A few of our favourite things

This week, we'd like to share a few of our favourite geeky items from the holiday season. After a year where we ended up purchasing quite a lot of merchandise, especially at rAge, we decided to tone things down over the festive season, but a few cool items still managed to sneak in.

The first item is practically useful as well as awesomely geeky: our coasters were in a sorry state, so Annalene shopped around for some Super Mario Bros. coasters for Marius' birthday. They turned out to be quite nice.

The box contains 20 different sizes and shapes of sturdy coasters with a nostalgic gaming theme. You can purchase them here if you are interested.

Next up, we have a Lego Superman head lamp. This one is perfect for feeling like a hero at the braai, or when Eskom suddenly fails you. The head band is detachable, so Superman can hang out with the other figurines on the shelf when he is not needed, only to be transformed into a useful functioning member of the household with the click of a button and the clip of an adjustable head band.

Finally, we want to share an item that requires a bit of user participation. We received a Metal Earth BB-8 3D metal model kit as a Christmas gift. To build this model, all you need is a tiny pair of pliers or tweezers to help you bend the metal into shape - no glue or soldering required. Sounds pretty easy, right? Annalene decided to tackle this, since some of the parts were insanely tiny and require precision handling from smaller fingers, if possible.

Look at those tiny parts! Even the tweezers were too small to properly bend some of those tabs. The building process started out well, and the model actually started to look a bit like a spherical robot.

Up until this stage, everything was going nicely, but as soon as the sphere was completed and all the holes filled, it became very difficult to 'fix' the little tabs that kept coming loose. It you pressed into one side of the model to bend something into attaching properly, the other side tended to pop open again. BB-8 started to look as though he had been in a few battles.

Annalene battled on, managing to attach the base of BB-8's head but failing to attach the body to the base stand. After a while, she decided that the robot would rest on the base without actually being attached to it - you can only bend a microscopic metal tab so many times before it becomes completely messed up.

At the end of the day, the model looked as though it could sort of pass for BB-8, in bad lighting. Considering that this is the first metal model kit we attempted, it didn't turn out too badly.

Final verdict: you need freakishly small hands, a microscope or lots of patience and skill to get this perfect. These kits tend to be quite expensive, so keep in mind that you might feel bad about 'wasting' your money if it doesn't turn out quite how you wanted it. However, even though there were some issues, this was still a lot of fun to build and the instructions were clearly set out.