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. 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.
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.
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!
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 
) 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 . Still if you're preparing to do your first kit this post may give you some kind of idea what you're diving into.
Bookbinding is fun!
As i sometimes like to tinker on stuff that i totally don't know about. This time it was bookbinding. Turnes out its easier than you might think. All you might want is some basic garage workshop material you probably already have at home, some glue, your PDF to print and some time - only about a hour. It's really fun, really easy and the results are great.
So, please come in and read the actual Article/Tutorial .
AmiAmi.com RSS
Maybe some of you like figures (as in figmas, nendos, etc.) and know www.AmiAmi.com - which is a great shop. It just poses one problem - it offers no RSS feed that allows you to stay up to date to whether items get available, get into preorder or are restocked. So you may miss the item you want due to the completely crazy japanese habit of buying everything that was just restocked out in mere hours.
As we have also been disstatisfied with that we wrote a parser for AmiAmi that creates a RSS feed. You may also subscribe it, it's update twice a day at 16:00 and 04:00 Europe/Berlin time every day. You can find it on:
http://ghostdub.de/~eefi/rss.xml
Maybe it'll help you harvesting the Otaku loot you want .
Robust HTML Parsing (in Ruby)?
Have you ever wanted to parse information from some rather complex or totally broken (in terms of html standards compliance) website? Maybe you tried fighting that problem with regular expressions or DOM or SAX XML parser. If you did you probably ran into some problems: Maybe there were too many similar matches for your regex as there are repeating similar patterns in the website or your XML parser went crazy with invalid formatted or non-xhtml-compliant content?
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.
Nyamo~~ nya nya fuwaaa~ Plushie
Plushie-time again, it is!
This is one of the awaited chrismas present tutorials, a gift we've made for a good friend who happens to like everything thats cat-ish, especially - of course - if it has its origins in otaku-culture, like this:
Nyamo and Miyuki (figure)
We decided to give a Nyamo (the small catish thingy) a try and make it. As a base we used the well known Poring Plushie pattern, attached ears and tail, cut the right face and swoosh, there it was. But step for step for now...
Chrismas Present: Tetromino PinBoard
Yay, Tetris, the famous russian game everyone loves for its music Oo. Or like that. Anyways, we've got a friend who's kind of a Tetris nerd - at least he singing the polka melody all the time. So we got that idea of Pulshie Tetrominos pinned to a Frame. Problem was it ... didn't quite work:
Didn't quite work
So we had another idea, how about making tons of tetrominos from room temperature curing plasticine, inserting pins to pin them to a pinboard (amongst other ... well - notes or whatever you normally pin onto a pinboard ).
Bees wax candles, do it yourself
A few months ago a friend told me she had some bees wax lying around. She told me something about huge blocks and old age of the stuff ... anyways, it turned out it was TONS, literarily TONS. We've had three huge round blocks, about 20-25cm high and 40-50cm (i'm bad at guessing) in diameter.
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.