The People's Republic of Fub
The People's Republic of Fub |
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| Feb. 9th, 2010 @ 09:05 pm Box failure | |||
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Current Mood:
I have been trying to make a box (like the Japanese book box we made earlier) to store my prints in. Right now I have a cardboard folder that I store 'em in, but that one is getting fuller and fuller. And it's not like I need the prints I made last fall on a day-to-day basis anymore. disappointedSo I determined the dimensions, plugged those numbers into my spreadsheet and I got all the dimensions of the board, linen and paper. It turned out that I would need about 1 meter of bookbinders linen -- which is nowhere to be found. In the store (this last Saturday) we decided to do the inner flap in a different color. And so I bought the linen and the papers that I wanted. The big problem was the glue. We only have PVA, which dries really fast. And the box is rather big -- so when I was finished with pasting glue on one side, the other had already dried out. And I got a lot of glue stains on one of the sides... So, this one is a total failure. But I learned a lot and thought of a few new things to try out. I will try again, once we get the right glue made. Meanwhile, I am designing a much smaller box (A5-sized) to hold the etching plates. I am thinking of making two A6-sized inlay trays and one A5-sized, which would then be placed inside the box... |
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| Feb. 9th, 2010 @ 08:28 pm Manual upgrade complete! | |||
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Current Mood:
The default browser for Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala, which I'm running currently) is Firefox 3.5.7. With many tabs open en lots of stuff happening everywhere, it would become really, really slow. It started to irritate me. happyI've checked out Iron (a Chrome variant with the parts removed that phone home to Google), and it was a lot faster -- but I can't live without the many extensions I have collected throughout time for Firefox. And I need some more UI than Iron provides, it seems. So I poked around a bit and found out that there's a PPA with Firefox 3.6 in it. After a bit of fiddling I now have 'Namoroka' (the codename for Firefox 3.6) running. And so far, it seems a lot faster than 3.5 -- the rendering doesn't block the whole UI anymore, which is important to me. I want to be able to click on a link to open it in a new tab, and then move on. It's how I read my friendspage, and I don't want to wait with scrolling on until the other page in the other tab is finished loading and rendering. So that seems like a total succes! |
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| Feb. 8th, 2010 @ 11:45 am This year's amaryllis | |||
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Current Mood: sick
We have a tradition that everyone gets an Amaryllis bulb for Sinterklaas(which we celebrate around christmas). There's a good-natured competition who has the first flower and who has the most. It seems this year our entry will have three flowers -- I'm sure it won't be enough to take the top prize...  |
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| Feb. 7th, 2010 @ 07:40 pm Papercraft robot | |||
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Current Mood: blah
Yesterday I bought this Piperoid in a weirdshop in Den Bosch. It's a papercraft robot, built from paper tubes. Pretty cool design, and a fun little diversion.  |
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| Feb. 6th, 2010 @ 09:25 pm Lunch | |||
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Current Mood: hungry
This was our lunch today, with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} usmu in Den Bosch. |
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| Feb. 6th, 2010 @ 11:24 am Finished it? | |||
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Current Mood:
Yesterday evening, I managed to finish Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon. Or at least, I finished the main game by defeating the 'God of Destruction' in his Floating Fortress... But apparently there's a lot of end-game content, and there are some dungeons that I wasn't able to play before finishing the game, so I still have a bit more to go. geekyAt the end of this month, Dokapon Kingdom will be released. And it looks really interesting. Anybody interested in playing the game irregularly with me? |
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| Feb. 4th, 2010 @ 08:00 pm Pamphlet letter | |||
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Current Mood:
I am a member of the  accomplished![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} brievenbus community. The members send physical mail to each other. I had received a large letter, and I wanted to write something back. But my skills in cutting and pasting to make a colorful mail package are limited, so I thought of something else: to make the letter in the form of a pamphlet.( Photos here ). I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. And the recipient was impressed as well. I really like the pamphlet binding, and I think I'll be using it more often in the future. |
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| Jan. 31st, 2010 @ 08:30 pm Box delayed! | |||
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Current Mood:
Turns out that the box for the etchings is so big, we don't have enough linen or decorative paper to make it... I foresee a shopping trip next weekend. disappointed |
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| Jan. 31st, 2010 @ 08:14 pm Full HD on the MACH F | |||
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Current Mood:
The MACH F has been quietly churning away on our anime mountain without any problem. The resolution of the PC is set to the native resolution of the TV (720p), and all was well. Until the latter episodes of Shangri-La were encoded as full HD (that is, 1080p), and the poor MACH F couldn't cope with it! nerdySo I have been transcoding the rest of the series into 720p, but the loss of quality is visible. And I didn't want to transcode anymore -- otherwise I could have kept the old MACH F around! I use the Combined Community Codec Pack, which in turn installs ffdshow to handle the video codecs, which in turn uses the open source libavcodec library to do the actual decoding. While it gets the job done, it's not noted for it's efficiency, so there was a possibility that installing a more efficient codec would help the poor overworked MACH F with full HD streams. Some research suggested that the payware CoreAVC would do the trick. I read through the site, and it makes much of the use of NVidia GPU accelleration -- but I have an ATI chipset in the MACH F. I downloaded an evaluation version (*cough*) and installed it. And to my surprise, CoreAVC managed to decode the full HD stream without any problems -- even the high-motion scenes didn't give any problems! There's this shot in the opening sequence of Shangri-La that's a quick zoom-out of a forest, which has lots of details and lots of motion. With libavcodec this was the part where sound and video would de-sync, but with CoreAVC it played on without as much as a hiccup! So I went to the site and bought a license to the codec -- it's only USD 10, and it saves me a lot of hassle. And my salary is paid in part by the sale of software, so I want to return the favour to others who are dependent on software sales for their income. |
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| Jan. 31st, 2010 @ 05:29 pm Boxing calculations | |||
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Current Mood:
I've made a spreadsheet to calculate the sizes of the board, paper and linen for the Japanese Book Box, given the size of the book that you want to store in it. We even corrected some errors in the original measurement calculations by studying the boxes we made closely and using our mathematical reasoning to come up with calculations that we both agreed on were correct! nerdyI've decided to make a box to store my etchings in, and based on four parameters (height, width, thickness and the thickness of the board) I get all the calculations automatically. |
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| Jan. 31st, 2010 @ 01:44 pm More etching | |||
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Current Mood:
Last Wednesday, I started with a new etching plate. I made a line etching of a cat's grin -- I still need to design the rest of the picture (in aquatint), so I left it at that. The rest of the time I spent making two more prints of the five-storied pagoda plate. I liked the print in turqoise, but I wanted a print with more structure in the color. okay( Under the cut, to protect the innocent ). The 'Prussian blue' ink made true to its name: it went everywhere, subjugated the other colors and was hard to get rid of. ;) |
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| Jan. 31st, 2010 @ 10:35 am (no subject) | |||
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Current Mood:
Happy birthday, festivemuri_san! |
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| Jan. 30th, 2010 @ 01:45 pm Shopping for shoes | |||
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Current Mood: okay
ingiechan is shopping for new walking shoes. |
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| Jan. 30th, 2010 @ 09:27 am (no subject) | |||
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Current Mood:
Happy birthday, festivefenko! |
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| Jan. 28th, 2010 @ 08:15 am (no subject) | |||
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Current Mood:
Happy birthday, festivesol_nuada! |
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| Jan. 28th, 2010 @ 08:14 am (no subject) | |||
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Current Mood:
Happy birthday, festiveartistic_sillie! |
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| Jan. 27th, 2010 @ 10:57 pm iPad? Not for me... | |||
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Current Mood:
The whole internet is abuzz about the iPad, the tabled computer that Apple announced today. Anyone who knows my stance on closed systems will know that I won't be buying one. hypedBut I am seriously hyped about the Entourage Edge. E-reader on one side, Android tablet on the other! That's certainly a device that would fit on our couch! Impressive video here. It's coming out next week. I can't wait to read some owner reviews... |
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| Jan. 27th, 2010 @ 07:09 pm More vacation planning | |||
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Current Mood:
The ryokan that our travel agent suggested for Kyoto is already fully booked -- because of the cherry blossom season. Which is what we're aiming for, so I guess we got the right time frame... The other hotel he still can book is much further away from the station, but closer to the shopping area, and looks OK as well. anxiousBut I wonder what we can expect if we book a "Hollywood Double" room... |
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| Jan. 27th, 2010 @ 05:53 pm Papercuts | |||
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Current Mood:
I still have a way to go, but I do think these papercuts are really, really impressive. impressed |
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| Jan. 27th, 2010 @ 07:53 am (no subject) | |||
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Current Mood:
Happy birthday, festivemy_vivid_dreams! |
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