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I stumbled upon electronically actuated Etch-a-Sketches, and I pretty much had to see if I could port the PlottyBot stack to the toy. It was pretty straightforward. I got the parts from someone else on Thingiverse for a smaller Etch-a-Sketch and the fit isn’t great, but it’s enough of a proof of concept to know I want to make a nice big one, and really the work is all mechanical at this point. How about a web enabled Etch-a-Sketch that can write in your handwriting?
Did you know that turkeys literally start showing up around Thanksgiving? Didn’t see them all Summer, and now they’re here everyday, looking tasty. Something makes them bolder and get quite close. The fact that culture and tradition were shaped by environmental cycles was completely lost on me as a city dweller. Maybe it didn’t help that I lived in places where that culture had been imported not in accordance with the environment, I’ve never seen wild turkeys in Utah.
I was introduced to the art form of Découpage. It’s simply one where cuts are made in paper or other mediums to represent a scene. A niche of this art form is the “Poya” representing alpine life, often depicting transhumance. I had this on my radar for a while as I figured it would make for some good plotting material and it does that to a decent extent.
The more interesting part however, is the artform’s unique property of always having material connected. Which means it’s perfect for laser cutting, and for playing with shadows.
In its rightful place
I unfortunately didn’t take good pictures of my trials, I attempted to fill the gaps in epoxy which was a disaster. There is definitely more to explore, and I will further delve into it in due time.
This is the culmination of my collaboration with Lara Laubert. It turns out that Majestic Cat was only a preliminary test for this piece.
Each of Lara’s pen stroke was processed to be outlined and hatched so they would have enough visual weight on such a large scale. The basic “traveling salesman” algorithm I implemented doesn’t discriminate between outlines and hatches, so parts of the drawing look nonsensical until they all come together at the end.
I occasionally would stay near to machine to watch people’s reaction and had a few chats with them too. It’s a real pleasure to see how well received it was. When I took it down 3 students were curious about what I was going to do with the drawing so I offered it to them. It completely made their day and I couldn’t think of a better thing to happen for this drawing.
As always there were several trials and refinements before the public render.
I’ll do my best not to rant here, I got a new car, of course it’s connected, of course it defaults to sharing your location and everything else with Ford and its dumb affiliates, of course I diligently went through all the settings off the lot to disable all the data sharing, of course these settings found themselves back to enabled magically after a few days. And now Ford knows where I live, work, shop, eat, and everything in between. ~16 years ago society still cared about privacy, but multiple “scandals” quickly showed corporations there were no real repercussions legally or reputationally for privacy abuses. Since then it’s been a free for all, and a new generation of people has assimilated these practices as a norm. Let’s beat the piñatas for all they’ve got!
I’ve been trying to disable the cell modem in this car. Even if the car had a no-tricks UI for privacy settings (it doesn’t), I don’t trust software to truly report nothing back to the mothership. And so for definitive results, I want to pull the plug. Today I can, tomorrow, I’m sure cars will absolutely require a fresh slice of your private life before they deign take you anywhere.
Take a look at your car’s manual to find the fuse box and a mapping of what they control. In my case the box is by the passenger side’s right foot. It’s work to move the panels it’s behind out of the way. The manual points to a likely candidate:
Yup, sounds like the sort of shit I want to nuke
So I removed it and hoped for the best.
Next thing you know, gone is all the worthless bullshit Ford reimplemented worse than Apple so they too could suck up your data.
It brings me pleasure to see incapacitated corporate malpractice, but I know things will only get harder with time. At least I got me a 10 year respite.
I forgot where I saw this done, but I was finally able to produce something close. The subject is only visible from a distance, getting close quickly dissolves it into something dizzying to look at.
What if you need a container to have a different time than its host? Well, LD_PRELOAD has a solution for you. While this solution generally works outside of Docker, I rarely find myself outside of a container these days. I like that it works in one without requiring special privileges.
Dockerfile:
FROM ubuntu:latest
RUN apt-get update --fix-missing
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install git build-essential -y
RUN git clone https://github.com/wolfcw/libfaketime.git
WORKDIR /libfaketime/src
RUN make install
RUN echo "/usr/local/lib/faketime/libfaketime.so.1" > /etc/ld.so.preload
ENTRYPOINT bashBuild with:
docker build -t faketime .Run with:
docker run -ti --rm -e FAKETIME="1970-01-01 00:00:00" --name faketime faketimeOf course you can run the “date” command to confirm, but this fake time percolates to all processes in the container. I was reminded of the existence of LD_PRELOAD to hijack system calls recently, and remembered this old trick I had stashed in my notes.
And just in case it goes away, I mirrored the excellent repo this is based on here.
Since I figured out how to emulate old Dos games to host Capture the Flag using JSDos, I might as well spread further other games which left an impression in their time. I don’t mean to compete with the highly curated abandonware sites out there, I just want to reduce the chances for attrition by hosting another copy, and I like having these gems at my fingertips too.
Introducing MadTV, an addictive game where one runs programming for a TV channel. The issue? You’re also trying to “get the girl”, and she only likes utterly boring documentaries which aren’t good for ratings.
The angles were very hard to get right, it’s not perfect but I did pretty good.
Trashed construction clothes are practical while rigging the double pulley to hoist subflooring.
This will be a quirky tiny room with a great view, both kids claimed it as their own.
I guess it’s a mast year for… raccoons? They’re all around the house every night causing a ruckus. I’m trying to deter them from coming, even took out a few, only to have more come back. In past years, we’d run into them here and there, but this year the house and its surrounding seems to be their established playground every night, it is a bit baffling. I know it’s only a matter of time before they cause damage that really stings. They’ve already been trying to get in the chicken coop.
I swear to god if you make the skunk spray I will smite all of you.
With plants more established, and no clear effect, I decided to relax counter measures a bit this year and see if maybe the orchard, fruit trees, and garden could do with less fencing. The sentence was immediate, we didn’t get as many berries, trees got damaged, and hard work was voided. It is now clear that while various measures aren’t 100% effective, they definitely help. With this confirmed, they’ll get implemented with more vehemence next year.
It’s a lot less work and it looks better without fences. What a shame.
Left some amazing skies.
I finally got my hands on a Flipper Zero and boy oh boy, let me tell you, I should have done this a long time ago. I got it for my own interests because I was curious to understand some protocols better. To my surprise, both kids have been way into it. I’m of course elated to titillate their hacker spirit. I didn’t even think it possible with a 7 year old, but the cross between ease of use, and yes… a Tamagochi is really hitting home. Esther’s mind was blown when she scanned and replayed the IR signals of a toy of hers.
Robin & I are trying to sniff and replay all kinds of signals which always leads to a deeper understanding of technology for the both of us.
I too I’m in love the with the fun packaging and the geek humor. There isn’t anything revolutionary about the capabilities, but they way lowered the bar of entry. Most of all, it’s built with a spirit that strongly appeals to my original love of computers. This little wonder sparks curiosity and discovery everywhere it goes.
Picking blueberries, we stumbled upon this crazy looking thing.
Which apparently belongs to the largest moth in North America. We hope we’ll be able to catch it in the moth stage.
My mind has a hard time convincing itself that a hazy sky can be explained by events 2000 miles away. Sure enough:
I believe the World Health Organization recommends a daily average no higher than 10.
I started early in the season with the usual piers, beams, leveling, subfloor combination. Now I get to frame which is immensely more satisfying. Tearing the shingles was heartbreaking, I will never do shingles again. This poor early choice is likely why our house isn’t fully sided yet. I estimate it’s about 20 times the amount of work as doing boards. And I really don’t have time to side 20 houses. They’re also impossible to remove or replace. Bleh all around.
I’ve involved Robin more in the construction, he’s eager to learn for his own house. Music to my ears. We built a small covered thingy to hold all the things that might blow up. I didn’t like having them closer to buildings. This project had him use all the tools and techniques on a small scale, but he’s helped me on the subfloors since.
The house is reaching its final footprint. I still haven’t modeled the deck which didn’t really need much forethought, but I’d like to have a complete model of the house. It’s very useful on top of being fun.
This year we’re looking at a kitchen alcove/bay window.
And a “basement” with a small quirky room on top. We could really use a space to store a bunch of stuff in the absence of an actual basement.
Mandala/Tessellations by Hava Edelstein (as always :)).
Large plastering of UV ink, it looks awesome in person.
I’ve refined my algorithms for processing multiple colors.
I’ve got my next 2 big plots lined up, but I’ll abstain from revealing their test renders until their full size reveal, likely this Fall. Both are collaborations with artists.
It’s a great year for fireflies, we harnessed the magic into lanterns.
