This is one of the kits I've always wanted (even before picking up painting GKs as a hobby). The sculptor Abira is really talented and has produced a bunch of Toradora (among others) figures that I all love to have. So more are bound to follow if I can ever get my hands on some kits of his!

Taiga here was painted using Mr. Hobby Colors and I especially like how her dress turned out. The many layers of frills have a little purple shading on them. I'm happy that it seems like I'm rally improving. Usually I stick to round acrylic transparent bases but this time I sort of copied the background colors of the original artwork that belongs to this kit.

sadly after playing with some plugins it seemed that somehow a bit of potentially malicious code entered the blog. It was appended on all themese footer.php and i'm currently trying to investigate (and asking the wordpress guys over at WordPress-Support) which plugin it was and how it injected the code.

Upon a quick analysis of the code it seemed that no harm was done - it connected to a site transmitting no data whatsoever. !So it didn't actually harm anything! (as far as i could see...).

The matter is now resolved, and even the google Malicious-Code-Check doesn't raise a alarm anymore ...

Sorry for any inconvenience caused!

So why all this? When casting resin in a (RTV) silicone mould at room pressure it seems you're up against mainly one problem: Bubbles. You'd do anything to get rid of them. From complicated vent systems in the molds that i've seen to the nice thingy below: A vibration table that will shake out the dreaded little bubbles.

The LEGO construction you see on the table is there as a test object - it will be used as a box to pour the silicone in (THIS WILL NO HAPPEN ON THE VIBRATION TABLE! ITS REALLY ONLY MERELY A PLACEHOLDER THERE). After the silicone mold has vulcanized(?) and is ready to be filled with liquid resin to cast it is placed on the table, the resin is poured and then the table is switched on.

I've tried to put a little work in the construction of the table, yet still keep it a quick hack. I have not yet acquired a jack for the power, so currently i'm holding the wires on my power connector manually ;>. This WILL be changed ;P.

As for the construction, its a simple rectangular frame which is miter-joint for extra stability and better looks ;P. The wood used is some cheap three-layer composite material sourced in the waste-bin of the local DIY-store.

 Additionally i have mitered the top edge and the edge of the "floating" table plate.

This allows for more play for the table and thus a larger range of weights that can be put on it without restricting the vibrational ability...

 The "Floating" construction is made using pull-springs in each edge:

 On the frame side they're simply hung on simple wood-screws...

 On the table-plate side they're mounted using a long screw driven through the plate itself. The mouting ring of the spring is then fastened between two hexnuts.

For the vibration mechanism itself we went for a old computer fan that has been stripped of ... nearly everything. I've preserved a few struts to mount the motor on. To create a imbalance large enough to vibrate a big block of silicone i've glued a large screw to the outer runner of the motor and added weights (hexnuts) until i was satisfied. The position and weight of the nuts can be used to adjust amplitude and frequency of the vibration.

 It has been fastened using regular 2-Components Epoxy glue...

For fastening the motor on the table i've gone the simple way and clamped the struts of the frame between two screws.

 Nice jack and switch to come ;P.

So, how good does it work? To be honest - I DONT KNOW! We haven't got the resin and silicone yet, so i can't test. But the basic principle is there, and it vibrates nicely. Check out this bad, crappy, short video for a functional test using ~1L of water ;P.

I'm really looking forward for the rest of the equipment to arrive so i can test the construction ... and hopefully report back with more ;P.

But we didn't give up and started investigating new, cheaper methods of batch-building those nifty little tissue-cubes. Lucky for us we found a way using a well manufactured premade tissue box made from sturdy cardboard. The results can be seen here:

And now for the important things: We've done this and made this prototype to be able to offer you a bunch of those thingies. When making them in batch, using the premade boxes, spray-mount, quality adhesive plastic-sheet and colored paper sheets we could press the price as low as 18Eur. That is if we get at least 10 "orders". Shipping would be europe-wide (and maybe others too, if not too pricey) for the standard "DHL Päckchen International" rates.

For those interested: The cube measures 12.5x12.5x12.5cm. Subtracting maybe 2-3mm wall thickness it still fits our originally used saubär tissue boxes. I do hope that similar designed (and sized) tissue boxes can be found anywhere...

In a nutshell

• Size: 12.5 cm x 12.5 cm x 12.5 cm
• Material: Magnetic lid, cardboard, acrylic paint, foil coated paper
• Now with stronger adhesives!
• Price: 18 Eur
• Payment: PayPal or Bank Transfer (inside EU)
• Pattern options: Random pattern (default) OR Solved pattern (please write into the message field if you order via Paypal)
• Tissue option: Without tissues (default) OR with German SauBär tissues (blue and orange) (+1 Eur) (For the time being we can't offer this option!)
• Shipping (no tracking!): Germany: 4.10 Eur, European Union: 8.90 Eur, World: 15.90 Eur
• If you order more or want Express Shipping, please inquire!
• Returns accepted! Ship it back at your expense to get a full refund!
  

If you feel like you want such a nice cube, feel free to either leave a comment or send a email to "cub...@kanojo.de".

OR Fast Checkout with PayPal

GERMANY	EU	World

In stock!

I rarely preorder a figure these days but this was one I could not miss~.

I like those pictures with the blister still unopened. Hanekawa comes with a school desk and chair, plus her second shoe, an extra hair fringe part without cat ears, mobile and two metal etched glasses.

Okay, it's not really difficult to figure out how to assemble her and I ignored the instructions. What I mean is, push the included pegs into her legs first, I did it wrong.

Stuff sticking out of the table!

Enjoy the pictures! I force walls of text out of my brain for my thesis every day, I have nothing left to say now.

Beautiful shading everywhere~

It's a shame I never take my time to appreciate a figure. Most of the time I take it out of the box and put it inside a shelf. I have a shelf right above my desktop but it's not the same as when there's no glass between you and the figure.

PLANNING AND CONSIDERATIONS

So first when planning a system like this you need to decide a few things. What are the aspects that are most important to you?

• Speed?

I've decided that this system will be a mass-storage. A data-grave. Thus i have made no attempts whatsoever to optimize speed in any way. The result is relatively clear - not really fast.

• Security?

Does the data need special protection? For me it was simple - i've got a okay~ish CPU in the host box, so encrypting the whole data is no big problem. Why NOT do it?

• Reliability?

How important is the data you want to save really? RAID is nice, but it is NO BACKUP. Are there special considerations to make for desaster recovery? As this is going to be a data-grave for me i've opted for a "best effort" policy. I've got a used UPS to protect my equipment (server and this storage) from power losses and voltage fluctuations. Then i've decided for a RAID system, namely the old RAID 5. As i said i haven't optmized for speed, so RAID 0+1 was no option since you'd need more disks to get the same actual storage size. As for desaster recovery i've decided to use a LVM layer on top of my crypto layer. This allows me for snapshots (in case of huge write events when snapshotting i think i can even use a external large disk as a snapshot device...) when i perform critical filesystem operations. If the filesystem ever fails so hard that i have to perform potentially dangerous operations (and FSCKing a "crashed" ext-filesystem IS dangerous) i can always just snapshot, toy around, if i break it revert the snapshot...

• Noise and vibration?

As for vibration (and thus much of the noise of a harddisk array) you need to trade a few things off. On one hand its really nice to mount disks with thick rubber layers to dampen their vibrations. This has the backdraw that the harddisks will always move - they'll swing on the flexible rubber layer. Consider this article/video by Brendan Gregg to see why this is bad: Unusual Disk Latency. So basically you'd want something that is very rigid so the drives don't move *too* much. On the other hand, to isolate each harddrive from the vibrations of the others (huge commercial raid arrays all have/need ways to deal with isolating individual drives - consider a scenario where a RAID 5 or similar level array starts writing, many drives start seeking at the same time sending a huge vibration-wave through the case disturbing (and as i've heared - yes, only heared) and even headcrashing other drives.

I've attempt to achieve this by applying my knowledge from building speaker enclosures. The scenario as well as the vibration frequency range are quite similar. To supress case movements i've chosen a even (internally) and dense material: MDF. While this has the backdraw that it heavily couples the drives it will do a good job at dampening the overall vibration. As a upgrade to this (which i haven't implemented yet) one could use a additional "energy trap" consisting of a moveable, rubber-like but very stiff material. Fortuneatly this is readily available as a mat to put your washing machine on! If i'm not entirely mistaken even putting the whole construction on a piece of such a mat will not only effectively lower the (hearable) noise from the array but also further dampen vibrations by taking in the (slight) case movement and turning it into "heat" (by elastic deformation(?TODO: ASK PHYSICIST?)).

• Connection?

How do you plan to connect the device to your computer? There are basically two ways of doing this: One is to use a cheap S-ATA adapter card with enough ports (see below) which will then leave you with a large pack of cable running from whereever you place the array to into your computer (also requiring some kind of large hole in your case to route the cables through). I've chosen this option as it fits my needs (server standing somewhere in a drawer) better. The other thing i've come across are sata multiplier cards. These nifty little things implement a integral but not widespread part of the sata-specification: some kind if hub/switch. If your card supports sata port multipliers (and really REALLY check if it does!) you can get a rather cheap (~60Eur maybe) multiplier card (e.g. from "dawicontrol") which enables you to build a completely self-contained storage - just plug one (e-)sata cable into your computer and zuuup, there are your 5 drives!

CHOOSING PARTS

Theres a bit of a philosophical question here regarding harddrives. You could either use 5 exactly same drives bought from the same store, thus having a larger probability to be from the same production batch. For one this would be great because seek and throughput performance would be the same, you wouldn't waste bandwidth waiting for one slower drive. On the other hand this can suck because ... if theres a manufacturing error and one drive dies, you replace it, start a rebuild, the rebuild puts heavy strain on the other drives, bearing the same error they'll be likely to die too leaving you with severe data loss. So i'd recommend you either to try to get the same drives from different batches, or - that was the way i did it - buy 5 completely different drives. As speed is a non-issue for me this seemed the safest choice when it comes to per-batch production errors.

As for the adapter card i was very lucky to find leaf-computer.de who seem to offer quality storage controllers used on very simplistic PCBs - such as this: Marvel 8Port SATA Adapter. Exaclty what i need! And at what a small price tag! The marvel chip used on this board is known for excellent linux driver support as well as good performance and a nice feature set. Heck you could even plug sata port multiplier on this and achieve a 8x 5-disk-raid-5! It does also support staggered spinup (spinning up one drive after another putting less load on the PSU)

As for the other components i've simply tried to choose reasonable at a good bang for the buck ratio. A simple 450W PSU with 85% efficiency even in the medium power range, a reasonably silent and powerful large fan... thats about it.

IMPLEMENTATION (hardware)

Taking the measurements at the drives and calculating the case sizes was a bit of a hassle, but in the end it worked nicely. Here you can see a the parts of the case loosely put on each other.

As for the parts needed - heres the list:

• 1* 306x186mm
• 2* 102.2x186mm
• 1* 219x186mm
• 2* custom measures parts of ??x105.4mm

everything is made of 16mm MDF.

Here you can then see how the PSU will be mounted (it has two mounting holes where that square timber is) and the two custom measured parts. They close the edges of the fan and depend on the outer sizes of your fan - so first mount/measure the fan, then cut the MDF.

The case itself is assembled by using simple wood glue, then reinforced (as seen below) by counterbored screws to make the vibration-transfer better and distribute it throughout the whole case.

Now comes the most tricky part, and i must admit that i've forgotten to make detailed notes of this. You need to measure the harddrives (they're more or less 25.4x146.5x101.6mm by specification) and where their screw-holes are, then measure it on the top of your case, drill a hole that'll just fit your screw, then drill a little with a larger drill to countersink their heads...

After finishing the holes i've found a nifty little gadget in my old hardware scrapbags - a simple fan control pcb! Woo! I've just mounted it where it looked nice - please note that this is totally optional .

The next trick was to get the PSU to start and stay always running without attaching a mainboard or switch. Thanks to Wikipedias ATX Article this was very simple. Find the PS_ON pin, some random ground (the one above/beneath PS_ON for example), rip them out of the poor connector and solder them together... magic works, the PSU runs!

Now its time to mount the harddisks. This turned out to be a little more difficult than expected as you need to place the drives exactly under the drilled holes without looking. In the design i proposed there is a little space between the drives making this a little harder yet. I've had luck with using a led flashlight on the backsides (the one with the PCB) of the HDDs and looking through the holes from the top of the case...

... and having a hand in the front of the case is also very handy

Then i've packed all SATA cables into a nice large batch (wow, this looks SO professional )

and finally placed it where it belongs - in my drawer above my server!

After using it a few days i must say that both noise and heat is very good. Even with the fan on full i can barely hear the array even under full load (seek-hell). The drives report temperatures of 25-41*C through smart, which is really okay. When feeling with your hand it only barely warm...

IMPLEMENTATION (software)

Now as the hardware is completed, up and running lets head for the software. This was a little harder than i expected to get right. As already said i've chosen a design like MD <-> CryptSetup (LUKS) <-> LVM <-> EXT4 to have maximum flexibility, data security as well as a little more help in case of a data corruption.

The main problem with the software setup was to get all those abstraction layers neatly aligned. However, first things first. If you got new drives, what do you do? Right - badblocks and smart. The thing with badblocks on a new drive is that it almost in all cases will NOT yield badblocks. This is because a modern harddrive has some free blocks that are not mapped at the start of its livetime. As the drives firmware finds bad blocks while operating it'll replace them with those replenishment-blocks. Only when you run out of those you're in serious trouble. However, as smart prints the "Reallocated_Sector_Ct" field you'll identify a defective harddrive after a exhaustive badblock test even if there are replacement blocks left.

badblocks -s -w /dev/sd[efghi]

Is what you want to run now (assuming dmesg agrees that your new drives are sde,f,g,h,i). Do expect it to run quite long, if you want the RW test as proposed around 2-3 days. After that we'd want to start a smart long selftest (smartctl -t long /dev/sd[efghi]) and then read and try to interpret the results (smartctl -a /dev/sd[efghi]).

The next thing is ... naming your array! Its important for such hardware to have a good name. I've chosen the name "dantalian" of the recent anime "Dantalian no Shoka" (The Mystic Archives of Dantalian, ダンタリアンの書架). Its basically that this cute tsundere little girl here to the left does contain a large library of magic books in her chest, making her a library (the magic library dantalian). And as its magic it is HUUUGE. What is this array? HUUUGE! Nice fit!

Anyways, back to the software setup. Now that the drives are tested we can start to initialize the array. This can be done with:

mdadm --create -x 0 -l 5 -n 5 dantalian /dev/sde1 /dev/sdf1 /dev/sdg1 /dev/sdh1 /dev/sdi1

after partitioning your drives so you'll have one partition of the type "FD", aka linux raid autodetect. For testing purposes i propose to create a smaller partition, e.g. 100gb, on each drive. That way you can run your various desaster tests (and i've run SOME!) without the raid rebuild taking ages each time!

Now that md is told of the array, we need to persist its configuration. This can neatly be done byletting mdadm itself create the config

mdadm --detail --scan >> /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

This assumes a standard debian mdadm.conf (especially containing "DEVICE partitions", telling mdadm to probe all partitions known to the system to find raid drives...). Now you can monitor your raids initial 'rebuild' status by issuing

watch -n 10 cat /proc/mdstat

which will yield something like:

Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] md127 : active raid5 sdi1[5] sdh1[3] sdg1[2] sdf1[1] sde1[0] 7814041600 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [5/4] [UUUU_] [&gt;....................] recovery = 1.4% (28754816/1953510400) finish=1590.0min speed=20174K/sec

Now, according to a good source

If the device to be encrypted is an md RAID array, you should use the --align-payload= to ensure that crypto blocks are aligned on RAID stripes. This option takes as an argument the number of 512-byte sectors in a full RAID stripe. To calculate this value, multiply your RAID chunk size in bytes by the number of data disks in the array (N/2 for RAID 1, N-1 for RAID 5 and N-2 for RAID 6), and divide by 512 bytes per sector. In the example below, /dev/md0 is a RAID 6 device with 4 data disks and a stripe size of 128 kbytes: 128 * 1024 * 4 / 512 = 1024 sectors. # cryptsetup --verbose luksFormat --verify-passphrase --align-payload=1024 /dev/md0 When prompted, supply the key you created in the step above.

So, adapted to our scenario that means that we'll create the crypt layer using:

cryptsetup --verbose luksFormat --verify-passphrase --align-payload=4096 /dev/md/dantalian

Now (after opening the device using cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/md/dantalian dantalian-crypt) lets create the LVM:

Consider this formula:

metaatasize = chunk size times number of data disks in the array

which then gives us the command to create the physical volume format on the crypto-pseudodevice:

pvcreate --metadatasize 2048K --dataalignment 4096 -M2 /dev/mapper/dantalian-crypt

now, using pvscan you can let this new volume be autodetected as:

PV /dev/dm-2 lvm2 [7.28 TiB] Total: 1 [7.28 TiB] / in use: 0 [0 ] / in no VG: 1 [7.28 TiB]

Okay, we've got our physical volume for LVM, so lets create one volume group containing one (or more, depends on your preferences here) logical volume on those:

vgcreate dantalian-vg-main /dev/mapper/dantalian-crypt

lvcreate --name dantalian-lv-main -l 100%FREE dantalian-vg-main

Now, after some more vgscan and lvscan you should be presented with your /dev/dantalian-vg-main/dantalian-lv-main device - ready to create a filesystem. This again needs to be .... ha - what is it ... ALIGNED! Hell No!

Lucky for us EXT4 pretty much autodetects that it is on a raid device, what stripe-width and stride-width are, but to be sure lets ask our source from before again:

The relevant options for ext3 are stride and stripe-width. stride is identical to the md array chunk size, and stripe-width is identical to the array stripe width, except that both options are specified in units of filesystem blocks instead of bytes. The default ext3 (and ext4) block size is 4096 bytes, so simply divide your chunk size and stripe width by 4096 to get the proper values for these parameters. Here's an example using a RAID 6 array with 6 disks (i.e., 4 data disks) using a chunk size of 128k (stripe size is therefore 512 kbytes)

So for us its now:

stride = chunksize / blocksize, (512*1024)/1024 = 128.0

stripesize = stride * datadisks = 128 * 4 = 512

which will then result in the following mkfs command:

mkfs.ext4 -n -m 0 -E stride=128,stripe-width=512 -b 4096 /dev/dantalian-vg-main/dantalian-lv-main

leaving us (when removing the -n option) with a nicely aligned filesystem that is aware of the striping/striding. The last point is then again a data-security thing. If ever the unlikely case should happen that the crypt layers metadata get corrupted it is really handy to have a backup. This can be achieved by

cryptsetup luksHeaderBackup --header-backup-file DANTALIAN-LUKS-HEADERS /dev/md/dantalian

cryptsetup luksDump /dev/md/dantalian &gt; DANTALIAN-LUKS-HEADER-DUMP

with all its backdraws. Those can be found in the cryptsetup/luks FAQ!

Now after some while of using the array i'm quite fond of it. Its not only faster than i've feared (i do get 25-30MB/s over my gbit lan) its also proven to be quite sturdy in case of bad(TM) events. I've tried killing the power of the array, the host computer, tried unplugging single harddrives or even more than one harddrive - all even with heavy random access (compiling a kernel). I haven't succeeded in creating a situation that would've lead to data-loss.

Again, if you're interested in more details, would like to know the exact locations of the holes you need to drill for the harddisks or something else - just write a email or leave a comment!

I've also burdened me with some constraints - it should require as little "active chef time" as possible. There are some things you can't change, amongst them that a good broth needs time to simmer. The second was that i've tried to use as few "exotic" ingredients as possible.

The result, which can be seen to our left, is neither great nor bad - but its a good start, not too pricey as well as not too complex.

Another abstract i'm obliged to add is that THIS IS NO "AUTHENTIC" RAMEN. IT ALSO DOESN'T AIM TO BE "AUTHENTIC". I've never been to japan nor have i tasted *really* authentic japanese ramen. I've been to a pair of japanese restaurants selling ramen here in germany. My main reference are tastings and recipe from people who seem to have tasted a great deal of japense ramen - and, of course, my personal taste.

So first we'll go through the basic idea. To get a delicious, "wide" and full-bodied broth you need quite some tastes. To  me it seems as most ramen stocks rely on a kind of "roasted", "caramelized" flavor base, combined with various vegetable-flavors. They also seem to be seasoned with only a few spices, however these need to be chosen and dosed carefully.

So my idea was to get the whole flavor from a very thick chicken stock as well as the braising liquid from braising pork chops.

Here's my ingredients list:

Chicken stock:

• 1 (medium-sized) Chicken, preferably old
• 1/2 (large) Leek
• 3 carrots
• 3 (larger) onlions
• 1/4 celery

Braising liquid / Meat:

• 4 (large) Pork Chops
• Warm/Hot water (as needed)
• 1tbsp Miso
• 1/2 tbsp ginger powder
• ~30ml Shoyu (Kikkoman or similar good brand)

Soup Seasoning:

• 100-150ml Shoyu
• 1/2 Pckg Instant-Dashi (package said to season around 1 litre of soup)
• 2tbsp ginger powder
• 50-75ml mirin
• 1/2 tbsp brown sugar
• 2-3 tbsp Miso

Directions:

First start by washing and (coarsly) chopping onions, carrots, leek and fennel. Put these in a pressure cooker in around 3 litres of water, start to cook. Meanwhile start washing the chicken and cut it in half. Add the chicken to the pressure cooker and bring to a boil. After 4-5 minutes scrape off the skunk that may have shown on the top using a slotted spoon. Close pressure cooker and let cook at maximum pressure for 2:00-2:30h.

After finishing the soup, start the braising. Put around 100-150ml warm water, shoyu and pork chops in a large pan. Make sure the pork chops are almost fully submerged, *almost*. Bring to a boil, then turn the flame down so it'll just show the slightest hint of bubbles/boiling (you can also achieve this by using a pot/pan with fireproof handle and put it into the oven @ ~110*C). Dissolve the miso and ginger powder in a small cup of warm water, add to rest of the mixture. Let sit and *slightly* simmer for around 1:30-2:00h.

When the pork is nice and tender put the meat itself in a plastic wrap in the fridge. Cooling it down makes it possible to carefully slice it using a *sharp* knife.

When the soup finishes release the pressure and add the braising liquid. Pour the soup through a coarse strainer/sieve, boil some water (~500ml) and and pour through the mixture in the sieve to extract the last bits of flavor (this is, e.g., also done when brewing beer).

Then start seasoning the soup. Start with the instant-dashi as this is probably the one powder thingy with the highest level of salinity you've ever encountered in your life. Then slowly start seasoning with Shoyu (don't panic if its a little salty at this point), then mirin, then sugar and the rest. The mirin and miso will eat away a little saltyness, but you can always re-adjust. Add the miso at the very end of the process as it doesn't like to sit for long. Make sure NOT to bring the soup near a boil as soon as the miso is added, when boiled it will spoil your whole effort by becoming unbelievably bitter.

Then slice the meat into small mouth-sized pieces, find some nice somen noodles and various other toppings (i've used silk tofu, a hard-boiled egg and carrot julienne). Other great ideas include chopped spring-onions, various other kinds of vegetables and narutomaki.

The Result looks like this:

I hope you liked this recipe or - at least - got a idea of how you're going to create your own recipe. I must also again note that THIS IS NO FINAL VERSION. It actually kind of sucks compared to what i want to achieve, but this is the best "quick" ramen recipe i've seen so far (maybe i've just searched wrong?).

The Recipe was also reviewed by a friend here: Review

My long awaited Snow Miku arrived today, brought by Enekoneko (thanks for proxy-ing for me ;A;!!). She was released back at WonFes Winter this year. Being a GSC Online Shop Exclusive, you had to pay a proxy to get her. At last, GSC's own shop accepts international orders now as well.

The package is quite big... Yuki Miku doesn't come with a lot of accessories but an ice tray is included which is taking up a lot of space.

I'm looking forward to trying out making ice cubes and whatnot. A Hatchune, a normal Miku, leek, some sort of sign, half-spheres with snowflake pattern.

The good think about all her accessories is: you can display a lot of them at once. Like her snowman, her scarf and her leek.

Just like Saber and HMO Miku, Snow Miku is "Super Moveable". This basically means that she has additional joints on her arms and legs and her torso. Miku has a LOT of plastic wraps to avoid paint transfer which are hard to remove (I cut a few instead of taking her apart).

Okay, I can't pose Nendoroids to save my life. So that's why Miku will look very awkward in the following photos. But you get the idea. I'm mostly afraid their joints will get loose, and Nendos are usually really hard to get on their stands. I can either pose them and won't be able to attach them on their stand while keeping the same pose. Or I can jam them into the stand and not pose them (or they'll fall of the stand again). I have no idea how people can manage both.

"Hello, I can stand on my own using my twintails!" This is very similar to the original Miku Nendoroid.

Hatchune Snowman Miku. I tried to make the head come off but at some point I was scared to pull harder. I think it's cute how the leek sticks out, I don't know.

I'm obviously too much of an amateur to understand why Hatchune has to come with her own hairpiece. But I won't complain, really.

Her usual headphones.. thing is also included but I will *never* remove those earmuffs, they just fit her a lot better.

I was just trying to make her stand on her own, alright?

No, she can't really sit down. At least I tried.

I know you people are tired of translucent hair already. Snow Miku is really shiny all over, even the blue colors sparkle.

My Miku has a paint chip on her head. I guess GSC's QC is not perfect.

I finally attached her on the stand.

Transparent leek!

Even though she is just another color variant (except for the scarf and her earmuffs), she really stands out from my Nendoroid collection. I'm glad I didn't buy the first Snow Miku (yes, there's more and from what I've read on GSC's blog, they'll release a new one next year too) which was just that, a recolor from the original Miku Nendoroid. I love the bright blue they used for the color non-shiny parts. She'll be my color reference for a scaled GK Miku I'm about to build. You might not like Nendoroids that much, but you'll probably like her.

If you have a similar setup to mine - read on!

For your most basic setup - a 5.1 upmix, a52encode(!!) and spdif output pulse alone cannot get you to your goal. You need some small piece of alsa configuration so pulseaudio can properly autodetect your spdif output as well as leverage alsas encoder to do the actual work. On any debian-like system (and probably others too) you can just install a *RECENT* pulseaudio (>= 0.9.23) along with pavucontrol and put this piece of config into your

/etc/asound.conf

file, then invoke

/etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart:
==== SNIP ====
pcm.a52 {
  @args [CARD]
  @args.CARD {
    type string
  }
  type rate
  slave {
    pcm {
      type a52
      bitrate 448
      channels 6
      card $CARD
    }
    rate 48000 #required somehow, otherwise nothing happens in PulseAudio
  }
}
pcm.!default {
    type pulse
    # If defaults.namehint.showall is set to off in alsa.conf, then this is
    # necessary to make this pcm show up in the list returned by
    # snd_device_name_hint or aplay -L
    hint.description "Default Audio Device"
}
ctl.!default {
    type pulse
}                                                                                            
==== snap ====

This does the following: It provides a configurable a52 encoder for a variable card to pulseaudio. It also sets the alsa-pcm-default to pulseaudio (which will make all your "legacy" alsa applications use pulse by default) as well as the control default to pulse.

Please note that with this and pulse' default setup the first application that'll do audio after boot will start your pulseaudio-server - and the owner of that application will own the pulseaudio server. For example if you use "mpd" or some other daemon audio player which runs as a different user than you he will own the server - which can get inconvenient.

The next step is configure pulseaudio itself. In

/etc/pulse/daemon.conf

i had to add

default-sample-rate = 48000
default-sample-channels = 6

to set the default values. After that alls thats left is deciding whether you want autospawning - which you do in

/etc/pulse/client.conf

then start a pulseaudio server, watch the debug output and connect with pavucontrol. Pavucontrol lets you reroute stream to output devices (so you can switch your mplayer live from spdif to analog out to some network device and vice versa) as well as set per-application volumes or set your default output.

All thats left is - if you want networking - on the server to (either in default.pa or dynamicall) load the networking module using:

pacmd 'load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl=192.168.0.42'

where 192.168.0.42 may be your trusted other party or a whole trusted network in the "<ip>/<decimal netmask>" notation., then on the client you can either use a whole remote server via

"export PULSE_SERVER=YOUR-SERVER-IP"

then start any pulse-aware audio application and it will connect to the remote server, or - more elegant in my view - you can add your remote server as a (tunneled) sink:

pacmd 'load-module module-tunnel-sink server=YOUR-SERVER-IP'

then you'll have your network output device listed as any other output device in pavucontrol and you can reroute streams (live! although with a short initial lag/stutter period)

This is what my pulseaudio setup looks like - and i'm *really* happy with it. Everything works as expected, including mplayer on 5.1 movies working out of the box! If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

The second part of my August loot. Here comes No. 9 of the Touhou Nendoroid line. GSC doesn't have any new ones announced so for now my collection is complete! They almost take up the space on one shelf by themselves.. I can fit another three but any more and I have to get creative. But it seems like this is not going to happen anytime soon.

Gallery behind the cut!

I know I always complain about the lack of accessories and Cirno's no exception. At least GSC makes the Touhou Nendos themselves. Leaving Nendoroid releases to other companies has seldom worked out well (in particular the Taiga Nendoroid - they squeezed out three different releases, one with less extras than the other..).

Cirno comes with three faceplates, a matching base and some arm pieces, the usual stuff. And a frozen frog and an ice sword.

Oh God, look at that grinning face.. but it suits her well.

Her wings were hard to push into their sockets so I left them a bit loose.. her hair's also gets in the way.

I think I have a few more of those angry faces... but the crying one is priceless!

You can display her floating in the air with the jointed base arm.