And Handwriting for All

I wrote something pretty neat for Plottybot, and for the longest time I thought I should make it available on its own, and detached from the project. Then the most excellent Stuff Made Here guy made a writing machine, and ran into all the issues I ran into which drove me to write my own algorithms for capturing and replaying handwriting. My stuff wasn’t online then and that’s a shame, it was only available by building a Plottybot, or at least using its Pi image. Oh well.

As is tradition, I captured my kids’ handwritings as I do every year some time in the Winter. But this time I made sure to have the new site ready before Thanksgiving so that people could use it as they went and met with loved ones.

So here, this site serves the purpose of capturing one’s handwriting. It supports cursive, character variations, saving, and finally exporting to SVG & GCode. Hopefully this means you can use it with your favorite craft machine for the coolest of personalized projects.

https://ben.akrin.com/plottytools/

Microplots

I built a website for running experiments in collaborative drawing. It’s pretty neat and I’m not going to describe it just yet, but in the process of testing it, I threw at it all kinds of plots I had at the tip of my fingers, and it yielded some pretty cool results.

I may have here my next plotting streak: microplots. Some look predictably bad as they were meant as stress tests, but some came out well enough to make me curious.

More to come on all this soon…

Sanctions? All I can do is Slight Annoyance

Mandalagaba is no longer available in Russia or Belarus. That’ll slightly annoy about 30 people per day. It feels wrongly targeted at little people going about their lives. But it also feels like I don’t want to pay server time to provide something nice while they have Putin in power. I say all this knowing full well how close we got to having our very own dickhead motherfucker of the same vein seize power.