Month: December 2006

I have a surprise visitor and I (generally) will not be posting until late Sunday. It’s a very, very good surprise visit! 😀

As evident in my last post, we successfully screen printed our own OneTwenty shirts. However, it was a learning experience, with a number of failed attempts along the way. Here I’ll detail what not to do when trying to make your own screen printed shirts.

We knew that we wanted shirts for a quite a long time, and we wanted nice printed shirts rather than cheap-looking iron-on transfers. Our enthusiasm was buoyed by this cheap screen printing tutorial by craftgrrl, but our initial attempts didn’t really work out.

We bought the fabric paint from Jackons in Shafto lane. They have a nice shelf with a whole range of water-based fabric paints. They also sell squeegees and silkscreens, but we figured that at $20 and $40 (?) each, we could try to do without for our first go.

Continue reading “DIY screen printing attempts (failure!)”

OneTwenty decided to make shirts so that we could all match at tonight’s Perth Massive. It turned out to be a real learning and bonding experience; staying up until 4:30am waiting for the screen to dry after your second attempt at making a stencil failed will do that to you!

I’ll post more details on our failures and successes in future, but for now behold the majesty of one of our OneTwenty shirts:

Ah the majesty! But how much did it all cost?… probably too much. Although we do now have the equipment and skills to make as many shirts as we want. We’ll have different shirts for every event! He’s a discussion of costs that I had with spinboy:

Check back in the next few days for the making-of pictures. Also, stop by the Massive and say hi to all the OneTwenty members modelling these shirts!

Thanks to everyone who made these shirts happen. In particular: Minh, Mash, Jason, and Jim!

Yesterday, Phil sent me an image link via Jabber (our preferred instant messaging system). I clicked on the link and what I saw kinda freaked me out. I asked where the photo was from and he directed me to this user profile page on the Eurasian Nation forums.

Here’s a screengrab of the image on that page:

I’ve shown this image to a few people and this guy apparantly looks just me. From the eurasian look and long hair, down to the aviator sunglasses and the slim-fit green shirt. Spinboy even thought it was me until I mentioned otherwise.

Continue reading “Apparantly I live in Canada (look-alike found)”

As you may have read on Jason’s blog, I have a Wii… and it is awesome… revolutionary even. That is all for now, but expect detailed reviews here and at Aeropause in the next few days.

Update: spinboy has put up some videos on his blog.

I decided to mention here (rather than at the OneTwenty Events blog) that OneTwenty will be at the Perth Massive 2006. We’re even listed on the website as a community group:

Minh and I are planning on making shirts this weekend by screenprinting. Any OneTwenty members planning to attend the Massive should meet us this weekend and bring along an item of clothing for printing on (We’ll send out more details via email). Anything will do: t-shirts, polo shirts, business shirts, jackets, skirts, trousers, jumpsuits…

OneTwenty stencil designs available for review after the jump.

Continue reading “OneTwenty at Perth Massive 2006”

A few months ago on my old blog (currently offline) I mentioned that I pretty much have everything I want and encouraged people who wanted to buy me a birthday present to donate money to one of my preferred charities instead. It didn’t really work out; No one donated. 🙁

Undeterred, I’m giving it another go and trying to figure out what went wrong. Maybe people felt that a donation isn’t present-like enough, or my list was too long (offering too many possibilities), or people didn’t want to give their credit card details out to a charity (odd, since many would trust an online store).

Bearing in mind the factors above, I’m asking anyone considering getting me a gift this holiday season to buy me something from Oxfam Unwrapped.

From the website:

Are you sick of giving socks, bath salts, or token gifts? Is this festive season going to give you gifting grief? Yes, trying to choose gifts for some people can be quite an ordeal – and that’s why we’ve developed Oxfam Unwrapped. It’s a unique collection of gift ideas that help you give something special to your friends or family and give something extra special to people who haven’t got much at all.

Basically, they use your money to provide items to those who need it and they send a card (explaining the gift) to the friend of family member that you are buying on behalf of. It’s present-like, it’s got the interface of an online store, and it’s the only thing on my wish list for the holidays. So, please consider it; I honestly can not think of any gift that would make me happier.

Note: Thanks to my name is not deenie for posting a link to Oxfam Unwrapped on her blog (that’s how I found out about it). Hopefully it’s the answer to my wish list conundrum.

OneTwenty web services were temporarily down earlier today, possibly due to an attempted hack. The kernel caught a TCP window shrink attempt:

TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer 220.128.54.50:2072/80 shrinks window

This page has a few explainations of what the problem could be. The http site at the IP address in question looks to be a vanilla Mandrake install. Running a reverse DNS lookup reveals that the computer is somewhere in China (that is, if it isn’t a masqueraded IP).

Anyhow, the kernel caught the problem and I used iptables to automatically drop packets originating from that IP address. Anyone else have something like this happen recently?

Update: Installed OSSEC per Steve‘s suggestion. The latest version (0.9.3) installs easily (following the instructions in the manual) and even creates the /etc/init.d/ossec file for easy use in Ubuntu!