wmoci.com at the Tyne Tunnel Midnight Run

With the Toshiba Camileo H30 and Pedco Ultraclamp on test. Enjoy!

Tyne Tunnel Midnight Run 20/11/2010 – 200sx from Ste Whiteoak on Vimeo.

A bit of an oops with vinyl…

Hi everyone. My first post on here!

A while ago I decided to try something a little different with my car. I’d seen some vinyl online that I rather liked and duly emailed and asked for a sample. The colour was Black Galaxy. It looks kind of textured black/dark grey in normal light but when there is bright light (sunlight is best) it glitters all the colours of the rainbow! Yes, I like sparkly shiny things and holographic vinyl ticks all the boxes for me!

When it arrived, I was transfixed as it glittered and sparkled at me, calling me to have everything I own in this colour.

Being a little impulsive, I decided one day to remove my spoiler from the car. Took it off, fibreglassed over the holes left and resprayed with some rattlecans from Nissan. Now I had this bootlid with no spoiler and 10m or so of rather expensive black galaxy vinyl (you see where this is going?!). The bootlid was removed and I enthusiastically ploughed in with scissors, water spray and vinyl on the kitchen floor. The topsheet went on ok but I didn’t leave quite enough for the leading corners. That wasn’t a major issue as I could match up a couple of offcuts.

The problems arose when I tried to fold the vinyl down where the lip of the boot drops to the light cluster. I’d been told that a little heat (such as from a hairdryer) would be sufficient to soften the vinyl so it could be stretched a little to cope with the curves. Little did I know that metallised vinyl does not work like that! It does NOT stretch. Nor does it like bending very much.

I ended up cutting a lot of little slits and folding down about 20 tabs. The end result can be seen in the pictures.

But wait! My tale does not end there!!! Whereas I was happy with the vinyl glittering away I was not happy with the finish. 3 days later I decided it wasn’t a good enough finish (mostly that you could see all the little cuts where I’d folded the tabs down) and set about removing it.

Unfortunately I’d done a good job of sticking it down and whilst pulling it off (gently, I didn’t grab and yank!) it took half the paint off the bootlid too! Unfortunately no pics of this as I was too embarrassed to take any!

I did, however, decide I couldn’t NOT have this vinyl on my car so I set about with dremel and stanley blades trimming my grille, fibreglassing over the hole left from removing the center strut and laying a piece of the vinyl on the lower plane. The end result glitters nicely in the sunlight and has received some nice comments:

I have only just now got the bootlid tidied up and re-sprayed properly (should be fitting it back on the car tonight) after spending quite a bit on expensive vinyl, fitting a couple of meters worth then ripping it off again causing another re-spray. Because of my ineptitude, enthusiasm for doing things without researching them properly first and the fact that I’ve had to have my bootlid repainted 3 times in total and the cost of holographic vinyl, Steve beleived it warranted a WMOCI post!

Welcome onboard!

wmoci.com recruited two new contributors this week. Welcome onboard to Daz and Teggers!!!

Hammering a labour of love…

We’d like to tip our hats to wmoci.com fan Ken Scudder…he’s built arguably the best S14 200sx in the UK if not Europe or even the World…then rather than garaging it like a museum piece, he gives it serious stick on a regular basis. Ken, you’re a legend!

Now turn up your speakers and listen to the sound of pure bliss that comes from the Procharged 6.0litre Chevrolet LS2 V8 Engine:

Thanks go to KarenP for providing photos of Ken’s car competing at Ten Of The Best 2010 and Ken himself for letting our vinyls grace the hallowed bodywork. “We’re not worthy!! We’re not worthy!!!”

Luke’s Alienware Monster PC

We’ve got vinyls!

The team at wmoci.com would like to chuck a big shout of “Thanks Dude!” to Kelvyn at KSDigital for sorting us out with some sweet vinyls for wmoci.com. Please be sure to check out www.KSDigital.eu

If you’d like one of the 14ins stickers then e-mail wmoci@live.com for more information

The eBay Challenge

A new game that I and a few mates have started playing is eBay challenges.

Quick rundown of the games

Most items for £1
Everyone has £1 to spend and the winner is the person with the most diffrent items
(A judge who checks for any cheating gets to pick one item from each person)
– We’ve already played this game, the results are getting tallied up today.

Stupidest item for £1
Everyone buys something as stupid as posible for under £1
The winner ( Chosen by a judge ) gets the change from every one elses £1
– The game starts tonight or early this week

More details soon

Toshiba Camileo H30 1080p Camcorder

My wonderful wife and daughter gave me a Toshiba Camileo H30 for my birthday so thought I’d write a little review for this great little affordable HD Camcorder

It offers big price features for a not a massive amount of cash. The RRP is way higher than what you actually pay for it (Around £180 in general). I will update this with some footage from the camera but basically; its easy to use, a nice weight but still compact, feels solid and not as though its going to fall apart in your hand. The footage is crisp and vibrant and although low light levels get a bit noisy it doesn’t affect it enough to comprimise value for money and can be cleaned up with good editing software. Also a plus point is you get 5x Optical zoom on top of digital zoom features. Means zooming with no pixelation issues. Winner!!!
All in all the H30 gets the wmoci thumbs up. Well worth spending some of your money on.

Main Features:

Read the rest of this entry »

wmoci.co.uk – Overkill? Definitely Not

We discussed getting wmoci.co.uk as well as wmoci.com for all of 10 seconds. You could look at it as overkill, .com is more generic and we aren’t a company. None of you will have noticed you can type in www.wmoci.co.uk and get to www.wmoci.com but then if you were going to a site called wmoci.com why would you use .co.uk as a suffix?
So why did we do this? Well 2 reasons.
1. Luke and myself both thought well we’re in the UK so why not? It seemed like a good idea at the time.
2. Its starting how we mean to go on. Wasting money on a .co.uk address for a site called wmoci.COM is genius. £4 wasted, yay!

Kodak Zi8

The Kodak Zi8 full HD 1080p video recorder.
For around £130 this is a great little gadget. Light-weight design pretty compact so easy to carry around in your pocket.
Has four different settings, you can either record at 1080p if your not bothered about memory usage, a 32GB memory card is a great extra for this. Or you can record at 720p instead saving more space. For sports and other fast moving video you have the option for 720p at 60FPS for some great slow motion play back. Or if you want to record for hours and hours theres simple VGA recording. The camera has a built in usb cable that pops out allowing you to download the videos straight to the PC or you can of course take the SD card out and transfer them with that. The camera also has an inbuilt HDMI out port so you can plug it straight into any HD tv and begin instant playback of all your videos

A few downsides I can pick out,
One its very very light. Too light in fact making it very easy to shake around and mess up your videos, however it has a handy tripod mount that’ll fix that. The second is lack of any night vision or flash, you get a much lower picture quality in the dark with lots of noise in the picture. The editing software that comes with it though makes it pretty simple to just turn up the brightness a little which makes it a lot easier to see. However this will add around an extra 30% to the file size.

HTC HD 2, Windows mobile

HTC HD 2

The second windows mobile I’ve wasted money on

However this time its much more money well spent
The phone may be on a £35 monthly contract but it was a really great buy,
With its 4.3 inch touch screen its one of the biggest phones out there, but its so slim and light weight the size is barely noticeable fits easily in any pocket but still has enough power to do whatever is needed of it
The first phone to come out with a 1Ghz~ processor allowing for multi tasking that actually works without lag
The phone comes ready to use after a short tutorial and gives you instant access to MSN, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and the rest of the internet with the added Opera browser with full multi touch support
The keyboard this time just uses the touch screen with a great auto correct option on it and allows you to type away close to a normal typing speed,
The new windows mobile OS runs a lot better with VERY few crashes or bugs and has had a great visual makeover by the phone makers HTC and all the ugly windows mobile OS interfaces are hidden  apart from a few essentials but with all the benefits, for example the new windows mobile market place which went live with the release of the phone and see’s new apps for your phone added every day.
The Market place may have a long way to go to catch Apples App Store but that’s the great thing about windows mobile, The phone is practically a PC and your free to install almost anything you want to it with no one laying down restrictions
Unlocked from any network the phone sells for around £500 which is obviously more than you would need to spend on a laptop of equal specs, but how many laptops can fit in your pocket
My only regret would be going on a contract with Vodafone the first company to offer the phone in the UK as their reception is weak everywhere I use the phone but I have the phone up and running with my old orange SIM now and can get a good connection all the time

Silverfox Orb MTB

Behold the Bike I bought in May this year and haven’t used…Was on special at only £100 but I can’t ride it as I’ve not yet converted the brakes with a special adaptation to put both brakes through one lever (that also cost £23 and is sitting on our kitchen bench). £123 so far wasted then. WMOCI!

* Colour of frame: Black * Black alloy rims.
* Some assembly required. * Tyres style mountain.
* Frame size 45cm (18in). * Wheel size 65cm (26in).
* Suitable for leg measurement 72 to 88cm. 14 yrs and over.
* 18 Shimano SIS gears.
* Front and rear brakes: Disc.
* Frame type: Y-frame. * Frame material: Steel.

Imate Ultimate 9502

Windows 6.1 Smart phone 

Price paid for brand new sim free £399.99

Processor: ~400MHz

Ram: 128mb

Camera: 3.0 Mega pixels and a second front facing camera for video calling

GPS

Full QWERTY Keyboard

Touch screen with stylus

3G internet access

Wifi and Bluetooth

Microsoft word, Excel and PowerPoint, Windows live messenger, windows hotmail

USB to PC Connectivity and the option to connect to a TV display

Price two months after purchase… £299.99

Got the phone in the box sim free and popped down to phones for you and got a 15 quid per month sim on orange with unlimited texts, 200 minutes and unlimited internet access then had the phone up and running in a few hours.

Going with windows mobile for my first Smartphone was a bit of a bad idea, first impression was how confusing this phone was totally different from any plain old phone.

Navigating around in Windows mobile 6.1 without a stylus is almost impossible unless you only use the buttons which can sometimes take a while if you need to scroll through a huge list, so many options and features can be customised to how you want to use it

Had the phone around 6 months and it developed a pretty major problem where it would hang for around two minutes every time I unlocked it

This was fixed after a few days by a factory reset but resulted in the loss of all my contacts, after this I found that if I had just edited my windows live messenger contacts to include mobile numbers, (which can be done quite easily on the phone) all I needed to do was log back into windows live on the phone and it would instantly download my entire contacts list, so now that’s what I use all the time which is going to make it easier when I eventually get bored and go for another phone.

But all in all a great phone, web browsing is easy, multi tasking works great, Windows live messenger works great both opened and in the back ground.

Only regret is

Not waiting two months two order it

And the cheek of the company I bought it from to send me an email advertising the exact phone I bought for £100 cheaper

The Playseat A1

Not the first crazy idea ever
But the newest one since this site went up
Also the main reason i havent had a chance to do any updates to the site. Simply put this things awesome if your a fan of driving and/or racing games

At first it was quite hard to get the hang of but after a few laps im finding the whole game in general a lot easier
Playing Forza 2 is great, the only downside i can even think of (apart from the size of the whole thig) is that you cant look around using the right thumbstick to get a diffrent view
Your either stuck pointing straight ahead or straight behind

Apart from that i’ve been racing almost none stop and its made me pre order the collecters edition of Forza 3 aswell
Its even made me want to play all my other old racing games aswell
Its also taken over as my main gaming chair aswell as this thing is so easy to sit it. Its easy enough to take the wheel and the peddles straight off aswell so it can be used for just sitting in or stored away

The seat and wheel are held in solidly so the thing barley shakes when your sitting in it but if you tun the force feedback setting up to 100% it’ll shake your whole floor which makes the whole thing feel alot more real
If you set this and a decent set of speakers up well enough (I have two speakers behind me The sub right under the seat and two speakers infront your even more in the game
The only thing we could think of to make it better apart from doing it for real was to stick a helmet on and try that
Maybe that was going over the top a little and it made it alot harder to see it was still great fun

All in all I’d say £265 well spent

WMOCI.com goes live!

Hello everyone and welcome to WMOCI.com!

This site is here to honour everyone who has come up with a crazy idea, then taken the idea to a state of reality much to the dismay (and in some cases disgust) of everyone around them. Most of all WMOCI.com salutes the wallets, purses, loans and bank accounts who ‘take one for the team’ for our pursuit of ‘must have’ fads.

Some of these ideas looking back we may now regret. But we can take solace in posting them on this site it may give someone somewhere a giggle to lighten their day.

WMOCI.com is here to entertain and allow others to revel in our quest to ignore common sense and pull out the cash regardless of what others may think. Our views and opinions are exactly that and shouldn’t be taken as personal blights or attacks. If you do then you are taking life to seriously and need to read a different blog.

At the same time we aim to guide our followers where possible to WMOCI in a progressive way and will post up promotional codes to save you money and hopefully in doing so you’ll retain some small amount of respect from your family and peers when you bragg to them “well it could have been worse!”

You can join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Be careful out there and happy spending…