Hi!
My name is Justin. I’m from New Zealand, currently living and working in the USA.
I love to invent, build, or create things, but I tend to simply sit on a lot the things that I make instead of showing them to anyone else. I’ve made this website to hopefully counter that tendency and encourage me to take the time to document some of what I do.
The things I make are sadly not very ambitious – I don’t have enough free time to undertake larger and more meaningful projects; I have to keep the scope very small. Nonetheless I hope they appeal on some level!
Speaking of creating things – that’s also how I ended up here in America! I was interested in making computer games and my amateur modifications to the popular game “Doom” were well-received internationally and caught the eye of games studios. There was no game industry in New Zealand at the time, so if I wanted to be in that field I had to emigrate. I didn’t know anyone in America, I had never been there, and all of my family was in New Zealand, but I packed some things and set off into the unknown. Along the way there were some trials and tribulations but also a lot of people being helpful and new friends, and somehow it all worked out.
New Zealand is a fantastic place to live, but something that is better here in the USA is how much easier it is to obtain obscure or esoteric supplies and materials for making oddball projects. New Zealand is an isolated island economy of under 5 million people, while the USA is a continental economy of over 300 million people, almost all of whom are within quick affordable ground-shipping distance of each other… and other large countries. When I wanted a specific component or part in New Zealand, typically either I needed to import it myself, air-freighting it from the other side of the world at a cost I often couldn’t afford, or there was simply no supplier at all who was willing to ship internationally in small quantities. Either way, I usually had to find something less suitable but more available. Today, I live near a city with more people than all of New Zealand! The difference it makes for finding supplies and materials is amazing.
Because of the difficulty obtaining specialist supplies in New Zealand (especially in the days before online shopping really took off), I think I developed a pretty good eye for spotting and salvaging useful parts out of junk. That’s less necessary here, but it still adds to my options and I like it when things I make have diverted junk from landfill rather than consumed new materials. (My wallet likes it too!)
Anyway, that’s enough for now. Currently this site is Under Construction Like It’s 1994!
– Justin