Enabling Japanese input in Ubuntu 10.10

I had some trouble to enable Japanese text input on my fresh install of Ubuntu 10.10.

After browsing the forums for a while, this is the solution that worked for me.

• Install IBus (if not installed already)
• Add support for the Japanese language: System / Administration / Language Support
• Start IBus, a dialog appeared that asked to set certain environment variables. But in my case, setting these variable didn't help starting up IBus automatically when rebooting.
• To fix this, add IBus to the startup applications as described in this post.

The Bookcase

I needed a bookcase to store and display my books that were still in boxes after I moved them from my parents home.  I wanted to make this a real DIY experience instead of an assembly project of a bought bookcase.

Requirements

• should fit in the room that I claimed as my home office, which has a limited surface area
• don't want to be buying any of those boring bookcases that would never really fit
• make the construction as simple as possible to get to a good looking bookcase as fast as possible

Tools required

• Black&Decker cordless drill
• some different size drill bit (depending on the screws I'm using)
• a countersink bit to allow the screws head to move below the boards surface
• some flat corner braces
• different size screws
• some free time :-)

Materials

I used some standard size board(20x200cm and 30*200cm). I had these boards sawed to specific lengths at the DIY shop where I bought them.  The lengths were based on the design I made.

Design

As the location of my book case I selected one wall close to the entrance to my home office. I needed to take care that I didn't block the entrance too much.

Across the entrance of my home office there is an access hatch that leads to a crawling space underneath the roof.  I needed to make sure that the bookcase didn't block that hatch either.

So first I started to make a design of the entrance to my home office in SketchUp and afterwards a started sketching out my bookcase.  This came in handy to see how the final result might look and to see if the entrance to my home office  wouldn't get blocked too much by my bookcase.

Making a basic box

This is the simplest way of  putting together  a wooden box.  Just take to boards of same length as top and bottom parts of your box and put some same length boards in between to become the sides of the box.  Then secure these to each other using some long screws.

Stacking the boxes

Once I had a few boxes I could start stacking these according to my design. Every time I had a few boxes stacked to my liking attached them using flat corner braces at the back and some screws at the insides of the big boxes to attach them to the smaller boxes on top or at the bottom.

The final result

So after spending some hours on this, this is the result:

Every blog needs to starts somewhere :-)

Hello all

From today onwards I will be blogging about some projects I'm working on or stuff that I think is worth wasting some bandwidth on.

This will be for documentation purposes  and to show my friends, colleagues and relatives what I'm working on.

In the first upcoming post I'll document how I designed and built a bookcase that just fit my tiny home office.

So, check back shortly.