See the pictures below for the whole drink collection as well as the drinkholder and both put together .

(some building details inside!)

Unfortuneatly we didn't have time to document the whole build process due to time constraints (we only had one evening to build the whole thingy), so just a little description here.

All the wood was birch plywood ("multiplex"), the baseplate is 18mm thick, the top one (the one with the holes) is 12mm to save some time routing the holes. Both are 35*50cm. The two sides (3*50cm) are made of two layers 21mm wood, so it'd get high enough. First we routed a 45* bevel around the bottom (read: the ugly side) of the baseplate, then started to route the holes - they are of diameters 7cm, 8cm and 6.5cm (so that all the bottles fit just nicely). This was all in all the most of the work - after that came routing some bevels onto the inner diameter of the holes, routing the bevel on the top plate and glueing the four  21mm sides together to two higher sidewalls. The finish was sanding up to 180grit (using a eccentric sander) and rubbing the whole thing with linseed oil. We only used a little as we had the need to dry it overnight - this sadly minimizes the protective effect of the oil but we had no choice. Normal would be two or three times flooding the wood with oil, letting it stand for ten minutes and taking the rest off - after that it'd need to dry completely which would take several days if not weeks.

Hope you liked this project again - as always, if you have any questions, please feel free to comment or mail in!

Okay, so after almost two days of fighting with XeLaTeX to get nice unicode support and fighting defoma for getting a nice font its finally done!

You can fetch the PDF here, the booklet printing (just print it, fold the whole stack in the middle (short-edge oriented) and staple it together) version as postscript is available here.

Also note that there might be a few mistakes due to the hardcore TeX action in the typesetting, feel free to report those to me to get 'em fixed. For errors in the original document please contact the original author or me.

I hope you're having your fun playing with those rule sheets, i hope they came out nicely . For a nice, short yaku overview just surf up here.

The whole event took us longer than expected, we started at about 18:00 and worked through until we started cleaning up maybe at ~24:00-00:30 - and hell, we produced a lot of candles, both pulled on their wick and casted into various cans and cups.

The Results were really really nice and everyone took their fair amout of candles home. Thanks again here for the suppliers of the wax ;P. If it should ever run out i'm definately planning on getting my own to make candles yet again. The way they look and smell is just too nice - and as everything you make yourself ... its just somehow special .

Finished Candles

For a more detailed report and instructions you can also visit Saaviks Blog.

So, that's why you might want to rebuild all those Tools you're used to in a trusted environment - your own server. You don't want your mail stored in some possible hostile environment on a untrusted machine that could leak your valuable data. Turns out its not that easy sometimes. I've only worked on getting a capable Web Mailer and Feed Reader to run smoothly. What surprised me here - and why I'm writing about this - is that it was exceptionally hard - or rather time-intensive - for something sounding as easy as this.

I first targeted the Reader, looked around Freshmeat and SourceForge where you expect to find decent free software for that task. I've found quite a few not-so-simple-looking projects, including Tiny Tiny RSS. Turned out TinyTiny RSS is almost there, but needs PostgreSQL. So  i set up PostgreSQL, installed TTRSS and set it up. Imported GoogleReaders OPML, and zup. worked. Problem's all the feeds are in one big Table - resulting in the whole thing beeing painfully slow. So up for 7-8 Hours of harcore Postgres performance tuning, trying to hack memcached into ttrss, etc. Speedup of almost 100%, yet it was not close to beeing usable. Turns out the developer didn't intent the project for archiving articles for having a searchable archive. So up for something different, Gregarius, which the TTRSS dev recommended. This worked quite out of the box, except for 3-4 Hours of tinkering and writing small plugins to get the whole thing to work properly. But it does - and has almost all the feature one expects.

The harder part came now, Webmail. I first tried to hack the roughly-set-up RoundCube that still was on my server. After short testing and many functions that just did not work due to unknown reasons i knew i needed something different - and started toying around with Horde and its webmailer Imp(4) in the Horde Webmail Edition pack. Horde feels somehow "unix style"-ish, like ... building a highly reusable backend, letting other projects include/work ontop of that backend, etc. - but let me say one thing: This beast is so darn hard to set up. I've got it working - more or less - after hours and hours of doc reading, tinkering around with mysql tables and databases and reading Horde source due to its ... slightly lacking ... documentation on some points. Still, it was so unstable and lacked features too. So i finally decided Horde/IMP was a bit too much to go with. After searching around its a lets-get-back-to-Roundcube.

Just that this didn't make things better, well... a bit at least. It takes tinkering, fixing old plugins to work with the current version, finding out why the hell buttons are greyed out that shouldn't be and getting a "well, reset the database (again)" from the developers. All of that fun. As of now i at least managed to get everything except for Filter-Rules and sa-learning ham to work. Phew!

Okay, so why am i writing all this? you may ask yourself. Well, i've gone through some PITA for beeing independent. It really takes some work to get everything to run smoothly if you're used to professional systems that are customly coded (such as the google stuff) and backed by real money its still some hackish tinkering to get the Free Software tools that we're given by the community (which i'm not ranting against by the way, all that code out there is really beautiful in fact) to the same level. I also want to encourage everyone out there not to give away their data but to build something on their own, keeping their data. As computer users used to for a good reason for a long long time.

So we've been busy sewing a few of them. Unfortunately we haven't quite gotten to the idea of blogging and being all Web 2.0 at the first plushies, so no pictures of them.

Okay so what do we have here?

The OC-Bunny <TODO>

Next is Kirby:

Which is a part of the idea of sewing every (at least more or less sewable) Nintendo Character .

And what do we have here?

A Poporing! The green version of the loved-by-everybody-pinku-jellyfish-blob of Ragnarok, the Poring (of which our first two Plushie-sewing-tries are already given away). A nice Tutorial on how to sew *Rings and Drops is also being worked on, so stay tuned if you want your own *Ring/Drops.

And last but not least: Boing! ZOMG!

Mr Saturn! Everybody who played Earthbound gotta LOVE Mr Saturn! (Super Smash Bros. * too, you can throw him around, after all!). We used this Tutorial as a base for our Saturn, we just made him a bit less cutaneous for the user to achieve a better cuddle-result. Also we've noted a little problem in the original Tutorial as you can see - the Nose. Its kind of to blobby, a bit too large and not long enough. Also stay tuned for a fixed pattern for the Saturnose.

But anyways, all of them have been quite fun to make - also there will be a great deal of Tuts on Sewing those plushies as we make them.