Geek-ish Tissueboxes

IMPORTANT: For those of you are looking to buy cubes, we have a sales page here!

We happen to be fans of Big Bang Theory and in one episode, we spotted a Rubik’s Cube tissue box somewhere in their geek apartment (back in October?). Of course they’re not the first one to have this idea but we got curious and were convinced they would make awesome Christmas gifts for our friends. In the end we overdid it a little and made every cubic (and geek-ish) item we could think of. The result? A certain annoyed person who had to cut all those small pieces of wood for us (he paid us back with cutting them half-heartedly and not so precise as usual but no hard feelings..). Every cube made in a different way (some painted, stenciled, glued,..). Many gifts and actually none left for ourselves to keep and no drive to make more, … as always.

Now this wouldn’t be a real Kanojo.de blog entry if we didn’t tell you how it works, so here goes:

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Exclusive Gold/Silver Origami Cases

And it is (or rather, was) chrismastime again. And what do people like us do that time of the year? Right, tinkering together gifts in raw quantities! This time it got to be small origami figures, plated with real leaf-gold and leaf-silver: A nice selfmade gift with a exclusive note to it. And this is a small introduction (i wouldn’t say tutorial for the sake of the posts detail level) on how to make them. Read on!

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Free/Open Wireless Sync your iPhone with Linux!

While using 3.x on my iPhone free (as in self-hosted and “free as in free speech”) syncing was a bit of tinkering here and there but worked. With iOS 4 Apple introduced a new scheme for the Calendar (which used to be a nicely and sanely formatted sqlite file), so all the sync-tools aren’t really working anymore. Iphonesync (required J/B Phones and synced to e.g. Funambol) can still read notes(?) and addresses but can’t sync the calendar anymore. So i was looking for another option to sync this thingy – and found one (or two) …

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Custom Figure Display, Part 2

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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Custom Figure-Displays, Part I: Rakka Picture Frame

There are days where you just have to do some handicraft to finish the day in a nice way – so was today (and yesterday, but yesterday nothing worked, so fu yesterday, today worked out nice!). What we did is a – specifically our first – custom figure display. Its a kind of picture frame for a Rakka which lies cozily on a feather-bed.

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“HiFi” on the cheaps, DIY Speakers for few euros…

As a friend and myself built me a pair of quite nice – not to say wowzie – speakers for music production and DJing a few years ago i was now eager to try myself. To get the basic idea of craftsmenship and woodworking i started not by developing the speakers myself – as it was done by my friend for me back then – but go for a well known design by a guy from the german Hifi-Forum: The TenÖre Transmissionline Broadband-speaker. The name comes from german dialect/puns and roughly means “10-euro thingy”. A perfect object to train the techniques needed for more complicated work…

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Mahjongg madness, DIY Mahjongg table

Okay, so what do we have here? As you may know from previous posts or the tag-cloud we are quite into the game of Mahjongg, playing Riichi rules. What we’ve been missing all the time was a fantastic automatic mahjongg table. Of course it is much too expensive and huge – on top of that those beasts of machanics engeneering need frequend service – which isn’t available in Europe (it seems like this one was a rumor and is not true for the ones linked above…). So we set out to build one Ourselves (of course no automatic one as we are no team of engeneers with a fully equipped work shop). Read on for details and building instructions.

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Kawaii gifts, n-th round: Bath-Towel

“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!

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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Mina, Model-Kit Diary

As figures are somehow fun and so is tinkering. So how about combining those two? “Garage Modelkits” offer you the (IMO) nicest way of doing so. What you’ll get is a resin casted model in parts, you’ve gotta file it, grind it, polish it, paint it and glue it together. It takes up shitloads of your time, so be careful not to let that new hobby eat too much of your time – if you decide to try it / stick with it.

Anyways, we’ve (as in Eefi and NebuK :P) tried our first garage kit, Mina, from the Densha Otoko opening:

Mina, our first modelkit, finished 😛

As we’ve run into many problems, gear and methode wise, we thought we’d publish a small “buildlog” or “modelkit diary”. Mind you, this is by no means a guide or tutorial as we’ve only tried to find our way into the Resin Kit World :P. Still if you’re preparing to do your first kit this post may give you some kind of idea what you’re diving into.

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