Space Koala

Where no Pizza Cutter has Gone (so stylishly) Before

miro — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 03:24:42 GMT

In another long running example of how much I relish celebrating my outer geek, my family have a tradition of weekly Star Trek nights.

We usually order pizza so no one has to cook and our energy is reserved for more important activates like making (and drinking) Gin and Tonics, and laughing lovingly at the techno-babble.

We have recently acquired the Star Trek Enterprise Pizza Cutter from Think Geek, and will now be cutting our pizzas in futuristic space battle style.

I took some photos of her maiden voyage with my father at the helm:

The Enterprise ended her mission that stardate after having crash landed into an olive crater on a pizza asteroid orbited by a G&T satellite in the midst of the cardboard-box nebula.

Scotty would not have been happy with the state we'd gotten her into. Luckily it was only a short distance (made on impulse drive) to the nearest starbase and we got her cleaned up in no time.

In way of actual review: Geek values aside (which are both obvious and awesome) the pizza cutter is sturdy, has a nice feel and weight to it and cuts perfectly. In fact it's probably fairly easy to cause damage with it, so it should be kept away from children and extremely drunk or stupid people.

Festival of the Photocopier – Zine Fair

miro — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 18:24:49 GMT

This year I finally had the opportunity to attend Sticky's zine fair, Festival of the Photocopier. It was held in the Melbourne Town Hall this year, a truly beautiful building, as the fair has outgrown its home in the Degraves street subway (where Sticky is located). It was wonderful to see the whole room filled with zine tables. The crowd was a perfect size too, not too crowded, but lively. So it was heaps of fun without the need for jostling. Which was great, because I suck at jostling, I'm too polite. ^^;

My favourite zines are always tiny ones because I'm addicted to cute things, and usually comics or densely illustrated creations on account of my visarts background, so naturally I was enchanted by Joy Serwylo's stall of gorgeous miniature Willo Press books. I got the Miniature Vegetarian Cookbook for Minimalists, a folding world maps book and a concertina photo book called Street Art of Melbourne; all beautiful little treasures. Here's a photo of the bookcase on her stall (taken with permission), and the miniature books I bought.

Another of my favourite purchases from the day is the Little Book of Bearded Chaps by Mechelle B. The artwork is charming and its construction design makes it extremely satisfying to page through. That might seem like an odd comment, but I'm such a geek that I really love nuances in the physical reading experience as well.

I also picked up the newest issue of Ben Hutchings' mini-comic series, Comic of Smallness, which never fails to make me laugh (Ben of course does heaps of other awesome comics too), comic fans should check out his blog.

I expect I shall now also be collecting the comic adventures of Echidna Dirigible from Australiadelphia Press. I do love the gentlemanly banter and prickly storyline. I picked up issue#1 and even signed myself up to their email list, something I rarely do.

Unfortunately I can't be in Melbourne again next February (which has always been the problem previously), but now that I have attended and confirmed my assumption that the event is incredibly fun, I will definitely be making the effort to return again in the future. In the meantime, I’ll just have to haunt Sticky as much as possible.

Tybot

miro — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 13:10:20 GMT

I felt like drawing robots today.
This is my favourite. I call him Tybot, the typing robot.
Heh-heh silly ^^;

Stacks and stacks of book stacks

miro — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 12:09:05 GMT

Recently, I was sent to a library to do some work for a project I'm the research assistant on. It was brilliant. I love libraries, and because I was there on behalf of a university I was very kindly given a backstage pass to the closed stacks, a pile of reader slips and free reign.

As you walk along the stacks there are lights to turn on, but when you first walk in it's all dark and creepy and awesome. I quickly discovered that I am quite a fan of awesomely dark, creepy, book-filled places, so I usually only turned on the light for the shelf I needed at the time.

Here's a reader's shelf slip in use:

They mark the spot a book has been taken from to make it easier for the librarians upon re-shelving.

Here's a photos of the stacks looking into the darkness rather than the light. Rather fuzzy, cause my camera just isn't good enough, but I love the photos anyway ^^; Click to enlarge:

Using Excel formulas to mass-create HTML tables

miro — Sun, 08 May 2011 07:26:39 GMT

Today I needed about 700 rows of MS Access data structured into HTML table code for a flat-file database I'm working with.
I am likely to be the only one in the world bat-shit crazy enough to want to do that sort of thing in the first place, but I thought I'd share anyway ^^;heh.

It's actually a relatively simple process.
First I cut and pasted the data I needed into Excel.
Then, at the end of the first row I created a formula using the ampersand and quotation marks to edit the html in around the data. Even including some line breaks where I wanted them.

Eg: For a row with the first 3 cells ROBOT MONKEY PIRATE you could do something like this...

This formula:
=""&A1&""&B1&"
"&C1&""
Would give you this html:
ROBOTMOKEY
PIRATE

Which, if you put inside table tags, would give you:

ROBOT

MONKEY
PIRATE

So, then I double clicked the dot at the right hand bottom of the cell to copy the formula all the way down the list, and cut and paste that column to where I needed the data.

I actually put it in an empty php file which I called up all in one shot inside the table tags using an include function but you could equally as easily paste the whole thing straight inside a html file if you wanted to and didn't mind the bulk.

...I am such a geek in such incredibly unnecessary ways. haha.

Takoyaki

miro — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 17:02:15 GMT

Recently-ish I made a mini flag for a takoyaki party with friends, and thought I would share my photos of the flag as well as the simple takoyaki recipe we used.

Ingrediants

Mixture:
* 1 cup flour
* 1 egg
* 1 cup water
* powdered dashi stock

Filling: (whatever you want really, but this is what we used)
* cooked octopus
* beni-shoga (red pickled ginger)
* grated cheese

Seasoning:
* takoyaki sauce (if your local Asian grocer doesn't stock takoyaki sauce, yakisoba sauce makes an equally tasty substitute and is easier to find)
* mayonnaise
* aoinori (dried seaweed flakes)
* katsuo bushi (bonito shavings)

Instructions

Measure the flour into a mixing bowl and sprinkle in dashi to taste depending how fishy you want the mixture to be.
Crack in the egg and gradually mix in water to form a smooth liquid. It needs to be runnier than standard pancake mix (about the same as crepe mix)

Cook in an oiled takoyaki pan. First pour in the mixture and then add the filling to each recess, then turn the balls as they cook using a toothpick or skewer.

Season and enjoy! yay!
*nomnomnom*

Origami Bookmarks

miro — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 23:12:18 GMT

Scathing Weekly recently blogged about some charming heart topped origami bookmarks that she once made for some of her students during a previous incarnation. They're easy and fun, yet look spiffy and cute as well. The mind boggles at the origami zen-ness of it all. Check her post out for the instructions.

There were calls in the comments for a less girly - or rather, more manly - bookmark and Scather suggests the origami corner bookmark over on the the Instructables website.

I have another to add to the suggestions. But alas I have no idea where I originally learned the fold, so i've had to resort to making my own instructions. I hope they're easy to follow. ^^;

The sizes and measurements are flexible depending on how you want it to look, but for the first time round I recommend starting with half a square of standard origami paper (ie: cut it in half to form two rectangles and use one.)

Here are the instructions. Steps are written out in full below the diagram:

Step1: Fold the rectangle about 5mm to the side of the centre of the paper, leaving a half-fold where one side is longer than the other.
Step2~3: Fold the short side back on itself leaving a border of pattern down the right side.
Step4: Fold the back forward and under the right flap to make an equal-width border on the left side.
Step5: Crease each end down (about 2cms or so should do) and...
Step6: Fold the corners to form a straight line between the edge of the horizontal crease and the edge of the white strip at the end.
Step7: Fold the previous crease and tuck the corner folds behine the white strip on either side.
Step8: Decorate the white strip however you like.

You can use two-sided origami paper (if you can find it) for extra flair, and use glue if you want it flatter without waiting for the book to sort that out.

XP Tweaking - Setting a Keyboard Shortcut to Open a Program

miro — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 15:43:09 GMT

Most people who are as still using XP like I am, probably know this by now anyway. But I just thought I'd share one of my favourite tweaks.

This is how you set a keyboard shortcut for opening a program:

Right click on the program in the start menu, and select "Properties".
Then click on the "Shorcut Key" field, press an alphabet key and click on OK.
Control and Alt are automatically applied, so you open the program by pressing Ctrl+Alt+(alphabet key you have chosen).

Yay!

I'm a keyboard shortcut geek, and for some of the smaller frequent tools I find this more convenient than the quicklaunch menu. I have it setup for a couple of programs and the one I use a keyboard shortcut to open most is oddly, the character map.

Mildly related P.S.
I hate Vista.
I have tried Windows 7 and it was better than Vista, but I still have old software that I need which won't work on it (yes, even in compatibility mode).

Origami mini-book

miro — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 17:26:07 GMT

I wrote a mini "choose your own adventure" called The Tunnel, which I decide from the outset would be eight pages long so I could make it with the origami mini-book fold. Scripting it from the start to be that short yet still with multiple endings was surprisingly kind of fun.

It's a great little zine-fold because you can print on a single A4 piece of paper and it folds into 8 pages with just one cut along the middle.
You just have to know which page will be which, and print the top row upside-down, so they'll be the right side up when you fold it. In the above diagram, the solid lines are mountain folds and the dashed lines are valley folds. After you make the folds, cut along the red line and you'll be able to shape it into a book. You can then either use the 6 inner pages for content and pages 1 and 8 for the covers, or attach a separate cover.

I used origami paper (with the height trimmed) for the cover, the size of the paper turned out to perfectly match the length of the cover need, spooky :P ...Then I made a front cover image in photoshop, printed it out on standard office sticky labels and cut around the shape. The font I used is VTCorona, which I picked for its old-school typewriter look.

I've uploaded an online javascript version for anyone who might be interested in reading the text adventure: The Tunnel :)

Brushpen scribbles

miro — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 19:00:00 GMT

Some slapdash brushpen scribbles done late at night for something creative to do, inked on the back of old class handouts and homework:

I've been feeling lethargic and creatively brain dead lately. This was an exercise to help with the latter and also to try and improve my hand with an inkbrush (which has always been quite shaky).
If I was totally hardcore i'd address both issues by going for a jog as well or something :P