Making Paizo-like pawns AKA stand-ups

November 15th, 2012

There are often cardboard stand-ups used for characters on a map when playing a role-playing game. They’e cheaper than minis. Paizo has sets of them they market as “pawns”.

The plastic bases commonly used hold 1/16″ chipboard, perfectly. It’s also numbered 0.06″ or just 0.06. It can sometimes be called Binder’s Board and is used for making book covers. Check the scrapbooking places.

I got a big box of it on eBay – possibly a lifetime supply – for $16, including shipping.

It fits the stands perfectly. I’ll print the art, glue them to the cardboard, and cut them out on the laser cutter at TechShop.

Vinyl Record Brush

October 30th, 2012

I’ve been playing records lately, and have been considering one of the big expensive Record Cleaning Machines.  I’ll probably buy one, in fact.  In the meantime, and to handle surface dust, I ordered a carbon fiber brush to use dry.  I’m really impressed at how effective it is!  It’s easy, quick, inexpensive, and makes a big difference.  Highly recommended!

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Why I Dislike Autodie

October 23rd, 2012

Many people have suggested I use autodie. I have never been interested in the functionality it provides, and don’t use it. I think there’s primarily two reasons why that is. I might know a way to address one of them, but it’s tricky. Read the rest of this entry »

About Lifehacker’s Headphone Picks

October 8th, 2012

A friend sent me a link to an article from Lifehacker, where they picked their Five Best Headphones.  My friend knew that I like headphones.  I try not to be too into audiophile headphones.  I only own one pair of headphones worth over $1,000, so I’ve not gone completely overboard.  Trust me.  Or don’t and go over to Head-Fi and read what all the nice people there have to say about headphones.

I replied to my friend, discussing that article on Lifehacker, and he suggested I publish it as there was a ton of additional information in it.  So, here it is, a reply to Lifehacker’s article: Read the rest of this entry »

Remember to store errors!

August 20th, 2012

In Perl, when you get an error, there are magic globals that the interpreter sets to the value of that error. If you’re going to do any other work before reporting the error, save those variables!  Work almost got this right… Read the rest of this entry »

Fix for Bowlfish 2.1 on a Soekris net6501

August 19th, 2012

Bowlfish assumes that after it boots, the single hard disc in a system will be wd0a.  Not true on a Soekris net6501 when using a USB volume.  It’s sd0a.  You need to update /etc/fstab to mount / from sd0a instead of wd0a.  You can do that with a site.tgz file, or just mount and edit the disc before you boot.  Or mount -o rw,noatime /dev/sd0a /mnt on the booted system, make the change to /etc/fstab, and then mount -o rw /dev/sd0a. Read the rest of this entry »

Quirk installing Bowlfish 2.1 for OpenBSD 4.9.

August 19th, 2012

I use a tool called Bowlfish to build OpenBSD images which run with the drives mounted read-only. This lets me use cheap Compact Flash or USB drives in a Soekris single board computer instead of a real disc or a more expensive SSD.

Bowlfish has been a lifesaver and has worked perfectly for years. The current version, however, didn’t. I was shocked.  Then I fixed it! Read the rest of this entry »

Anti-documentation in Perldoc

July 28th, 2012

Found a section that annoyed me in perlsyn today, in the documentation for the foreach loop: Read the rest of this entry »

What is Shinto?

July 25th, 2012

I wrote about a visit to a Shinto shrine last week, and hadn’t touched the topic here before, and thought I’d change that.  Since I’m wordy, there’ll probably be several parts.  This one is to discuss what Shinto is, at least, what my understanding of Shinto is.  I feel like it’s a new topic for me, and one that I don’t know much about, but I’ve been reading about it steadily for months now, so I’m probably better informed than I give myself credit. Read the rest of this entry »

Teaching Perl…

July 25th, 2012

I’ll be teaching a very informal class on Perl to  a couple of folks I know.  We’ve got two days scheduled, and I’ve suggested they get chromatic’s Modern Perl as a ‘textbook’.  I plan on covering what variables are, how program flow works, functions, and objects via Moose.  I’ll also discuss installing Perl on Windows and Linux.  What am I forgetting? Read the rest of this entry »