After a long dry season of posts here on blog.kanojo.de i proudly announce yet another garage-tinkering-tutorial: How to print t-shirts yourself. While this may not sound special or new at all, the technique we've chosen required a lot of fine tuning to yield *PROFESSIONAL* (and by that i mean really really REALLY good) results. So i considered it worth sharing.

While i must admit that i make a equipment-assumption that may not be the case for most, you can work your way around it. What i'm talking about is that recently a cutting plotter moved into this household. A cutting-plotter is almost like a normal plotter - except that it doesn't paint or print the paths (read: vector-files) you give it, but cuts. For those who don't know what a plotter is - imagine a printer that is able to print on a infinitely long roll of paper and doesn't print per line, but prints a arbitrary path (e.g. a sphere, bezier curve, etc.) at a time.

This allows to scrounge off so-called "flex film/foil" from professional shirt shops (they always seem to have some oddments to give away) or buy it really kinda cheap on ebay. This can then be cut using that cutting plotter given a nice vector-file you did before (inkscape is great once you learn how to use it by the way!). The trick with cutting plotters is that the foil you use comes on another foil, the "medium". This medium is not cut, but only the "useable" film on top of it. So after cutting you need to take away the excess outset and inset foil.

And this is the point where i like to stress that you can, in fact, do this even without having a cutting machine like this handy! If you have some patience (and we had before we had that machine) you could just print out your motif, trace it to the foil and then cut it by hand using a scalpel or hobby knife. Just be careful only to cut the useable film, not the medium foil!

But it's only after this that the real work begins - everything before was done by machine (or, by hand, in that case that was the most work ). The film needs to be pressed on using quite some force, a defined (short!) time and a defined temperature. For this purpose professionals use "transfer-presses", machines likeseen here on the right...

So, what do we do at home? We hack! After some datasheet reading and one Shirt full of little bits and pieces to try around we've found out how to properly do it. What you'll need is found in (almost) any household:

• a hard, smooth piece of wood
• a regular electric iron
• baking paper
• a stopwatch
• a frind who's doing body-building also comes in handy

Make sure the iron is set to around 170°C (thats ~338°F). The press time is roughly 8 seconds *per point on the film*. As you have to move the iron around you need to guess how long each point was pressed on around 8-12 seconds... but for the pics! And the further explaination of course - it'll be under the pics as always...

finished getting rid of in and outsets. You mag now recognize the famous mahjongg-player akagi

The iron and wooden board...

Now first lay out the shirt as flatly as you can

then iron it where you want to put the motif, just enough to be kinda smooth

This is the setup for fixating the foil on the shirt - you align the film/medium nicely, the baking paper over it (so you can move around nicely without moving the foil) and a stopwatch to time how long you've been pressing...

ready, steady....

GO! Press as hard as you can (or as your bodybuilder buddy to press even harder than you can) while slowly moving the iron around. Moving it has to be done to make shure the film gets fixated evenly!

press more ...

... and even more - until ever point on the foil got hot and was pressed on for about 9-12 seconds

For pictures this size (~14x14cm) this usually takes around 15-20 seconds

Now the film is fixated on the fabric, but the medium also sticks to it quite hard ... the trick here is TO WAIT UNTIL ITS *COMPLETELY* COLD.

You can, by the way, already see whether it worked by looking out for a silky~ gloss on the surface of the film

Then, after its COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY COLD start pulling it off at a angle as sharp as possible - and SLOWLY. Even if the worst case should happen and small parts peel off with the medium you could use your hobby knife to pull them back and fixate them later...

After finishing removing the medium - you can already see the film "burned into" the fabric.

But not enough yet! You need to burn it in a little more - fortuneatly this is possible when using baking paper again... i like to fixate every point for around 1:30min - which seems to be the point where "well fixated film" turns to "burned film"

Everything finished, not yet finally fixated...

closeups from after fixation - you can see the film burned nicely into the fabric

Here it seems i fin-fixated a little too much, the film started to melt and the black fabric comes through a little. Lucky me it isn't too bad!

The final result

With this technique you can achieve a almost professional result from everyday home-use items (except for the cutting plotter maybe...). Some professionals may cry out because of this tutorial - but it really works. Washable too, the first test-shirt didn't break down yet...

I hope you had fun with this tutorial and are now put up to try it yourself. Really, even with hand-cutting easy motifs aren't too bad to make... As always, feel free to ask!

Also look out for our post with tons of vectors for T-Shirt printing .

The idea is to have a frame thats front glass plate is dismount- and mountable in the glimpse of a eye thus allowing to change the contents without too much of a hassle. The other aspect is that the whole content of the frame is made up of a mosaic of mini-pictures framed by small but thick cardboard frames. You can then use cardboard spacer to lay the small framed image-"cards" (moo.com are half business cards, ours are roughly creditcard-size) out in every way you want to create a nice compilation of the works displayed!

The frame itself is quite flat, 6mm without glass, rougly 8.5mm with the glass front attached. The glass it held by a couple of strong rare-earth magnets and sits very tight, so no worries about falling glass. The inner frame can hold around 7*3(=21) of our cardboard-mini-frames, but ... see for yourself! And if you feel like it, make one yourself....

As for the materials we have used it's actually quite simple. The most exotic thing you would need to also built a frame is (if you want it nice n woody) veneer although it could be substituted for something else and equally nice (later more on that).

Here a small list of what you would need (the frame itself, not the "mini frames"):

• a angle-saw or angled saw guide (i used something like this: gehrungssäge but other things like a regular wood saw and this: sägeblock would work too)
• HDF plates / "bars" to your liking (depends on what inner and outer dimensions you want) and one large "backplate" (details will get clearer with pictures below)
• regular wood glue, a flat iron (for veneering)
• veneer (or alternatives, see below)
• a old brush for applying the glue to veneer/hdf
• some linseed oil and/or beeswax-glaze
• some wood drills (depending on the size of your magnets)
• (optional: a hole cutter, something like this
• rare earth disc-shaped magnets (we used 12x4mm and 10x3mm)
• 2 component (epoxy) glue
• Some glass, harvest it from the cheapest picture frames you can get or - even better - old windows. Ask the nearest glazier, whatever comes in handy.
• A glass cutter - good hardmetal (tungsten carbide) wheeled cutter is recommended as they really really yield nice results with minimal "learning-cost" (read: glass plates you've ruined)
• some ~2-3mm thick homogenious (non-crinkeled) cardboard
• (optional: spraymount glue)
• regular 80g plain paper
• some metal frame hangers

I hope that list didn't scar you off. But some of the things can be left out while others are "standard equipment" - at least more or less...

Okay, now onto the making! First we're gonna make the frames for the roughly creditcard sized pictures out of ~2-3mm thick cardboard which is plated with plain paper to beautify it a little...

one piece of our cardboard, already cut to the right outer dimensions. inner cut dimensions are already marked.

To cut such thick cardboard we used a good(!) cutter (the japanese brand "olfa" makes godlike cutters! but use whatever suits use) and a metal ruler. align the ruler carefully, then first cut the surface a little without applying too much pressure. that way you won't slip. Then cut again a few times each time with a little bit more pressure. for the inner cutout ... see below

The large piece of cardboard which is our source for the mini-frames. It is marketed as material for bookbinding, maybe check your nearby arts-store?

First test picture "clipped" into the frame - success!

As the inner cutouts tend to get a little tricky i first made little slots at the corners (without a ruler)

then cut alogn the edges as described above (first without pressure...

now turn around the cardboard, you'll see that you've probably missed a few millimeters of the last layer in the edges - go back to the other side again and cut into the corners carefully at a large angle

Now as the frames are finished you can beautify them by cutting out a just-a-tad-larger piece of paper

and mount it on the frames with spray mount (or whatever you have at hand...)

differences - this is why you wanna get some additional plain paper over it

beautified mini-frame

After giving all hdf "bars" a 45-degree-sawoff glue the 45 degree edges of the hdf "bars" with a thick layer of wood glue

lay them flat on a piece of paper, newspaper or whatever may get dirty and get ripped later...

carefully align all the pieces to be at exact right angles (if you've used a sub-par angle-saw as i did you may see small gaps, just fill them by pressing some additional glue in with your fingers.)

filled 45-degree gluespot

smeared all the edges a little - this saves some sanding time later.

to hold the edges together a little i used crepe-tape. apply it with care, you could move the carefully aligned pieces of hdf again!

And here is that little point where you could do something other than veneering. You could - for example - sand the surface of the HDF up to 220Grit and paint it using acrylic paint. First prime using acrylic primer two times, then sand again using 400grit, then paint two or three times in whatever colour you want. You can also get creative and glue colourful napkins on it, glue paper on it and paint on it, you choose, get creative!

I have learend the veneering technique shown here from Nordic-Audio - it's described nicely and even has a video attached, so if you don't speak german either try the google-translation or just watch the video (which should be explainatory enough). This is also the reason why i haven't documented and described the veneering tech in detail - this guy's better at it!

Now for the veneer - after the hdf outer-frame dried completely i placed it on two mirrored pieces of veneer (here: maple) and drew a line around it. then i cut with a good buffer (~3-8cm) around those lines on both of the mirrored pieces

mark for cutting

next step is to smear the veneer with the wood glue, apply a thick~ish layer so the whole piece is slightly milky-white. it'll soon roll itself up, but don't worry, it'll work anyways. also smear the hdf-frame

smeared hdf frame

veneering workplace with the already half-veneered hdf-frame.

the first broken edge looks like this

as you can see there was a little problem caused by veneering the hdf - the heat of the iron made the hdf-outer-frame bend a little. this has to be corrected later ;/

piece of veneer with not yet broken edges.

first half is now finished...

the point where the next half of veneer would hit is a little crucial so it has to be sanded down to get almost flat towards the end

detail of the flattening

detail of the flattening

else the first veneering part looks okay - clean edges with no raptures, flat and even veneer

the second half was now also veneered and the backplate is glued on. note that some space must remain between the outer border of the backplate and the outer edges of the outer-frame. the intersection between both sanded down to be level.

the whole thing is flat and smooth without any bubbles or raptures at the edges

the intersections between the two parts of mirrored veneer are also clean, flat and smooth - and in reallife barely vissible.

The next step is wood finishing - first sand the veneer with 120, 220, 400 grit paper, then wet it with a sponge, let it dry and sand it with 400grit again (only sand along the streaks/with the wood-texture). then apply some linseed oil, let it stand on the wood for ~5minutes and wipe it off again. This will make the texture of the wood come out nicely and have a little protective effect. !!! be careful with paper/fabric that is linseed-oil-soaked - it can self-ignite !!!

Then as a second step of wood finishing (after 2 days of linseed-oil-drying in a warm, dry place with direct sunlight light) is applying beeswax-glaze. I've opted for a "milky-white" version of the glaze to set the wood a little back, it is only a frame after all..!

after applying thickly and letting it stay there for ~5-10 minutes take a clean and fine cotton sheet and start polishing the wax in circular motions with medium pressure. you'll see a sligh "semigloss" appear - that's exactly the effect we want that'll look nice behind glass!

finished polishing ... damn photos, you never see nice textures on them!

finished polishing ... damn photos, you never see nice textures on them!

finished polishing ... damn photos, you never see nice textures on them!

Now to mount the magnets i drilled a hole from the backside and used a hole-cutter (see above) to enlarge it step by step so the magnets would just fit in really tightly

you can see the inverted cone a little

the front had to be cleaned a bit using 400 grit, then polish again a little using the cotton sheet from before to restore the texture around the hole. Now smear just a little bit of your 2k-epoxy-glue into the hole (from behind) - be careful not to smear the frontside - and press the magnets in. carefully wipe off any excess 2k from the front.

to beautify the edges (inner and outer) we used crepe-tape to mask the outer-frame off and painted the edges using acrylic paint - here the inner edge...

and here the outer edge (shows the masking from below)

inner edges ready!

more painting on the outer edges...

aaand now for the frontplate - we've used harvested glass from cheap n ugly picture frames. the cutter is a "silberschnitt" cutter with a hardmetal/tungsten-carbide wheel. We use the (crappy quality) HDF backplates that came with the cheapo-pic-frames as a underground for cutting. use a long metal-bar as a guide and using medium pressure (you hear when you're doing right - it should sound like it's scratching but not like scrubbing with sand). Cut in one steady stream, never stop or go back!, then break carefully over a edge (it'll just break cleanly without any sharp corners if you've cut in one long stream)

Now place the glassplate on the frame and align it. take the other magnets and put a little drop of 2 components-glue on it. let them snap on the glass over the other magnets carefully and slowly

snapped on and glued magnet.

magnets already holding the glass tightly - technically you wouldn't need any more magnets. As you may remember the hdf bend a little from the heat from the iron while veneering - this causes a huge gap between glass and wood so we had/have to add more magnets to press the glass against the wood to close the gap... ;/

First test with the frames... Also to beautify the inner part of the frame a bit more we sprayed a large sheet of plain paper using spraymount (use whatever glue you have at hand).

they line up nicely, the height matches almost perfect!

Some real pictures inserted!

To hang the frame we used plain metal frame-hangers which are meant to be screwed onto the wood - as the hdf is rather thin here this isn't possible...

... so we just smeared a huge load of 2-component epoxy under and over the edges of the hanger

... like this

... and if you smear enough and carefully ...

... IT'LL HANG!!!

so nice!

By the way - the cards displayed here are traded on a german self-painted-card-trading-system called "Kakao-Karten". The miniframes fit the formats there nicely and whenever you get a landscape-oriented one you can use the spacers and place it anywhere in the frame. If you're a little less lazy you can fit many many more pictures in it, at all orientations and placements you want!

But it could also be used to display regular large images such as photo printouts or painted or printed pictures. It comes in handy whenever you need a frame with a thick "outer frame" thats contents can be changed easily and often...

I hope you liked this tutorial and idea and will build your own frame using some ideas shown here. Also - as always - if you want exact measures or tips on anything, just mail in or leave a comment. You'll always be welcome!

Okay, so first you might ask yourself what you need to build those? It's rather simple, only two things really. Of course the leaf-gold or leaf-silver, the special "transfer" version which sticks a little to one piece of parchment paper and thus can be touched, moved, etc ... very handy. We recommend starting with the silver as it's cheaper for learning and experimenting. You might find it in a nerby art-supply store (boesner.com if you live in the right place ) - if that was a false shot, maybe try asking in shops that build picture-frames and frame your pictures - if it's a shop that crafts the frames themselves they might have some and sell it to you.

The next thing is spray-mount, use 3M permanent spraymount for example. We didn't use the traditional method with that special gold-milk (a strange kind of watery wood-glue thing) as it was hard to get it evenly distributed on thin paper (parchment paper) without making the paper crinkle ... that's where those spraymounts come in handy.

And thats really about it - we used the parchement paper which lies in the package of gold/silver between as a seperator, it worked perfect. So no extra paper too!

Okay, now on to the crafting:

The package of transfer-leaf-gold

Now take on sheet of the parchment paper seperators of the gold/silver package and coat it evenly from ~20-30 cm distance with the spraymount

place the sticky spraymount-coated parchment paper on a table, take the sheet of transfer-silver/gold and slowly lower it above the sticky paper onto it. Once it touched the surface only lower it further, never raise it again, the gold/silver will tear ...

then after a few seconds (10-20) you can pull the transfer-paper off - the gold/silver remains on the parchment paper we coated with spraymount ... still shiny and smooth, almost no crinkles!

and then ... do your usual origami!

Yes, it's true - we this is a small kind of tutorial, but the spraymount / slow lowering technique really took its time to find out. We first tried with that gold-milk, was a no-go. The silver was full of crinkles as the thin paper crinkled (the milk is kinda watery as i said...), so this didn't look nice.  Also all experiments with those kinds of materials tend to be expensive .

What is also missing is a description of the origami done, but this is a whole different story that's better describe on other sites ... our tip: try youtube videos, they're much more comprehensive than those image-kind of instructions ... they tend to get very confusing.

So, what did we do with this? Using the glass-cutting technique described in a earlier post we build some boxes and ... wai - here are the results:

Hope you found this idea inspiring and ... it's not that hard, try yourself! Get Creative!

Just a quick post on a developing Idea: folding Origami out of real silver or gold. It'd make a perfect gift with a really exclusive feel to it. The first test was successfull with only some problems remaining to be solved...

As is turnes out getting leaf-silver (or leaf-gold) as a "transfer medium" mounted on really really thin parchment paper is less of a problem. Thing is - you don't want to touch the gold/silver itself, it would stick on your finger and you'd tear the whole thing apart. So we searched nice thin paper on which the gold/silver leaf would be mounted using a special glue (german: Anlegemilch).

To get the paper not to get bumpy when applying the liquid (read: glue) we used a old pump-action parfume sprayer, cleaned it and sprayed the glue on the paper which was stiffly mounted to a clean and plane surface using tape. We then waited until the glue was almost dry, then unpacked the silver, put it on the paper and "rubbed" it on. Then wait a short while for the rest of the glue to dry, get rid of the tape, cut the paper to fit the silver and ... well - thats it. Fold origmi as usual with a little bit more caution .

To seal the silver from oxidation we use Lascaux matte varnish - which turned out to be a bad idea. It made the shiny nice silver look like aluminum foil - tinker here. For Gold that'd be a no-problem because it simply doesn't oxidate (visibly).

Results here:

"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.

Now what am i trying to tell you by this? HELL, theres something that really ROCKS! You know what it is? Right, TOWELS!

And for that one and very reason we made one. A very epic one.

(also note, i know i've missed towel day :{)

As a friend of ours is a real sauna-freak and there are decent things named "sauna-towel" out there ... we thought we'd give modding on of those -- which are only super-sized towels by the way -- a try as a present for his birthday... This is what we've made

For cutting out the stencils from *thick*paperboard* you want a metal-ruler and a hobby knife / cutter / etc handy - make sure it's sharp, your hands and wrist will hurt less!

A pretty boring detail of what's going to get cut. You may notice the bit-special-null - it's so we don't need to align a negative of the inner part of the 0, and no, every font editing software was HELL for a non-typographer

To see whether everything you cut is (somehow) correct you might to switch to the backside view of your stencil - corrections and fixes if you didn't cut deep enought are easier to happen here

Ouch! My wrist hurts! But hey, almost everything of the first line of the stencil is cut.

It's important to test everything in your setup is going to work before attacking the actual target of your work ... we've sprayed two test-lines on this old but long-serving towel...

Cutting is finished, now we're about to attach our stencils to the actual sauna-towel.

The testing failed, we weren't able to align the lines of the stencil correctly, so now we're taping them together to one large stencil...

This is what a aligned and taped line of the stencil looks like...

As you finished aliging the stencils fasten them to your towel and go somewhere you can spray - as we didn't know how bad the cloth-paint would smell we chose outdoors

The next important thing - even if you spray really really close - is masking. just one little mistake and you've got overspray next to your stencil, you really wanna avoid that!

Now the preps are finished, stencil is aligned, fastened to the towel, masked all around... let's get to the spraying part!

It's - as always - handy to have some helpers around, in this case to press down the individual characters of the stencil to get a sharper and more crips outline... those gloves^Wmittens^Wgloves from the pharmacy (or other sources) are also really handy - less hand-washing action afterwards, better for your skin too....

By the way, this is the paint we used ;-0, it's sourced from boesner.com, a large arts-supply store in germany (and europe?). You wanna mix it with some distilled water so it will spray smoother with your brush. We used a .2mm nozzle-brush so we thinned it down quite a bit...

spraying finished. We were suprised how good the paint flowed through the brush... - be sure to let this dry a bit before removing the stencil or you risk ugly marks on the cloth...

The post-processing for this type of cloth paint is quite simple - but another (not so thick) cloth/towel over the sprayed region and take your iron and iron the whole think for a few minutes, that affixes the paint to the cloth and makes it washable.

After the first side of the towel was finished we decided to do a symmetric application on the other side too - which gave opportunity to shoot some details

... is fun by the way - more details.

and this is the finished product. Lovely^Wtowely, isn't it?

Notice the stain there ... we haven't got ourselves to wash it before giving it away, so they'll just stay on...

By the way - whoever is able to decode what's on there may win ... uuuhm .. as many washing-machines as that person can catch!

So, bottomline of this post: Spraying cloth with a nice stencil isn't that hard. Actually if you see plain white t-shirts selling on Ebay for 2 Euros you come to think of those text-only-nerd-tshirts ... and that it's quite simple and cheap to make them yourself for only a few bucks. If you're good with the airbrush -- or the cutter, in case of complex stencils -- you can do even more custom, more nerdy stuff.

You'll see first samples of that soon -- i hope.

Ookay, i think this was it for this "tutorial", i hope you enjoyed the idea, and i hope your friends will get decent towels soon too, cause, you know, what's more important in live than having your towel always with you? J/K

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:

Next thing is that you want light for your plants - as there probably isn't enough almost nowhere for them to grow nicely. After some reading you'd find something similar to this:

What this tries to tell you is that Photosynthesis mainly needs Blue and Red light, but way more Blue-Purple-Greenish than Yellow-Orange-Red-ish. Especially it seems like (based on what that biologist told me) that red light stimulates the plants to grow in quantity, e.g. grow larger - even to a unhealthy rate. Blue light stimulates "quality-growth", aka doesn't grow the plants much larger but improves the overall system, capilarries, etc. (don't know in detail, sorry :/). So regular light bulbs are crap for plants - first off they emit more red/yellow light than blue, second: they get hot! Which is the killer for any part of a plant that grows near your lamp.

There also seem to be quite a few products marketed as special "plant lamps". They range from cheap-ish (more expensive than you'd want to pay) to super expensive. The cheaper ones are most of the time either regular bulbs - which will kill your plants - or energy saving lamps with the wrong color spectrum. The expensive ones are actually really cool, gas discharger lamps ... but you cannot afford them ;/.

Your plants simply want energy saving lamps which have a high peak in the blue region (which are sometimes *real* cheap ). That kind of light will probably kill your eyes, but its really cozy for your plants. I've got cheap daylight (6500k) ones by Lumine. Simple measurements with a neutral-grey-card and my Camera did show that they have a spectrum thats near ideal for our usecase. If you can't get a hold of those Lumine ones, just check the websites of the big manufacturers, Phillips, etc. They have datasheets for their lamps that include a spectrum like above.

What i do to avoid having to be in that kind of light is having two timers, one for the room where my desk stands and one for my bedroom. The bedroom plant-lights will light around ~1300 and stop around ~2030, thats when i'm not there. The "desk-room" lamps light at ~0100 and stop at ~1100, thats when i'm - most of the time - not working anymore.

As for where to put the lamps ... i've mounted them into my ceiling. Where thats not possible, check your local DIY store, Ikea, etc. There are always decent hacks that'll fit your rooms style . Just check for a large enough lampshade so you don't waste too much light into your room not directly on your plants.

Sup, that was one thing, now the plants are there and have some reaaally cozy nice light (for them). I've noticed that i - and many many others - which aren't (yet) good with plants make one biiig mistake - water them too much. Way too much. Sure, you can't generalize that on all kinds of plants, but for most it's true. What will happen is the roots are humid all the time, mold will get on them, no water can't be absorbed through them anymore, the plant dies. Thats not what we want, is it?

About watering ... for most of the "recommended" low-light, high-growth-rate indoor plants you'll see its "water until the soil is completely humidified" (aka water too much, wait a minute, pour out leftover water from outer bucket/pot), then wait until it's completely dried out (stick your finger in the soil and feel how humid it is every once in a while) - this can be up to 1-3 weeks depending on the size of the plant and the bucket - and water again only when it's almost completely dry. (exception one: spathiphyllum)

I'm not quite sure about fertilizing myself. Currently i put some "general use indoor plants" fertilizer into the water i'm watering the plants with every 3-4 weeks. It doesn't seem to kill 'em, even if it doesn't seem quite ideal for most of them. My ficus and fern don't seem to like that and don't grow as much as the others. I'll report back when i've developed a good case of action and theory why it works on this .

Another great addition to my roughly tri-daily coming-home-routine is taking a sprayer/spray-flacon(?) and emulating a nice rainshower for all of my plants. I've the feeling they like it, the leaves have a clearer greener look. Also note that it's a good idea to use descaled water if you live in a region with very hard water. If you don't want to invest in a ion-exchanger or kitchen-use device you can also simply bring the water to a boil, let rest and pour through a coffee filter - the results are quite good actually. Using descaled water for both watering AND spraying is quite important. Too much scale in the soil or on the leaves will clog the porosities/membrane of the plant and hinder anything that wants to go in or out.

So, this was a quite strange post on a anime and technology focused blog. Still even if i wasn't to express myself to the level i'm used to (my english got worse, goddamn!) i hope i've made my point clear. Also don't hesitate to ask something in the comments . I also want to encourage you and everyone else to apply your hack-ish methodology and knowledge to various fields, not just technology. It's fun, try it!

Again sorry for the crappy pictures and writing :/.

So, please come in and read the actual Article/Tutorial .

First off you need a nice way to print the book you want. Assuming you have a PDF lying around you'd want to make a book of as it was in my case (script for university) you'd need to bring it in book form. This means that you print (duplex) on A4 or LETTER pages with half width - you wouldn't want a fullsize A4/LETTER book. You want your pages printed so that you can "cut through the middle" of your stack (well, you can - given the right equipment - cut ~15-20 pages at once, so you still need to split). Anyways, back to topic. To achieve this it was (for a nerd like me at least) the easiest to use psnup and psbook, two postscript manipulation utilities. If you use GNU/Linux your distribution should ship them in nice packages, Mac users can ask fink and Windows users cygwin to provide the software in a nice manner. Given your PDF you might want to:

pdf2ps input.pdf
psbook book.ps input.ps
psnup -l -p -2 book.ps booklet.ps
ps2pdf booklet.ps

After that you have a landscaped PDF, two original pages on one (downscaled) with the ordering just to cut the stack in the middle and fold it together.

After printing remember to let the paper "rest" two-three days in a straight, flat position.

And now for the actual binding. I've added the description of what's happening to the pictures, so feel free just to scroll through them and read up on what you gotta do.

These are the items you'll need, 2 bar clamps, two wooden boards (old cupboard, get from DIY market, etc.) a preferably old brush and some glue (wood glue or specialized bookbinding glue)

Now straighten out your stack of paper, put it on one board lying on the desk, then very carefully put the 2nd board on the stack. ask someone to tighten the clamps left and right leaving about 1-1.5cm of space for the stack of paper.

This is to show the alignment of the paperstack and the leftover space over the board.

Macros are fun

and this one is to show you how to make it better... note the bad alignment of the paper.

To avoid having glue on the sides of your book wrap scotch-tape around the whole back of the book (vertically) to prevent the glue of pouring out.

This is roughly how it should look like when applied...

Now take a good load of the glue onto your brush and apply it to the back of your book. It should be well covered. Also note that pressing the paperstack downwards and upwards to make the glue go a little "inside" the pages can improve the results vastly. But be careful not to leave too much glue sticking to the tape to prevent "blobs" you'd have to cut off.

The first layer of glue applied

After waiting for the first layer of glue to dry apply some more layers to achieve a nice thick layer of solid glue.

Last layer drying

Now that the last layer dried take the book out of this a bit wild construction and cut two thick (>200g) papers to fit.

But before fastening front/back we need a solid spine. For this you need a piece of (80g) paper and some fabric (old textile shopping bag, whatever), about 2 times as wide as the back of your book (note: you can also use only the fabric without the paper if you prefer a fabric-looking spine). Glue the two together, apply some more glue to the bookback (only the back, be careful not to drip on the sides of your book) and apply the Spine you just made (paper/fabric should still be glue-wet)

Roughly like this, just without the glue drops on the bottom of the book.

This is how the front looks like with the spine applied.

Now that the spine has dried you can simply put some (not too much) glue on the front/back and apply them. Easy going .

A first test shows that it's ... a book! Congrats, you made it!

Also the thick layer of paint backed by the fabric spine the book is quite tough, here bended it like you sometimes do with commercially made books to make them keep open on a page, worked multiple times without any harm!

With that you should have a not quite perfect but already very very useable book in almost no time. This one took me about 01:30h of work (subtracted the drying time as you will probably do something different then). Some hardcore bookbinding nerds would probably kill me for this tutorial/technique, but ... it works, it gets you nice results, you can use the books in quite rough enviroments (ie carry around in your school/uni backpack every day). If you have a printer that does not choke on thicker paper you may also want to print the cover on your book-front - or just scribble or draw something neat on there .

I hope you liked this tutorial and also start making books yourself - as making things is really fun and somehow makes you just feel good :p. Enjoy

-NebuK

It took us a while to get the idea what material to use as a base to start off from. We first thought to get round wooden sticks from the DIY market and grind them to half width, but that would've taken too long. Later on i found a flat-ish chopstick at my home, nice bamboo wood, cheap. So we went to a asia store and got a truckload of those:

(note the club mate to the right, its german hacker fuel )

So the basic idea is, take on or two of those chopsticks at a time, grind them down on a belt sander first on the more yellow-ish ugly side (the side that was the outside of the bamboo stick) first, then the inside. You also need to round the quite sharp corners a bit.

Note the round corners and smooth texture in the last picture.

From there on you can start postprocessing the sticks. You'll need a dremel or alike and these tools for it:

The result of the grinding action could look like this, presented by cute Miku-Chan:

So, first its best to try around on a not so well sanded stick if you're starting with the holes for the color.

So, take your measure and mark 8cm on the sanded chopsticks. They should be long enough for 2 Mahjong Counting Sticks each.

Now ... the pattern for the holes - how do i do that? you may ask. Well, i decided to leave that up to you, a rough guide can be found in my TeXed version of the rules. But really, think of a nice pattern roughly following the guidelines yourself .

Anyways, also mark those points (here: 1000 points, riichi stick) on your stick... and drill. First with the small drill, then make the ones that need to be larger ... larger with the round sander tool for the dremel.

Then, paint them with acrylic color, be a bit patient as the color easily splills over the edge of the hole, which looks ... not so nice. You may also want to hand sand the sticks with a 300 or 400 paper in order to get rid of the residues from the drilling action.

After painting you may want to hand-sand 'em again, this time to remove leftover dried paint. The finished results look like this:

If you're playing mahjong and still miss some nice counting sticks, no need to buy crappy plastic ones or pay tons of shipping, just go to a asia store, fetch some chopsticks and make them yourself! With a few friends thats more fun anyways.

I hope you enjoyed this small tutorial-ish thingy .

I wanted to parse a website that had no RSS feed for changes and create a RSS feed. I first tried around with various of the ideas mentioned above but as the website is kind of "irregular" (every item is a slight bit different) and W3 validator shows over 11k of errors (in 1.1 transitional) i had quite some problems.

Until i found Rubies Hpricot, a HTML parser that lets you realize robust HTML parsing of fucked up formatted and non-standard-compliant content at ease.

Hpricot is quite simple to use. The basic idea of the parsing part is that you specify the tag-order you want to walk down in the tree. So maybe you want the content of a div inside a td inside a tr inside a table inside a table inside a div ... you get the idea. By the way, Firebug is extremely useful for finding the structures you need in the HTML tree hirarchy. Hpricot will walk you down all paths that match your criteria and return you the rest portion of the tree found down there:
require 'hpricot'
require 'open-uri'
overview = Hpricot(open("INSERT SOME URL HERE"))
prodno = 0
(overview/"table").each do |product|
if product.attributes=={} and not product.to_s.include? "closed on the days marked"
(product/"tr/td/table").each do |article|
prodno += 1
end
end
end
This is a small snippet of my parser code, it will open the url, fetch the content and create a Hpricot parser object, then for every table check whether its the table we search for (identified by the attributes and content text). Then it will count every item (in a 2-column table).

As you see the basic idea is quite simple, fetch element by tree position, identify the element with no doubts, do the actual magic.

For the actual magic point Hpricot also helps you alot! Things like
linkurl = (content/"a")[0].attributes['href'].to_s.gsub("\r\n","")
imgurl = (img/"img")[0].attributes['src'].to_s.gsub("\r\n","")
name = (content/"a")[0].inner_text.to_s.gsub("\r\n","")
are so simple (attributes seems self-explanatory, inner_text extracts only the text, not the tags that are children of the element you call it on).

A slightly more sophisticated example would be this:
detail = Hpricot(open(linkurl))

price = nil
stock = nil
sale = nil
(detail/"table//tr//td//table").each do |data|
if data.to_s.include? "can buy from here"
entries = (data/"tr")
entries.delete_at(0)
entries.each do |entry|
estr = entry.to_s.downcase
if estr.include? "sale price"
price = (entry/"td")[1].inner_text.to_s.gsub("\r\n","")
elsif estr.include? "sale status"
sale = (entry/"td")[1].inner_text.to_s.gsub("\r\n","")
elsif estr.include? "stock status"
stock = (entry/"td")[1].inner_text.to_s.gsub("\r\n","")
end
end
end
end
Here a site like this is parsed for information like stock status, sale status and price tag.

As you see this is a more robust approach compared to python string.split, XML DOM/SAX which doesn't work for non-standard sites. It's not as perfect as i would wish for "easy" html parsing, but its better than everything i've seen so far.

Also i'll post the script for parsing amiami.com for changes later (beware, no nice ruby code, hacked late at night in 1h ) so you can see a more elaborate example. I hope you'll have more fun parsing HTML using these Hpricot and these snippets .

Thats a special kind of yeast thats harvested from natural yeasts in honey carried in by bees from various sources (yeasts exist all over the world, thats how beer and bread used to work in medieval ages). Its called "Backferment" (no translation found, sorry) and was developed by Hugo Erbe around the beginning of the century.

The making is somehow troublesome and similar to sourdough, you first need a quite fluid base which consists of:

- 150g flour type 405

- 150g freshly ground wholemeal flour

- 300-400g water

- 10g Backferment

and that needs to stand at ~28*C for a day. You should see quite some bubbles rising after that. After that you need yet another base, the breads sponge which is a bit less fluid (300g of any flour, 20-30g of the base and 5g Backferment) and yet again needs to stand a half day to swell and expand. Again bubbles should be clearly visible. The rest is easy, add another 700-800g of any flour, salt, oil and whatnot to your liking knead, let rest for 2 hours (or better: until it starts to collapse slightly again), bake until finished, thats it.

The result was astonishing, a slight, mild taste like sourdough, but not as harsh as real sourdough. It was super fluffy, but IMO with 1/3 freshly ground wholemeal flour it tasted a bit too solid, so 100% type 405 is my recommendation . In any case, Backferment is worth the trouble and produces a bread thats quite different from regular yeast white bread and sourdough bread. Its uniqueness is expressed in a mild, pleasant taste that reminds of sourdough.

For anyone whos eager to try some new breadmaking techniques and play around, Backferment is sure one of the ways to go . Be also sure to check back as we try out specific recipes for great breads. As soon as the look of the is up to a nice standard we'll also post pictures . Bon appetit!