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Milwaukee Makerspace – Grand Opening & Mini Maker Fair

Join us Saturday, April 9th, 2011 at the Milwaukee Makerspace for the Grand Opening & Mini Maker Fair!

I’ll be there showing off some of my recent projects for the Mini Maker Fair, so if you’ve ever wanted some hands-on with the stuff you’ve seen on my blog, well, this is your chance.

You can visit milwaukeemakerspace.org for more info (and I hear they are close to launching a redesign) or you can follow them on the Twitters at @mkemakerspace.

You can RSVP on Facebook (and see who else is going) or just show up… I hope to see you there!

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Pirate Eggs!

Pirate Eggs!

Since Egg-Bot is now fully-functional, I figured it was time to start making some SVGs of my own and doing some plotting…

Well, maybe “of my own” is stretching it a bit… The first one I started with was actually this jolly roger image, which I ran through the Voronoi Stippler, and then imported into Inkscape.

Jolly Roger

The plot took about an hour, which is probably way too long, as I could tell Egg-Bot was working it’s little motors out… Next time I’ll need to simplify things a bit when I create the stippling.

I’ll also be working on converting existing EPS images/logos to SVG files that are suitable for the Egg-Bot (and once I do, I’ll post them to Thingiverse.) For now, just keep an eye out for more egg-plotting fun right here.

(Note: For some reason Adrian Secord has removed the download link for VoronoiStippler.app, and his personal site stippling.org, does not resolve for me…)

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Photo… Published!

If you pick up the April 2011 issue of Milwaukee Magazine, and flip to page 60, you’ll see one of my photos.

Neat!

It’s neat, but it’s also weird for me. You see, I interned at Milwaukee Magazine in 1993, and ended up working for QuadCreative (and while at QC I also did work for Milwaukee Magazine, in fact I’m pretty sure I built the first web sites for both organizations.)

So anyway, in the process of working at QuadCreative I met Cory Zimmermann, who is part of Z2 Marketing and Z2 Photo, and one of the big reasons I know what I do about photography.

To clarify, this isn’t some inside job… The person at Milwaukee Magazine had no idea who I was, and it was just a coincidence that I once worked there (I left in 2000) and just happened to stumble across the photo on Flickr and thought it would work for the article.

I don’t know if it’s becoming less cool to see your work in print now that (almost) everything is digital, but hey, I come from the publishing world (of paper!) and I still think it’s cool to see an actual printed magazine with one of my photos in it.

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World View

World View

The state of our world…

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gnuplot

gnuplot

I’ve started to use gnuplot, which is a “command-line driven graphing utility.” It’s not open source but it is freely available (under some other license) and it’s been around since 1986. I don’t think it’s going to “go commercial” any time soon…

It’s proving challenging to understand gnuplot and get it to do what I want it to do, but I’ve tried using OpenOffice and Numbers and neither one can seem to plot 24,000+ data points. I considered updating my Perl code to write SVG files (and I may revisit that) but gnuplot seems to be the tool to use in this case…

Hopefully by the time I’ve collected a few more weeks worth of data I’ve got a better idea how to use gnuplot… but if you’ve got any pointers, I’d love to hear them.