収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

Dang, it was pretty out tonight:

I took a few other photos too, they’re on my Mastodon account. Enjoy.

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YEP IT COLD

But it’s also dry and exceptionally clear. The low “overnight” was like at 10:30AM which is kinda nuts, at roughly -9°C, which is not as bad as they got on the other side of the border but is still Cold Enough For Me, Thanks.

Mostly the last couple of days tho’ I’ve been at the 3D printer, because Anna got me a device called a BL-Touch, which is a sensor that lets the printer discover the print bed level – and any irregularities in it – by itself, using a little probe that goes around the print bed in a grid making measurements.. (BL-Touch = Bed Level by Touch, you see. I have to explain that because BL has rather different meanings in some places, particularly Japan I am just saying, and it’s always a little yikes to me as a result.)

I also replaced three failed bearing wheels that absolutely should not have failed but did, and in the unlikely event you’re one of the nontrivial number of people who downloaded my nozzle size dial, you’ll want to know that I had to make a new one that’s BL-Touch compatible. I found this out by not knowing my old design wasn’t BL-Touch compatible, turning the printer on, having it start a level pass, and then slamming the hot end continuously against the far left side of the hot end gantry in a way that sounded like a garbage disposal eating its own bearings until I could turn the stupid thing off.

So that was exciting.

The printer is fine, thankfully. The BL Touch is really nice and I’ve managed to improve the flatness of my printer bed using aluminium foil as a spacer, thanks to being able to see the irregularities. I was able to get it to 0.05mm, which I think is pretty good.

Anyway, I’ve got enough material for a few Fascism Watches, I’ll drop more soon. Also this is the first test of my edited “can we make Featured Images look less stupid on Dreamwidth?” functionality. Let’s see how it looks!

eta: TALL HOLY SHIT TALL let’s see if I can fix that lol

eta2: YAY I can! Okay, I think this’ll do. ^_^

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Anna and I went to check out the new wetlands park down by Sammamish (a bunch of photos here) and it was really nice despite not being really grown-in yet. That’ll take a little while, since they’re going full-native-plantings on it, but it’s good, I like it. Particularly the elevated pathways that let you get out onto the peninsula between Swamp Creek and the Sammamish River.

But we stayed kind of longer than I thought we would, and since I wanted to bike to Bothell (the next town over) to buy some items I can’t get at either closer grocery and get home before it got dark, I turned on the electric assist and leaned in a bit.

Normally I don’t use the assist on this trial at all, right? But I was realising that I was pretty high up the gears and something felt a little different, and looked down to see that I was going over 20mph, which means all the assist had turned itself off, as it’s supposed to do at or around 20mph on a Class 1 ebike.

And now I know what that feels like. I think it ramps down intelligently starting at like 19.5mph. It felt very smooth. (And I’m using miles because that’s what the rules here are written in.)

I think that’s maybe the fastest I’ve gone on a mild incline. I’ve gone faster certainly downhill, but this was flat to very slightly uphill, so I’m pretty pleased with myself over that. And I was certainly surprised.

Anyway, I got to Bothell and then got back home well before dark, even if some lights were turning on, and the frozen coldpack I’d thrown into the insulated bag on the way out showed no signs of melt at all, which is really as I’d expected but it’s still nice to have it play out.

Then I got home and made another iteration of my newest object design, which is printing out now. It’s another accessory for the vertical project mounting system, but I’ll post about that later.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

It’s been a while since I posted a flower picture, so here y’go. This was taken on a hillside above the Oregon coast.

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I played more with the panorama function on iOS 7 last night. It appeared to assume that you’d stand in place and turn, which is how most people do it, but I wanted to see how it would work if you didn’t do that, but instead scooched along in a straight line, to the side.

It really doesn’t expect you to be doing that. Check these out and click for larger:

Turning in place

The above looks pretty much right. I’m not practiced with it and the light could’ve been brighter, but you get the idea. Items look the correct size and shape, really, and the seaming is handled very well.

Now check it when you don’t do what they expect and slide from left to right:

Scooching left to right

Look how wibbly and bent things get! Particularly the compost bin – that’s the silver cylinder on the countertop. Is that cool or what? I suspect there’s some insight into their algorithmic assumptions here.

So, yeah. Not built for this purpose.

Oh, the stand-in-place version is cropped, because it came out to a higher total vertical resolution for some reason – 2468 pixels high. The slide version used I think the whole width, or close to it, and came out to 8627 horizontal. That’s a pretty high resolution pan. It is kind of noisy, tho’; I’d like to see how it does in good light. I suspect it’s optimised for outdoors.

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For some reason, I feel like talking about photography.

Here’s a shot I took from Butchart Gardens, outside Victoria, weekend before last:

The Inlet

I was going for that kind of 40s or 50s-holiday feel, an older boat, a dock that’s actually pretty new but looks older because of the sepiatone, and all that. I’m pretty happy with it. It has a 1930s feeling that I get from looking at land photos from the era.

But all of that was post-photo, because this was originally a shot with different intent – an intent that didn’t work. At all. Here’s the original:

(Technically speaking, that’s the next shot, but it’s pretty much identical.) I was trying a couple of experiments that failed in the same way, but I didn’t delete the shots from my camera, and ended up with the sepia faux historical.

In terms of mechanics, getting to the above from the below was all in iPhoto, but it works the same in Photoshop. iPhoto has a lovely biased centre-of-brightness tool they call “Shadows,” and another one biased differently called “Highlights.” The first makes shadows brighter, the second brings down highlights, and in both cases, they’ll reveal lots of lost detail if you crank them way the hell up.

The problem with this approach is that no matter what, you’re missing a lot of colour data. You just don’t have it – at least, not in usable resolution. The resulting images often look washed out and/or really grainy. This original, treated thusly, looks really washed out:

“Shadows” and “Highlights” cranked way the hell up

…which is where monochrome comes in. I went with sepia/amber here to invoke a mood, but standard black-and-white would’ve worked about as well. If you merge the colour data to a monochrome palette, you get back to a similar amount of intensity data as you’d've had if you’d shot the image in black-and-white to start. It looks natural, within the artifice of photography.

I’ve pulled out a fair number of concert shots this way, and night crowd shots. You get this old-school newspaper/disco kind of look. I’ll even turn up the graininess on purpose, to drive that home. And with that, a shot that looked lost can be made vibrant and interesting again.

C.f. this crowd shot, at Strowler Nights, a few years ago:

That was basically a black rectangle with highlights, on my camera. But play with the levels, edit out a stray arm in the lower left, take out the colour, and: result!

If I’d left it in colour, it would’ve been – at best – a washed-out mess with hints of colour. But taken to monochrome, and kicking up the grain so it looks intentional, and you end up with a textured crowd portrait.

Which I guess really means I didn’t want to talk about photography, I wanted to talk about art, and intent. To wit: a lot of things you think of as flaws or problems can become assets, if you just turn them up to the point where they look intentional, then fine-tune them a bit. Not everything, gods know. But a surprising number.

If you’ve done something like this, post links or descriptions, eh? Share your mistakes-turned-successes. It might be fun. ^_^

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