Archive for the ‘Otaku’ Category

Stamp Otaku

Thursday, April 30th, 2015

I like postage stamps. Always have, always will. I still buy them a lot, especially when I’m in Australia. They are also one of the reasons I love sending postcards, and I enjoy sending (or receiving!) cards with exotic or particularly pretty stamps on them. I wonder if any of my recipients notice?

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That’s a screen grab from yesterdays lecture, which was about the atomic structure. Rutherford is a real character, and I’ve always found it humorous that he’s been on so many postage stamps considering his (in)famous quote about science. Other slides in yesterdays lecture were peppered with stamps as well, and it’s actually quite easy to find stamps to use as illustrations in physics lectures.

In searching for such examples, I couldn’t help but notice that the masters of honoring their scientists on postage stamps are unquestionably the Germans. There are many and varied examples of beautiful stamps showcasing very famous scientists from German history.

Take for example this one:

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What a beautiful stamp! Hertz discovered electromagnetic waves, and this stamp displays the oscillations of the electric force due to a magnetic dipole (ie. EM waves) in the background. I love that the lines are superimposed over Hertz’s portrait, as if to put the science before the man.

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This stamp of Bessel is magnificent! The portrait is wonderful, and the fact the stamp prominently displays a plot of a ‘Bessel function’ (important mathematical tools required to solve complex partial differential equations) is just icing on the cake! How I’d love to stick this on a postcard!

Here are some other wonderful examples of Germany’s science stamps:

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That last one (Gauss) is sublime! Gauss is one of the titans of mathematics, and is one of the few men to have multiple identities or equations named after him. One may imagine that they would have shown a Gaussian distribution on the stamp, but whoever designed it chose the 17-sided polygon that he created using compass and straightedge when he was only 19. I love it!

Lovely stamps these all are. The woodcut portraits add to the appeal, and the fact the stamps embrace the science only make them more appealing.

Of course Germany isn’t alone in recognizing science in their stamps. Here are a few other wonderful examples I found (and in some cases have inserted into lectures):

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From the top, we have Roentgen (x-ray), Babbage (computers), Fermi (atomic physics), Bohr (atomic structure), Mendelev (chemistry), Democritus (coined the word ‘atom’ in 450BC) and Ramanujan (Indian mathematics prodigy). I love them all. I wish I had them all in a big frame. I’d display it proudly in my office.

You’re all wondering “What about Einstein?” He’s on more stamps than any other scientist, and they run the entire range of design and theme, since his fame moved into celebrity as well. I think this is perhaps my favourite Einstein stamp of all those I found:

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It’s simple, subtle (note the background) and a lovely portrait of Einstein when he wasn’t much older than when he presented his most important theories. This stamp would look beautiful on the back of a postcard of a surfing koala or kangaroo drinking a beer 😉

Sniper Girl

Sunday, April 26th, 2015

I’m a big fan of the Etrian Odyssey game series. Not only are the games fine examples of the first-person dungeon crawl genre, but they have wonderful graphics, due in no small part to the character designs of artist Yuji Himukai.

Here is his design for the female ‘sniper’ character from the first game in the series: 

Therefore you can imagine my delight when Kotobukiya released this model kit:

Figure kits are rare, so I eagerly bought this one when it came out. Last week I assembled it. Here’s what was in the box:

So many colors of plastic! So much detail on the pieces! Even before I pulled the runners out of the bags I was impressed.

Very quickly it was clear this was a god-tier kit. The engineering of the pieces was superb, and almost no trimming or sanding was required. Everything snapped together tightly, but articulation of the joints was perfect. The balance was also incredible, quite an achievement considering her tiny feet!

She was very easy to put together, and on top of the ease was a lot of fun. It took me maybe 2 hours only to finish her. Although she’s on the base in these shots, she can actually stand unsupported:

There is some customization decisions to be made. She can have her goggles on or around her neck, she can hold the bow by her side or in a firing position with arrow cocked, and she can have one of four faces:

Here’s the face I chose:

She looks a little tsundere 🙂

Another shot of my finished ‘sniper girl’:

And here she is in her new home on the shelf:

This is a very impressive kit. It’s inexpensive (about $30), easy and fun to make, and she looks great. Highly recommended.

(She also has a sister kit – the ‘Imperial Girl’ – which I also bought and will make one day)

My Collection: Pokemon Mini

Thursday, April 23rd, 2015

It’s been over a year since the last post of this type showcasing a part of my game collection, so I thought it was about time I returned to this topic. Today I’ll introduce a game system many of you have likely never heard of: Pokemon Mini!

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The Pokemon Mini was released by Nintendo back in 2001. It’s one of the smallest game systems ever released that uses cartridges. All the games were Pokemon themed, simplistic and somewhat ugly due to the 96×64 LCD display (which is not backlit). The device includes a startling amount of features, such as an accelerometer, IR communication, force feedback (via an internal motor), an internal clock and battery backup. It only weighs about 50g (!!) excluding the single AAA battery used for power.

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It was released in the US first, then Japan and eventually Europe, and while specific details are hard to find, it seems to have been a collossal failure. 2001 wasn’t exactly the game dark ages, so it didn’t compete too well against other devices of the time for serious gamers, and was probably a bit too niche for children, who were presumably the intended audience.

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There’s a lot to like about the device. It’s smartly designed, doesn’t feel at all like a toy, and the screen is very sharp with a fast refresh rate. The speakers are tiny but the sound is good, and the controls (d-pad, 2 buttons, right trigger and shake function) all work well. I also like that the cartridges are so tiny, and that they have the name of the system written directly on the back of the PCB!

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The games though… well they aren’t good. Incredible simplistic, most of them are versions of traditional parlour games (such as tangrams seen above) or sub-NES quality arcade games. The other problem was that there were only four released in the USA (including the pack-in)! There were a total of 0 games released after launch, which shows this device was pretty much DOA. I few additional games were released in Japan and Europe, but in it’s lifetime the system saw under 10 games in total.

Of course this means that my collection is complete (as far as the US version is concerned):

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According to my records, I purchased the handheld and the three additional games on May 25, 2003 – about 18 months after it had been released. I pid $29.99 for the system and $9.99 for each additional game. These days it’s worth quite a bit more – especially the games. Were I to sell it on ebay I could expect to easily triple what I paid, and perhaps make even more (since listings for the games are scant).

But I won’t sell it. It’s a tiny but curious part of my collection, and happily sits in a box with the other two unusual handhelds I have… both of which I’ll feature here within the next few weeks 😉

 

The Nixie Clock

Sunday, March 22nd, 2015

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Nixie tubes were invented in 1955 and were a popular pre-digital form of displaying numerals in electronic circuits. They use a technology somewhat similar to neon lights, and are designed so the shape of the discharge corresponds to numbers (or rarely letters). They were obsoleted in the 1970s by LCD displays, and even more so in the 1980s by pixel displays.

But they have experienced a bit of a resurgence in recent years since they are so pretty, and so retro. It is a great regret of mine that several years ago, while cleaning out old lab equipment at school, I discarded a (broken) nixie geiger counter from the 1960s. I should have kept it, and fixed it!

And then this year, for my birthday, KLS purchased me a Nixie clock do-it-yourself kit. I made it this past week, and it was easily the most challenging kit of any kind that I have ever made.

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It starts with the above – many components, an empty printed circuit board (PCB) and a whole lot of fitting and soldering to be done. Now I’m not the biggest fan of soldering, and despite once being paid to teach others how to do it (hi Florence!) I don’t consider myself very good. But I borrowed an iron from school, prepared a comfortable work surface and started…

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That’s about 3 or 4 hours later. Most of the resistors are in place, as well as the diodes and all the capacitors. I believe, at this point, I had soldered over 170 connections. It turned out to be easier than I thought, but at the same time very detailed work. If I didn’t have any experience at all, it would have been almost impossible to do it correctly due to how close some connections were.

The hardest thing to this point was actually preparing the nixie mounts. This photo shows the process:

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The circular bakelite discs had to have the conductive pins pushed into them and then the whole thing was soldered to the PCB. The difficulty was the pins were molded inside plastic and you had to break them out. This was much harder than it should have been and I cut myself more than once. It was frustrating but I got it done.

The next step was to add the LEDs:

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Then a few more components (including the chips) before testing to see if everything had been done correctly:

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The relief I felt at this point was incredible. This was during the second day of assembly, after a half dozen hours or so. I’d been frustrated up and down by this point since the ‘instructions’ for the kit consisted of a series of forums posts on a website that were lacking (in my opinion) in certain pieces of information that would have made things much easier had I known them in advance.

But I was half way through the PCB assembly and it was working (the LEDs were lit and the current was ~20 mA). Here’s the back of the kit at this point:

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The next step was to add the nixies, as well as the other essential components to actually make it a clock (motion sensors, crystal, battery backup etc.). Here’s one of the nixies:

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The kit comes with five in total: four numeric and one symbolic (+,-.>.<). Putting the 13 leads into the sockets on the PCB was easily the hardest and most frustrating part of the entire kit, and took about an hour in total for all five. Here we are mid-process:

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And when it was done – time to test it all:

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OMG it works! I was super relieved here – everything lit up as it should have and the whole thing seemed to work. Little did I know I still had a lot ahead of me.

Next I had to start building the case. Unfortunately two pieces were received broken, and a third was miscut. The case as a whole was poorly designed, and the pieces didn’t fit together anywhere near as good as I feel they should have. I had to do a lot of sanding and drilling to get things looking acceptable (but as you see later, believe I mostly succeeded). Again, a complete beginner would have been in trouble in this step. Here’s a shot mid case assembly:

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The five blue LEDs are asthetic, and you can see in the photo two above that they are all on (under the nixies). That was the last photo taken of them on, because for reasons unknown after I soldered the final component (the backup capacitor battery) and put it in the case the middle LED stopped working. Here’s a photo of the clock – all wiring completed – showing this (the case is not yet complete):

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In the front, just to the left of one of the chips, you can see a black LED. Right behind that (slightly up left) is a sensor chip. These two parts are required to set the clock, which uses a virtual motion controlled ‘air switch’ to set features like time, date, 24-hour mode, alarm etc. It’s a remarkably full-featured clock, but mine had a big problem: the motion sensor barely works.

It took me endless trial-and-error to get the switch working, entailing making IR blocks out of black-colored paper and moving my hand around like a deranged puppet for about an hour trying to control the ultra-unresponsive switch. Countless times during this process I lamented the fact the designer didn’t just choose to add buttons. But eventually I got the time set, and now – five days later – the clock continues to keep perfect time.

Here’s a shot of my completed clock:

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I think I did very well in hiding the breaks in the case, and I think the middle LED being burned out is mostly unnoticeable. In fact I think it looks very nice, and certainly is very striking in our entertainment center under the TV where it glows impressively in the dark.

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The nixies are very, very pretty aren’t they. This shot is with the cover (of the case) of, and you can see a piece of blackened paper I have resting over the sensor to prevent it from flaking out again. The clock is permanently set to 24 hour time, and the middle nixie alternates between – and + every second. It’s quite lovely.

It was an extremely difficult and frustrating kit to build, and I don’t think it’s probably worth what it cost. But I did my very best, and it works and looks quite good, so in the end I’m quite happy with my new nixie clock 🙂

 

 

Mortar Headd Engage

Tuesday, March 17th, 2015

I received this model kit for Christmas from my brother:

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I’d always been a fan of the design of the mecha in this series, but this was the first time I would build a kit. It’s made by a company called Wave, who I’ve never made a kit from before. I planned to do the best I could, since I wanted to get it looking as much like the photo on the packaging as possible.

Here’s the contents of the box:

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Two things stood out: firstly it had water-applied decals (yikes!) and secondly this was not a snap-together kit. The latter was unusual, since the kits I’ve made by Bandai or Kotobukiya are snap-together and have been for many years. I had thought that kits that needed gluing were restricted to military-style models, and this is certainly the first mecha kit I’ve made that has needed glue (in 15 or so years).

I briefly started with some crappy glue I just happened to have on hand before buying this stuff:

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It’s very fluid – like water  – and does an extremely good job. Recommended if you want to make a plastic model kit.

The Mortar Headd is assembled in 7 stages which will be put together at the end. You start with the body and waist, and very quickly I found that this was no beginners model. Parts were designed to be movable even after assembly, and very often the assembly itself was fiddly (even irritating) and required very precise glue application:

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It was also apparent that they didn’t go together as perfectly as it seemed they should. I’m not sure if this was a molding or design issue, but sometimes there were hairline gaps between pieces (even after gluing) or they didn’t match together quite right. Some of the piece design was questionable as well and seemed only to increase the piece count. For instant there were cases where tabs (to insert into other pieces) were glued on separately rather than molded, or when obvious single pieces had been split into two for no apparent reason. This leg for example has about 40 individual pieces in it and was a real pain to assemble:

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Before I get to the end comments, I invite you to speculate as to how easily this kit may stand given the design of those feet? 🙂

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The hands were particularly bothersome. You are given a choice of eight different styles (per hand) with many different pieces from which to assemble them. Unlike most other kits of this type, rather than simply make one articulated hand you’re supposed to choose which weapon or position you want the kit to have and then pick the appropriate hand for it. This would be ok in theory if
1) The hands were easy to switch (which they absolutely aren’t), and
2) The hands actually held the weapons they are supposed to (again, they don’t)
So one of the final steps – making and fitting the hands – ends up being one of the most frustrating.

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Building the kit took many hours. This was because the pieces were tiny, needed a lot of cleaning up (the connections to the runners were often positioned poorly) and because the glue – while very good – had particularly strong fumes which necessitated working in small periods 🙂

But eventually the pieces were all together, and it was time to assemble the final product. Here’s a shot pre=assembly:

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And here he is about thirty very frustrating minutes later:

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During assembly the head, hands and part of the waist broke. I was able to fix the head and waist, but the thumb on the hand broke cleanly off (not along the glue line) so he ended up thumbless. All these breaks occurred because of the force required to attach the limbs via ball-and-socket joints. Again, I attribute this to poor design. It would have been vastly better (a la the Gundam model) to built a skeleton first them put the armor on afterwards.

You can see he’s still unfinished. It was time for those pesky water-applied decals:

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Putting them on wasn’t so bad, but it turns out they aren’t quite the same technology as I remember from my youth. To be specific, there is no adhesive in the decal binder anymore, and surface tension is not enough to hold them on to the model when the water dries. You are supposed to apply a binding agent both before and afterwards, which ‘melts’ the decal plastic onto the kit. I had no idea of this, and was quite surprised when they all started flaking off shortly after application!

But I snapped a few photos first. Here he is post-decal and with some (unimpressive) detailing using a Gundam marker. Even between these shots you may notice some decals have come off:

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Don’t be fooled by him standing. It took forever to balance him and if I even thought at him the wrong way he fell over!

As you can see he’s nowhere near as impressive as the packaging, since he obviously requires a lot of detailed paintwork to look perfect. I’m happy enough with how he ended up though, given the frustrations and difficulties I had with the kit!

Last word: if you’re after a robot model kit, avoid Wave! Go with Kotobukiya (incredibly complex and detailed snap-together kits) or Bandai (slightly simpler but no less impressive snap-togethers), both of which produce easier-to-assemble models that are technically more impressive than this one.

If only Kotobukiya would get the FSS license…