultaneously, competing in tournaments for prizes, sharing scores, testing out the newest equipment and reading the latest news in the golfing world.

Go for a round here.

The Carver One is the incredible, 3 wheeled wonder that steers like a car but corners like a motorbike. It’s insane and it’s also no secret that we quite like it. We have a nicely rendered photoshop version of our ideal Carver One in all its metallic green goodness as a constant reminder of how much closer the real thing is getting.

Peter James is the chap that manages Carver New Zealand and Australia and fortunately for us he is local .. which means he pops over from time to time and enlists our help in any design work he may need and takes us for the occasional fly/ride/drive in the Carver.

We created a new site for Peter a few months ago, www.carverexperience.co.nz to help him get the word out on some of the great tourist packages that he is offering as well as promoting the Carver in general. We decided that it would be a good idea to try and give people a bit of a feel as to what its like piloting the Carver so we created a Flash application that lets people get a feel for how it behaves when you go around corners.

We pieced together the interior cockpit, created the ’tilt indicators’, steering wheel etc and with some photos from Peter’s travels in the background and some actionscript to tie everything together we had a fun little simulator. Click here to see what its like from inside the Carver.

We also built a page to show some promotional videos as well as a bookings page where you can book and pay for your experience online. So what are you waiting for? Go and experience the Carver One!

It’s been a while since we added some T-shirt designs so I’ve created a couple of nice simple ones.

Firstly, a simple solid design that you can wear to show your support for Barack Obama. I’m not a republican or a democrat, but does America really need another 4 years of the same? I don’t think so.

Secondly we’ve created a nice simpe design based on the cubes from the great 80’s kids show ‘Terrahawks’.

Both are available from our cafepress store (which I have to tidy up sometime ;).

Today one of our favourite web services, Ponoko, has just launched an amazing new tool called Photomake . This simplifies the process for people to design and make great stuff without having to use any scary design software.

How it works is you take a nice big piece of paper and black felt pen … then simply draw your design. Once you have finished you take a photo of your design and upload it to Ponoko. Easy as that!

Ponoko has a really clever system which will take your photo and make a trace of it .. much like Live Trace does in Adobe Illustrator. After the photo has been traced (which you can see in realtime) you can choose your materials and get a price to make the product instantly. All without having to learn design software.

Needless to say that this is another huge innovation from Ponoko and if you have always wanted to make cool stuff then now is definitely the time to have a go with Ponoko.

Costume Party eh? Music to my ears. The wife and I have been to enough medieval things in the past to have bits of costumes stowed away. Every time a new party rolls around the bits get dusted off, altered, improved and added too. This party, a birthday party for Marie, one of the lovely girls who works with Glen (my wife), was no exception.

Glen sewed me up an nice big tunic thingy and a massive cape. The wig and beard were bought and styled to suit. The pants are old dress trousers that were dyed and the boots are cheap gumboots with added leather and fur. The belt is actually a woman’s fashion belt. There is a knife and morning star that were built for a previous party and the dirty great sword is one of a matched pair that my very clever father made for Glen and me.

There were a few items were made specifically for this party, here are 2 of the main ones:

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For some time now I’ve been looking for a nice way to render 3D objects in flash so that a viewer can rotate the object and get a real feel for it.

There are a few solutions but none of them really created the high quality look that I was after so the option I have chosen is somewhat of a cheat in that it doesn’t create a true 3D object. It does however give a really nice result and with some tweaking to improve download times might just be a winner (for my needs at least).

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Tony recently decided that a bit of a party was long overdue. A themed party of course. Pirates.

Now I love pirates as much as the next guy but my favourite pirate of all time would have to be ‘Pirate Steve’ from the Dodgeball movie … who couldn’t love this guy?!

The problem however was where to obtain a Pirate Steve t-shirt. The solution … make our own and buy it direct from cafepress. Of course, you can buy it direct from cafepress too. If you would like the authentic Pirate Steve shirt then search for the one labeled ‘Pirate Steve’ as it also has his team number on the back.

As a follow up to our very successful Scrubs ‘Hooch is Crazy’ T-Shirt we have just released ‘Jzilbek’.

For those Scrubs followers in the know this tee needs no explanation.

You can get one of these great Tees direct from Cafe-press.

Ok…. firstly “NO!” this is not a real gun… come on people. If I could build laser guns I would be kidnapped by some secret overseas agency and forced to make super soldiers….

This idea came about after making the sniper rifle for the Star Wars party. I thought it would be cool to have a pistol that looked like someone had been trying to knock together a functioning hand held laser weapon in their lab. So it should look all bitsy rather than looking like a mass produced weapon.

Anyhow…. the first stop, once again, was the Warehouse to grab another knackerd cheap toy gun. Now this is not as easy as it sounds - the style of toy guns has changed a lot in recent years with most of them looking like they were designed to be underwater survey equipment. All curves and wavy bits. Not the angular more realistic look that we need. I did find this funky number though…

The next step was stripping out all the guff inside. It made noises when I first bought it but that lasted all of half a day before it broke. So no bad feelings about giving it the bash. All the stickers were removed and the text was sanded down.

Now the fun stuff. I started the process of adding all manner of crap to the thing. Super glue is my prefered adhesive because it’s quick and strong and I love toying with the danger of gluing myself to my bench - I live an exciting life I can tell you!

The “fuel cell containment cannister” mounted to the side of the gun is a plastic pipe fitting from a plumbing shop that I had knocking about. I capped one end with an RCA adapter from DSE and the other is a standard tap collar from a garden hose set. The whole lot is wound in wire and mounted using a the cord holder that come with a bamboo blind and some securing rings. The black box is a standard AA battery holder from DSE.

Other stuff is added. You can see a green USB adapter along with parts from a long necked safety lighter (dark red bits). Another RCA adapter was added to the end of the gun. Vinyl bits were added to simulate lead or other soft metal plating. This will help give the “held together with scrap” look I’m going for.

Now we are starting to really cook. More details bit added and imitation solder is added to the edges of the vinyl. Bits that have found their way onto the gun include: drink bottle top, curtain hangers, screw covers, spay bottle collar, pen spring, cupboard door latch thingy, automotive cigarette lighter adapter,LED, basic power switch, automotive fuse and other small bits of tatt…

At this point I like took the time to slap on a first coat of paint. A quick coat of what ever base colour you will be using helps to let you critique the overall form rather than the parts. Then you can decide better where to add more doo-dads.

Notice that I swapped the barrel around to give it that “focused beam” technology look. The lime green parts were laser cut from acrylic by Ponoko. Martian was getting some cards holders and key tags cut out so I tossed a bunch of random shapes on some spare acrylic for just this sort of eventuality.

I’m pretty happy with all the guff that has been added - so time for that nice thick coat of base paint over everything!

Now the fun stuff starts - the painting!! I just love painting things to look like naffed old metal. I don’t know why I have this affinity for old metal - it must be all those time my parents locked me in the car boot when I was a kid. hehe. Anyhoo, there will be lots of brassy, coppery and leadish looking stuff on this gun.

And here we go - the first coat of detail paint featuring lots of sooty metals.  Note the first coat of “solder” holding some of the metal parts together.  This will be darkened with a coat of black later.  Check out the good leady finish on the vinyl.  It looks nice and heavy even though it really weighs nothing at all.

Once again the call of Ponoko was heard in the Martian Lab and soon another fun laser cutting project was underway. This time it was a Martian styled business card holder - something else we could hand out to our Martianeer customers as a way of saying “hey, we think you’re just swell…

What we ended up with is a simple 2-piece slot design that requires no glue and is both light and stable. And of course having our Martian guy peeking over the cards is just too cool.