household

Backlit Couch/Coffee-Table

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Have you ever wanted a cool couch- or coffee-table? Something you’re friends will be like “wow”, that blends nicely into your existing room and that makes a nice comfy atmosphere?  Too bad something like that isn’t available readily made at IKEA or the like … but hey, we can tinker it together ourselves!

That’s what we thought when we started to plan that table. Another nice thing about it: It’s extensible, you can always mod in a LED matrix and a matrix-cabinet and start displaying pixel art, a ticker or whatever you feel like … but first you need the basic hardware, and thats what this post is about!

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DIY HiFi Surround, picturama

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Once again i’ve been tinkering on small a broadband system to be used as my surround front/rear speakers. I’ve chosen a simple (and cheap!) design very similar to the CT 242, the only thing i’ve changed is the bass-reflex tuning. Once again, as i’m quite new to all this i’d rather refrain from giving instructions on how to do this and that here.

Custom Figure Display, Part 2

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Heyyas there,

here comes part two of the “custom modelkit/figure display” series (or whatever you’d call it). A custom display for figures, modelkits, whatever – you name it! It’s a crossover between a glass-case/cabinet and a shelf. It combines the idea of hanging it on the wall with a glass-case so the figures/GKs don’t collect too much dust. This time – unfortuneatly – i don’t have pictures of the quality and detail of the other tutorials, but i will try to describe the working parts as good as possible.

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Kawaii gifts, n-th round: Bath-Towel

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“A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.”

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy writes

Partly it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta;  use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to- hand-combat;

Or so it goes on…

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

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Deer me, Deer you, Bookstand-Deer!

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And off we go for another nice DIY tinkering howto. Again we needed a birthday present for a friend of ours, which is a deliberate Otaku and IRC-Nerd on #satf, rizon. Those folks happen to have a bot that can draw ASCII-Art pictures mainly of deers – that look just like the bookholder deer below.

As you can imagine our friend was flabbergasted (i somehow like that word) to the last. Read on for more details on how to build it!

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Something green for your flat

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You may have some dark or darker places in your Flat/Room/House/Whatever – or – as i do – a complete souterrain flat. Now you may have tried having some indoor plants in there – just to make the rooms nicer. It just didn’t work, so you put ’em into trash and never tried again.

Well, maybe i just exaggerated a bit, it isn’t that worse most of the time. Still its kinda difficult growing and hatching nice plants virtually anywhere. As i like some green around me and *am* living in a dark souterrain flat i’ve put some reading and discussion with biologists into this and i think i’ve got it how to make that work by now.

First off you need to choose the right plants. Not anything is suited for this kind of enviroment, but some nice ones are spathiphyllum, ficus (benjamini), yuca, phoenix (dactylifera), calathea, dracaena, various ivys, but there are many many more. Just check your local library for nice books on that topic – believe me, books are way better than interweb for this :).

Of those examples i have the following ones around:

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