That’s one Company Master with a five man Command Squad, one Veteran Marine squad, three Tactical squads, two Devastator squads and half an Assault squad. That photo shows that I’m short one Devastator Marine, fifteen Assault Marines (which are in the mail as I write this) and two Tactical Squads.

After a little rearranging, and without taking another photo (doh!), I managed to get this down to fifteen  Tactical marines and four Veterans (I moved the Missile Launcher from the Vet squad over to the Devastator spot and the three normal marines from the vet squad to one of the Tactical squads) not including the Assault Marines.  This means I only need to pick up one Tactical Marine box, one five man squad box and one Dark Angels “Chapter Upgrade Sprue”. I’m thinking I may grab the Devastator squad box for the five marines so I can get a selection of Heavy Weapons into the Veteran squad.

After a weekend of far too much Civilization V and not enough time painting, the only thing I managed to accomplish was basing coating the Hellbrute with Death World Forest. I also finished the base for my yet still unnamed Daemon Prince. I’ll talk about him more in another post. Hopefully the next few days will be more productive.

So I wasn’t able to finish off the Chaos Marines last night, I got distracted by new TV (Tosh.0 and JJ Abrams’ new show Revolution), but I did clear off all the Dark Angels. All twenty four are now based and only need guns added, but I’m going to wait for the new Dark Angels Codex that is rumored to come out later this fall before I do all that. I don’t want to have to rip things apart.

Now, onto the BIG thing… the Hellbrute. This is the first of my two Hellbrutes and I’m planning on using Purge colours on it so it fits with the rest of the warband. The large armour chunks will be green or black, to follow the rest of the marines. The skin, however, will be that rotted colour I used on my Plaguebearers, but I intend to blend it with some black to make it appear like the marines power armour was merged with his flesh.

This guy is going to take a while, and he’ll probably be joined by some other models once I get the Marines off the tray. Working on multiple models at the same time helps stop me from getting bored too quickly. As the ultimate procrastinator, it’s very easy to get distracted.

On today’s tray are some of my Chaos Marine Warband’s Chosen, from the Dark Vengeance box set. There’s also twelve of the twenty four Dark Angel Marines I’ve been working on. They just need their bases finished and they’ll be done. I also started basing my Deathwing Terminator banner carrier. I was going to do something fancy, but it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, so I just did something simple. Hopefully I can get it all done by tomorrow and move onto something a bit bigger.

Here’s some more shots of them all. They also show off have I have a tendency to “miss” mold-lines, especially on the sides of legs. I’m getting better though.

After looking through the box and the instructions I started to build it’s body. After I finished that, I realized that it would be a good idea to magnetize the arms, so if I want to transport it or upgrade it’s weapons I could do so without having to rip the thing apart. Luckily one of the body panels didn’t set correctly and I was able to remove it without damaging anything so I could get access to the inside.

I finally picked up some magnets on Sunday and quickly set about finishing the model off. I wasn’t sure at first how to setup the magnets on the arms, but in the end I just superglued two magnets on the inside of the arm socket holes. Then I cut the plastic hex-locking-bit off of the arms themselves and glued the magnets directly to the arms. You can see how I attached them in the picture gallery. The shoota arm attaches perfectly and is balanced to well to stay in place. The close-combat arm, however, is not well balanced and the weight of the blade pulls it down. I think I have a solution for this, but that’ll wait for another post.

So all the primary parts are now done. All that is left is the customizations (Grots, Ork Symbols, extra armour etc), but those will have to wait for another weekend.

I’m really bad at finishing figures that I start. I tend to get about 75% done and then get sucked into something else. So, to try and help combat this, I’m going to post pictures each week of what’s on my Painting Tray. Hopefully it’ll shame me into finishing things. We shall see.

In this first photo I have a bunch of Dark Angels Tactical Marines, a couple of Assault Marines, a few veterans, a Techmarine and a couple of Plaguebearers acting as Heralds of Nurgle. The Marines mainly just need some details finished (eyes, chest, robes), Chapter icons added and bases completed. Most of them also need their guns added. The Plaguebearers have a few details to be finished and then their bases completed (The finished Nurglings in the picture show the style of base used on most of my Chaos Daemons army).

There’s also a Dark Angels Banner Bearer on the tray, but I’m still not sure which banner I should give him. I have a metal Dark Angels Banner Bearer as well, which is most likely going to get the Dark Angels Chapter Banner, while the plastic one on the tray will most likely get one of the Sacred Standards or a Company Standard. I wish there was an easy way to switch them out.

I’m sad to see webOS slowly slide into obscurity. It was a good run, and we had fun on the way. There had been some great plans back at the start (webOS in tlhIngan Hol?), and maybe those plans can take shape again when open webOS comes out, but until that time I’m going to focus on other things.

One of those things I’m focusing on is porting my apps to Android. Hopefully this will be easy with my Enyo apps, but the Mojo apps will require re-writing so the process may take a few months.

Thanks to all of you that download by webOS apps. I hope whatever platform you end up on you can find good replacements.

Create a file called pango.aliases in c:\program files\pidgin\GTK\etc\pango (32-bit Windows) or c:\program files(x86)\pidgin\GTK\etc\pango\ (64-bit Windows)

Put this in that file:

“sans” = “sans,meiryo,malgun gothic,microsoft jhenghei,microsoft yahei,gisha,leelawadee,pIqaD”

Save the file and restart pidgin. You should now be able to see and write in pIqaD over any protocol that supports UTF-8.

If “sans” is not your current theme font, you can either change “sans” in the above line to whatever font you use (make sure you change it in both places), or you can change your font in Pidgin to “Sans Normal” (it’s under Tools/Preferences/Conversations/Font, uncheck “Use font from theme” and select “Sans Normal” from the “Conversation font” popup window).

Note: The list of fonts above should enable pidgin to show all unicode characters. If you get any unicode characters that aren’t showing properly (if they show little boxes with 4 letters and/or numbers in them) then another font needs to be added to the list. Comment on this blog post with the characters and the language they are from and I’ll try and find the font that needs to be added to the list.