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Squeegee Making

Squeegee (in progress)

So two years ago I managed to acquire this long piece of rubber that would be perfect to make screen printing squeegees out of, but, you know, I’ve been busy making buttons and drawing on eggs, so I never got around to making the squeegees.

OK, the real reason I didn’t make the squeegees is because I couldn’t figure out a way to do it and actually have them look good and function well. That’s where Milwaukee Makerspace comes in…

I first started by asking some questions about cutting grooves into wood. That led to learning about dado blades (which are quite expensive!) and eventually about routers, and router tables, and how to use them (properly!) to cut grooves.

So last night I cut my first groove, slid the piece of rubber into it, and I’m this much closer to my first squeegee.

Squeegee (in progress)

I still need to drill some holes and get some t-bolts in place, but I’m on my way to having a collection of different sized squeegees.

When I worked at a screen printing shop, we had about 30 of them in various sizes. We’d pick one that matched the size of the artwork. It’s also handy to have a bunch of squeegees around, since there’s a 4-color screen printing machine at the Makerspace, and you’re gonna need one for each color.

(Oh, I also posted about this over at the newly launched Milwaukee Makerspace web site. I may post there from time to time as raster.)

Also worth noting, I celebrated this small victory by riding Mr. Overbeck’s scooter around the parking lot at high speeds, and then listening to the craziest noisebox I’ve ever heard courtesy of Mr. Bastyr.

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Does Not Compute!

Does Not Compute!

Does Not Compute!

“What did the working computer say to the non-working computer?”

“Does Not Compute!”

“That doesn’t make any sense…”

“Who cares!?”

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Mozilla Supporter

Adopt Mozilla

One more than one occasion, people have asked why I don’t use Google Chrome, or Apple’s Safari, or even Opera or Microsoft Internet Explorer… I think this sums it up pretty well:

Mozilla’s mission is to build user sovereignty into the fabric of the Internet. We work to ensure that the the Internet remains open, interoperable and accessible to all. To do this we build products, we build decentralized participation worldwide, and we build the ability for people to create their own experiences in addition to consuming commercial offerings.

As the “web” changes, I think it’s probably necessary for Mozilla to change as well.

Read the whole thing: Mozilla in the New Internet Era – More Than the Browser.

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HDR Photos [Photoshop and Luminance HDR]

HDR Photos

It’s been a while since I posted anything about HDR imaging, and I realized that I never put Adobe Photoshop CS5 to the test. I did try creating an HDR image with CS4, but was disappointed with the results…

In the image above you can see my final output of an image. On the left side is all Photoshop, and on the right side is Luminance HDR (formerly “Qtpfsgui” for you old timers.)

Now for both of these images I did the HDR+ thing I talked about a while back, where I blend an HDR image with a normal exposure. Personally, I like the way those turn out, so it’s pretty much how I do HDR.

Pewaukee Lake

Here’s the image from Photoshop. (View it large at Flickr.)

Pewaukee Lake

Here’s the image from Luminance HDR. (View it large at Flickr.)

I think the Photoshop image looks better in the sky… it looks a bit cleaner, while the Luminance HDR image has a little bit of banding going on. You can also see some differences in the trees, and the water, but I think the rocks in the foreground really show the difference, and I prefer what Luminance HDR did.

This is only my first attempt at comparing the two applications, so it’s not entirely scientific. I did go into each file and tweak it a bit to try to match them closely as far as the color balance, but the detail is where the difference is most apparent. I also didn’t see any way to adjust the tonemapping in Photoshop, while Luminance HDR has a ton of sliders and options to twiddle with.

I suppose next time I could combine the two final images into a ‘final final’ image that would be some sort of SUPER HDR+ image. (I’ll add that to the ‘to do’ list.)

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Crackerjack on Kickstarter

Crackerjack

Over on Kickstarter is a project called Crackerjack, which happens to be a comedy that will (possibly) be shot here in southern Wisconsin.

I should have mentioned it a few weeks back, because now there are only 19 days left to fund it.

They’ve raised only a small portion of their goal, and if they don’t reach it, the fallback is to fund the film on credit cards and go into debt, which is pretty common with low-budget films…

The most interesting thing to me has been the approach they’ve taken in their campaign, as well as the management of it. I’ve looked at a lot of Kickstarter campaigns in the last year. Some I’ve funded, and many I haven’t. It’s interesting to see which succeed and which fail, and try to come up with a formula that will work… if such a thing exists.

(Disclaimer: While I do know one person involved in this project, I had nothing to do with this campaign. I was told that they may want me to do some “technical consulting” though, which will probably just involve talking about the RED DIT workflow.)