Suddenly, and I mean less than two minutes after I had used it successfully, the offline blogging tool I’ve been using forever started throwing XMLRPC errors. Support for it was abandoned years ago, so I haven’t looked for a replacement until now.

MarsEdit let me submit an edit to the previous post, so let’s see if it makes a new one successfully, and to double-check the encoding, I’ll insert some kanji: 漢字.

Now for a picture below the fold:

more...

15 inches high, 26 inches wide, 16 inches deep. These are terrible dimensions for a Takadai, but they work pretty well for an idiot’s makeshift version: the Bakadai. The braid is coming out nicely, at least; it’s 25-strand Tsune-gumi (3/3 twill), done with a single strand of cheap medium-weight acrylic yarn per bobbin, in a simple zig-zag pattern.

I’ve had to rebuild it several times already, as I discovered where the stresses were (version 2 included a 4-kilo kettlebell for stability…). The latest version added sandpaper on the takeup bar, to keep it from unwinding the finished braid every time I pull the shed open to pass a bobbin/shuttle through; a real takadai uses a ratcheting mechanism, but I didn’t have one laying around the house, and the only tool I’ve used so far is the saw blade on my Leatherman, to cut the dowel to size.

The key components are the 8 sliding koma and their frames, which are constructed out of two sets of the Martha Stewart Knit and Weave Loom Kit, which I found on sale on Amazon for $20. Side note: I couldn’t get it to work well for weaving or single knitting, but I did make a decent double-knit scarf before I tore it apart to use for takadai parts. It’s a decent kit, but much better at $20 than the current $33 or the retail $45.

The other parts are a cheap lap scroll holder from a craft shop, a three-tier sword stand that I don’t need while my swords are off being polished, two short lengths of dowel, a bungee cord, a “bone” folding tool, a chopstick, three little strips of sandpaper, some gaffer tape, and some rubber bands and string. And a bunch of weighted bobbins, which I already had from my Marudai.

(note that the uneven thread spacing and the camera angle make it look like I’ve only got 2 threads under the chopstick at one point; there are actually 3 there)

Technical limitations:

• held together with string and rubber bands, so not the most robust thing in the world.
• hard to set up at a comfortable height; currently it works best standing.
• the front bar of the scroll holder is always in the way.
• each koma only has 5 pegs, so I'm limited to a maximum of 15 strands per side.
• the angle from front to back is way too steep (about 20°).
• it's too small to use my hand to create the shed, so I'm using a chopstick.
• the scroll frame isn't deep enough; another 6 inches or so, and I could use the biggest parts from the Martha Stewart loom to create a much longer frame for the koma to slide in, and use longer pieces for the koma, allowing me to increase the number of strands and even out the spacing between them.
• the sword stand is too close to the scroll holder. On the plus side, it's close enough that I can use the takeup bar to hold the chopstick in place while I pass bobbins through, which makes it feel more like using the real thing.
• only one set of koma on each side, so it's limited to single-layer braids. Not that I'll be ready to try double-layer braids any time soon...

If version 6 holds up well, I won’t make any significant changes to it [okay, there will be at least one more version; the sandpaper isn’t quite enough to keep the weight of 25 bobbins from gradually unwinding the takeup bar]. Instead, I’ll focus my efforts on designing parts with OpenSCAD to be milled on a Shapeoko 3 in the Spring. I have two sets of plans, from Rodrick Owen (with errata) and Carol Franklin, and my experience with the Bakadai has already given me a few ideas that will simplify the milling.

The first thing I build will be a better-proportioned Chibi-Takadai and a set of smaller bobbins, with only the top sides milled to keep it simple. The bobbins will have to be done in two parts and glued together (with washers for weighting), and the koma will have to sit at an angle rather than running in a track; that works well on the Bakadai, and will be even better with purpose-built parts.

[Update: for version 7 I replaced the takeup bar with a 1-inch dowel, the largest size that just fit inside the rubber hooks of the bungee cord. The tension is perfect, and it didn’t unwind at all when I made another Tsunegumi braid. The only remaining modification I need to do is put longer leaders on my bobbins.]

Momoiro Clover Z (yes, them) has collaborated with Kiss (yes, them).

Available on Bluray at the end of January, hopefully only in Japan.

Although, shipping on my last order from Amazon Japan was scary-cheap, and the yen is hovering around 120 to the dollar, so if you want it, I recommend combining it with the recent Babymetal concert disc where they cover Morning Musume…

Another slight classification error:

I’m not sure how you’re supposed to use this with your computer monitor, but I suspect first-person shooters are involved…

I have no idea why, but the order of the output of the permute() function in the Perl library Math::Combinatorics depends on the number of elements in @ARGV. This resulted in a rather frustrating debugging session, in which it was assumed that the output was deterministic, and one could reliably shift off the null permutation.

Seriously, when the mere act of adding a command-line option that is completely ignored by the program changes the output, your library is kinda fucked.

Please stop handing packages over to USPS. Two-day shipping is now four if I’m lucky, on a package that will be completely useless to me soon, since they didn’t even try to deliver on Monday, and then (allegedly) showed up at my office today at 6:04pm and found the front door locked.

No, I’m not actually going to include all of them. Not only would that be worse than visiting an endlessly-scrolling Tumblr full of animated GIFs, the vast majority of them are just plain ugly. In addition to the Carey diagram, I’m just going to post six reasonable ones and six random ones, to give you an idea of what’s available.

I’m not going to try an exhaustive search on 25-strand Shigeuchi; 2^17 was bad enough…

[Note: these diagrams are not compatible with ee0r’s 17-strand taka-on-maru braid, which looks pretty much the same, but obviously has a different braiding sequence. Mine is described at the end of this post, and I’ll do a real step-by-step with pictures later.]

more...

The most common sageo (mounting cord) for a katana is a 9-strand braid normally done on the takadai, but instructions for making it on a marudai are here (my own instructions on how to make it on a foam disk are here, in abbreviated form). After a little practice (and the acquisition of a set of 240-gram tama), I made a quite nice one for my primary iaito, using DMC embroidery floss (6x 4-meter strands) to get just the right color combination. It’s extremely quick and easy, especially if you follow Tada-sensei’s pictures and lift two tama at once.

Commercial Shigeuchi sageo are only found in two styles, solid and 2-strand zig-zag (221111111). The reason for this is that most of the other interlacements kind of suck. Shigeuchi is an oblique 2/2 twill pattern, and the progression of strands across the braid is much more regular than most kumihimo braids. Here’s the Carey diagram for the front side (the back is just a 180° rotation):

As you can see, every strand follows the same ordering in every column, severely limiting the possibilities. In fact, the standard “clockwise from the top” numbering system obscures the regularity a bit; if you numbered the five strands on the right 1-5 from the top, and the four on the left 6-9 from the top, the numbers in the above diagram would all be in order, which quickly became obvious in my 9-color test braid.

Viable three-color patterns are even harder to find, and the only three I’ve found that are worth mentioning are 111113322 (double zig-zag), 113323332 (crossing double-zig-zag) and 111223332 (sort-of triple-zig-zag). I’m sure there are others, but my script didn’t do a good job of reducing the search space, leaving me with 674 GIFs to pick through.

more...