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Old Vinyls

A few years after we bought a small parcel of land right in the middle of our land, I thought enough time had passed I could probably pop my head in the decrepit house which sits on it. There’s lots of complicated things to say about stepping into the intimacy of a family’s home which became frozen in time. I won’t get into it whatsoever, but there’s a reason it took a long time to feel ok stepping in. While the main living quarters felt off limit for looking at anything but the bones of the house, the attic seemed to have several generations of various families’ memorabilia in it (and some decent rafters), and that felt sufficiently removed to be curious about. A stack of vinyls caught my eye, they just looked ancient and unlike any I had seen before. Searching around it looked like some were more than a century old, and so I pretty much had to get a turntable, and it was a bit surreal to hear these sounds from another world. The turntable was really well received by all of us beyond its ability to play old records. I understand why vinyls made a come back. It’s not just nostalgia, kids seem to appreciate having a tangible medium that holds music, and the ritual of playing it. And I love having one less reason be bombarded with choice on a screen.

So I’ll post them here on occasion, some are already archived in various places on the internet and aren’t exclusive. It doesn’t matter, here’s another copy.

I had to disable the limit switch on the turntable, these discs are anything but standard size.

Here is the Armorer’s song recorded in 1912, 112 years and 2 world wars ago. 1 song on 1 side, that’s all you get :).

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As is Tradition

Thanksgiving handwriting capture.

It’s pretty cool that Esther learned writing just as this project came online so I could capture her progress from the beginning. For comparison purposes, this doesn’t show lowercase letters, special characters, or cursive that she recently acquired.

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PlottyBot Port

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?

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Cycles & Traditions

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.

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Poya & Découpage

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.

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Majestic Cats

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.

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Disabling Cell Connectivity on an F150

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.

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Uneasy Truchet

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.