I'm back - well, actually, I never went away but you could be forgiven for thinking I had. My last entry on this blog was almost 2 years ago and basically it was telling you that the YouTube channel was becoming a vlog - a weekly summary of what I'd been up to and things that had caught my eye in the previous week. I did that for about a year but never produced anything on the blog to go along with it - the videos alone were taking far too long to edit and there was no time or inclination left for me to produce write-ups too. So I stopped the vlog in May 2022 - it wasn't really a conscious decision, it just kind of happened. But lately I've been thinking about rebooting it, mainly because I've spent the last month or two learning Blender and I wanted to create a lasting record of the things I've learnt. If you don't know what Blender is, it's a brilliant piece of Open Source software for creating 3D models and animations. It does CGI, basically. It isn...

 Suddenly, here we are, 2021! And what a hideous year 2020 was what with coronavirus, insane politics both sides of the Atlantic, a climate emergency and a world turned upside down. I could use all that as an excuse for seemingly abandoning Planet Keef, but that would be too easy. I was actually very busy in the shed in 2020 and started many projects. I just didn't manage to finish any of them as videos. Here's a little rundown of some of the videos that I started but haven't (yet) finished. A SMALL LED VIDEO LIGHT This was intended to be a quick and easy project using an Anglepoise desk lamp as the adjustable stand with a square biscuit tin fixed on as a reflector. My plan was to stuff 10 metres of LED strip inside this, and then cover the front of the tin with some kind of diffusing material. Unfortunately I only got as far as removing the old light and its shade from the stand. I wanted to 3D print a bracket to connect the tin to the stand, but the printer was out of act...

When it comes to streaming TV and Video On Demand, I'm a bit late to the party. Sure, I watch YouTube videos on my computer, iPad and phone, but never before on the actual telly. And the reasons for that? Well firstly I'm not a big consumer of TV - I might watch an hour or two each night, or none - I'm just as happy to read a book. And secondly, we don't have a smart TV and I really didn't understand how it works. But here we are, just getting used to the idea of it being the 21st Century, and now the proud owner owner of not one, but two streaming TV devices. You might think that's a bit excessive, and so do I. Here's what happened... Many moons ago now, Amazon announced it had commissioned a 6-part dramatisation of Good Omens by the late, great Pterry Pratchett and the admirable Neil Gaiman. Others have tried to bring Terry's novels to the screen, but missed the mark by about a million miles - somehow the people involved just didn't get it. B...

From watching my KeefCooks cooking videos, you might think my kitchen is blessed with an island unit that I can stand behind and you can see the action from the front. But actually, it isn't. For the last few years I've been using a ramshackle assemblage of our dining table with one leaf folded down, a Black & Decker Workmate, a folding support thing that spans from table to Workmate and raises the height by about 6 inches, and a big, solid slab of oak sitting on top of all that. It took a long time to set up and put away, and also I've been getting fed up of the overwhelming oakiness of our kitchen. I decided to create a new solution - basically a tabletop with folding legs - long ones to reach down to the floor, and shorter ones to sit on the table. And then I needed a fascia to help stabilise the thing, and to conceal what lies beneath. I chose some grey slate-effect laminate flooring for the top - it's only 8mm thick, so it's not too heavy. The only...

If you're familiar with the German-owned supermarket chain Aldi, you'll know that every week they offer Special Buys, and quite often these things are absolute bargains. At £12.99, this little cordless screwdriver definitely falls into the 'bargain' category. I haven't used it in anger yet, but I have tested it on pine and oak, and it performs extremely well. If you do a lot of screwing (stop sniggering at the back), this is the perfect thing to use alongside a cordless drill - the time saved in changing bits totally justifies the cost of this chunky little tool. Highly recommended.

I've had quite a few blogs in years gone by, and sometimes I wouldn't post in them for a month. But this blog, well. This blog has exceeded all expectations. Seven months without a post. Seven. Silent. Months. OK, the truth is, I forgot about it. Planet Keef blog? Wassat? Anyway, I'm back, and I'll try to write some posts about what I've been up to all this time. See you later.

Assembling the Rage 3S Until a few months before I bought this machine, I had no idea that such things as sliding mitre saws existed. Sure, I'd seen them in DIY stores, but had no idea what they were, and still less idea that I needed one. But after trying to make a picture frame with mitred corners I started looking for decent mitre blocks, and I had a distant memory of using a hand operated mitre saw in woodwork classes at school. Searching online for those things threw up results for lots of Sliding Mitre Saws and I realised that was exactly what I needed. The Evolution Rage 3-S seemed to be a good bet for me. It was a great price, about £100 from Screwfix, but there's always the possibility that something so cheap will be badly made and unreliable. And although it's made in China (isn't everything these days?), it's designed in the UK and it had great reviews on various websites I looked at. So I bought one. Cutting wood The machine comes in a bi...

I've been using this amazing software to edit my videos for about six months now. I am by no means an expert, but I can use it to do pretty much everything I need. This video is the first of four, and together, they will be the thing that I wish existed when I first found myself at the foothills of Resolve's learning curve (replace 'curve' with 'mountain', or even 'impossibly steep mountain'). Hopefully, if you follow them through, you'll be spared the grief I went through on my journey. The 'problem' is that DaVinci Resolve is a massive piece of software, It's loaded with tons of features for the professional editor - and at some point I hope to learn how to use them, but for now all I want to do is slam some clips together. Yes, there's lots of teaching material out there, from the 1000+ page manual, to tutorials from people who either decline to speak at all, or who just mumble unintelligibly, or people who are clearly expert...