Posts Tagged ‘gifts’

How To Fly Your Remote Controlled Chopper

Friday, February 3rd, 2012

The majority of micro radio controlled helicopters are made for indoor flying and may be flown outdoors soley under the most perfect weather conditions, because they can easily be blown off course. These mini RC choppers can be controlled in three flight paths: up – down, forwards – backwards and left – right.

This means that the model is capable of quite remarkably specific manoeuvres. In spite of that, accidents do and will occur. ornaments will get knocked off the mantelpiece and some windows may get broken, if the flier is not cautious or adept.

So, it is best to practice in the garage or garden shed or even outdoors in fine weather until a reasonable level of ability has been achieved. it should not take long with these micro flying machines.

They are great fun, the sole real drawback is that the small battery will only give between five and seven minutes flying time. Luckily, it only takes 30 minutes to recharge the battery with the AC mains charger or the USB computer-cum-transmitter charger.

Lots of of the indoor choppers are padded softly so that they cannot do a lot of damage to windows, heads and the like, but not all of them. Some have a metal body so that it container better protect the motors from crashes. If you would like to create one of these safer, try affixing some foam rubber to the nose of the model.

However, actually bumping into things is not the sole problem that indoor RC helicopters may cause. As with all choppers, the top rotors create quite a downdraft, which may blow things about or off shelves. A letter put behind a vase might catch the draft, move and knock the vase off the shelf.

While you are flying model aircraft of any sort, you should be continuously aware of the health and safety of others. Learn to judge the diameter that the top rotors cover.

With these smaller craft, the sweep of the rotors usually extends well in front of the helicopter, which can present a hazard to eyes and faces. Never fly your chopper where someone may turn a corner and walk straight into it. You have to take responsibility for your model whether you fly it into someone or they unpredictably walk into it.

Children are not normally the people most at risk from a flying helicopter, because you usually fly over their heads. However, most flights will be at a height of about six feet, so adults beware. If you choose to fly your indoor chopper outside, there are extra safety problems.

Power lines are a major worry whilst flying your helicopter outside in a town.You can do lots of damage to power lines and you would be responsible for any financial cost incurred.

Two of the main benefits of starting flying a micro RC chopper are that: one] you learn how to control the model, mastering fundamental tricky flight manoeuvres two] you learn health and safety procedures, which will serve you well if you move on to a larger, more powerful radio controlled helicopter.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on a variety of subjects, but is now involved with the Gyro Helicopter S107. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Smart Toys for Kids.

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Packing Fragile Items For Shipping

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

The most difficult things to pack are the fragile ones and the more fragile the most difficult, as you may well imagine. Shape can also play a part in making it even more difficult. Imagine needing to pack antiques, fine art, ceramics, glass or even light bulbs for shipping, whether you will transfer them yourself or not.

Bubble wrap is a great boon in this field. Formerly, fragile items were packed in newspapers and even straw. Indeed, newspapers are still used fairly effectively by some packagers in order to save money although bubble wrap is quite inexpensive.

The easiest fragile items to pack for shipment or transportation are flat items like photographs and paintings. If the photograph is framed, it is best to wrap it in two layers of bubble wrap and then insert it into a flat, corrugated cardboard box.

There are various sized boxes which will hold one or several pictures and the boxes vary in area too. It is important that the contents of the shipping box fit closely inside and cannot rattle around inside.

The more the contents can move, the more chance there is that the box will break and the contents will be lost or damaged. The further you are transporting the things, the more vital this rule is.

If you are sending oil paintings on canvas or water colours on paper, it is easier to roll them up loosely, say around a rolled up newspaper and then insert the package into a cardboard or polystyrene tube. The tube may be round or triangular. Pad the ends of the roll to prevent it moving back and forth.

Manufacturers encourage customers to keep all original packaging, but it does build up if you do not have much space. While transporting televisions, monitors or microwave ovens, it is better to use the original polystyrene packing and the original cardboard container.

If you do not have these items, you could buy a box to transport these items and you will have to wrap it in bubble wrap and pack the corners of the box with newspapers. If you are merely moving the TV from one house to another, you can wrap it in blankets and maybe place it in a box to prevent it rolling around.

If you want to send or transport crockery, you can line a cardboard box with two layers of bubble wrap, wrap each plate in a sheet of newspaper and stack them in the box. Be certain that they cannot move from side to side with more newspaper packing.

A dearer, but more professional way of doing this is to fill a box with polystyrene balls and slide the plates into it carefully. You can often purchase the polystyrene balls by the sackful in outdoor markets.

If you are anxious about newsprint coming off on the items in the box, you could purchase a substantial roll of recycled paper for not a lot of money. Whatever you spend on packaging when sending to a customer, it is probably much less than sending a replacement.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on a variety of topics, but is now concerned with boxes for shipping art. If you want to know more go to Where Can I Buy Shipping Boxes?

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Glass Artwork Paperweights

Sunday, December 11th, 2011

My friend has a store that sells glass artwork. My personal favourite glass artwork is paperweights and I have a lot of fun attending art auctions and buying art glass with her. We pay a lot of attention to what our friends and her clients like and dislike.

I often give people art glass paperweights that I find at art auctions for special birthdays and anniversaries. My mother turned seventy last August and I found a magnificent glass paperweight for her.

The art glass paperweight that I found for my mother was made by Baccarat and I was extremely lucky that this was one of the last items auctioned. A lot of people had already left the auction when this item went on the block. My mother appreciated the rose motif because the rose is her favourite flower.

I have a Dutch friend from Den Bosch who loves effigies of frogs. She has managed to decorate her abode very stylishly with her favourite frogs. I have been on the lookout for an art glass paperweight for her for years. I finally found one at an art auction last year. The glass paperweight featured a frog sitting on a lily pad surrounded by blue water. It was really pretty and my friend began using it on her desk immediately.

I also have an aunt who collects art glass paperweights. She has asked me very often to find glass paperweights for her when I am attending art auctions. Of all of the pieces I have bought for her over the years, one sticks out in my memory more than any other.

The prettiest art glass paperweight I have ever won at an art auction has to be one that featured a blue and gold Macaw. Rick Ayotte was the artist that made it and it was even featured in a book of his work. He has created many lovely art glass paperweights.

There is no difficulty at all selling art glass paperweights made by Rick Ayotte. His work seems to draw a great deal of interest. My friend tries to win any auction she finds for art glass paperweights made by him. She won one not so long ago that looked like pink roses. They looked so fragile and cute. I know that this art glass paperweight will sell without delay.

There have been some inquiries at the shop for art glass paperweights by Richard Marquis, although we have not found any in any of the art auctions we have been to recently.

I will keep looking out for art glass paperweights at the auctions I attend, but I will not be going way out of my way to track them down. I now buy every art glass paperweight I can find that was made by Rick Satava. My favorite has to be the coral orange jellyfish that I found at an art auction an hour from my home. It was really beautiful.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with Waterford crystal vases. If you have an interest in Irish crystal or wedding rings, please go to our website now at White Gold Claddagh Ring

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How To Learn Foreign Languages At Home

Saturday, October 1st, 2011

Schools in English-speaking countries are infamously bad at teaching foreign languages. Or perhaps not bad, just completely indifferent. Although anyone who wants to get on in the world has to speak English, things are a-changing and we are waking up to the fact that we are missing out on a great deal by not studying foreign languages.

As everybody knows, it is simpler to learn foreign languages when you are younger, so perhaps it would be a wise plan for parents to begin teaching their kids a foreign language at home, if they cannot rely on the public educational system to do it for them.

All well and good for parents of mixed marriages, I hear you saying, but what if both parents are native English speakers. Well, why not learn the language too at your child’s pace? If you start early enough, the child will still be learning English, so will learn the foreign language slowly anyway and you will easily be able to keep up.

Especially as, being the teacher, you can control the pace of the learning and you could slow it down to suit yourself. The first thing to do is pick a language that you can hear spoken reasonably often. Spanish, French and German are probably the best options. Believe me, Russian and Chinese are not!

Spanish, French and German have lots of words that come from the same ancestry as English words, so that makes it a little easier as well. So, let’s say, you pick French. Now you ought to look about for ways to teach (and learn) French.

One way to start is to get some bilingual cards with pictures of everyday things like pets, household items, relatives, colours, foods, numbers and clothing. You could use three to five cards a day in a 15-20 minute lesson and once you have used a card, you could pin it on the wall and reread it every now and then.This will increase your vocabulary.

You will also need to buy some blank card, a grammar book, a dictionary and a easy reader in French. It is all very well having a substantial vocabulary of words, but you need to know some verbs to be able to put them together into sentences.

So, say you have both studied the words for ‘mother’ and ‘cat’, you could look up the word for ‘look’, write it onto a piece of card and pin it between the pictures of mother and the cat. Then you have: “La mere regarde le chat” (mother is looking at the cat). You could repeat this with all the words that make sense until it sinks in.

‘Teach Yourself …’ books are usually fairly decent at offering a structure for your schooling and the best ones have CD’s of indigenous speakers to help you get the accent correct. Often the course work is mirrored on the CD chapter by chapter to make it even easier.

You can look on Amazon and buy some CD’s of simple French nursery rhymes and get some good cartoon stories like Asterix the Gaul. The text is meant for children, so you will easily be able to understand it. They are fairly good too and ought to hold both your kid’s and your own attention for hours, but just do a chapter at a stretch.

In order to apply your new language, try prohibitting English at meal times or for one meal a day. This can be amusing and the whole family could get involved. You will be surprised how quickly you will learn enough to say what you want to

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on a number of topics, but is now involved with the Gyro Helicopter S107. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Smart Toys for Kids.

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