MINIBLOG

This shouldn't be a milestone, it's only the third video in a whole series of them. If I count up how many I've outlined, there's about 26 + some bonus ones. To stumble and stall on video #3 right at the start has been irritating.

Worse, I'm not super happy with the video. Each time I go through it for a slight edit I want to throw the whole thing away and start again. But I know that's a trap, it's only introduction stuff that allows us to get to the actual code. Get it done, out the door, move into the next one.

This one was awkward because it talks about pens, so it's also nice to show the machine drawing with those pens, the whole pen-plotter/drawing-machine thing is supposed to be visual rather than just me being a talking head. Again though, there'll be plenty of opportunity for pretty visuals when we start with the code and get to see the results. So I needed to not only shoot the video, but then a bunch of b-roll to drop in, and it was finding the time to set things up that slowed everything down.

Today though I got the last bit of b-roll shot, I dropped it onto the timeline, added the music, threw on a colour grade, exported and uploaded, phew.

Tomorrow will be for making the thumbnails and all the admin that has to happen before I can make the video go live. For now though, very glad it's done.

My kids named him Goblin Cat, he lives in the house diagonally across the road. At 6:30am a man walking from somewhere, going somewhere else, stops to feed Goblin Cat a tin of food, a kind act.

For the past year Goblin Cat has started meowing for that food, earlier & earlier, further down the road. Now he starts at 5:30am, shouting for food, loudly, outside three doors down until nearly an hour later.

The kind man doesn’t know this, because Goblin Cat stops the moment he sees him in the distance. The kind man from somewhere else is oblivious to the pre-dawn demands of Goblin Cat.

I recorded the answers to the Questions that got asked over on Patreon.

As always I wish I'd done a better job, but the only way you get better is by doing it.

I wish I had more away from the desk shots, I wish my answers were tighter and better thought out, I wish the lighting and sound was better. But you know what, it was better than the previous one, and better than the one before that.

I'm still working out typefaces, transitions, what music beds I want, how the format should be. If I could do it all over again, better, I would. The most important thing though is just to keep moving forwards. It's done, it's good enough (maybe) and it means I can finish off the Pen and Paper video, and move past that one too.

Everything is about moving forwards one could-do-better project at a time.

This is kinda super niche, but here we go. Some of the seedlings in the greenhouse are "leggy", which means for whatever reason, normally lack of sun, they grow taller than they should (searching for sunlight) and don't really have the strength to support themselves properly. Most likely because the greenhouse is warm; "yay we can grow it's Spring", but also winter "hey wait, where's the sunlight?"

With the larger plants I have proper wooden stakes they can grow up. But these seedlings are still super small, so I need something that's a) tiny and b) can keep them upright.

I did have a look around for something I could use, but nothing was quite right, so of course I ended up 3d modelling exactly what I need. Tomorrow I'll take them down to the bottom of the garden to try out and print some more on Wednesday.

fwiw: as annoying as using plastic is, and PLA isn't the worst, these will be reused many many times, and eventually recycled at an industrial recycling plant. Also, more importantly it's pretty neutral in the soil, unlike the tiny wooden "stakes" I've used which have ended up growing mold and and fungus.

It's the weekend so more gardening chat! But, not much. The Irises are doing well, the Crocus are not far behind. The English Bluebells are just starting to show and the Anemone & Fritillaria are either dead or just chilling.

The next step (still) is to clear up the borders so I have somewhere to plant them, but you know, that's super boring so I guess it'll be put off until the last minute.

I headed down to London on Thursday and came back today. I've written this "Miniblog" to only have one photo per post, and I can't backdate any entries. The idea I guess to have minimal friction to creating a small blog post. Write a title, write some text, pick a photo and go.

But the last few days I've been too tired at the end of the day to make an entry, so this one photo will have to do for the past few days. Perhaps I'll add the rest to the "Life" section of the projects?

Anyway, back home now, and happy to be getting back to my own studio next week.

Not every day can be interesting, some days are just sitting and planning. After a day trip out to Liverpool yesterday, George and I sat down today to capture some of the things we talked about in the car on the way up. This is pretty much how it goes.

1. Talk about things, bounce ideas back and forth
2. Capture whatever seemed to be important enough (i.e. we remembered) onto index cards
3. Move things off index cards into action items or documentation

That last step is going to happen on Friday.

A late post today, or I guess an early one. Had to make a flying visit to Liverpool yesterday and popped over to Albert Dock - where a lot of things were closed, unsurprisingly considering it was a weekday, in January, in a gale and most people have better things to do.

Got back late last night and didn't feel like posting, so an early morning post instead and then we'll see how it goes. A busy morning today and then things calm down in the afternoon when I'll be able to get some admin done.

Did a bit more repotting. Once again, will the seedlings survive? Who knows, but I'm looking forwards to getting ready for the next round, when we get into spring.

The rest of the day was spent going through all my notes for the last couple of months and filing everything away so I can be more prepared for this upcoming week.

I'm no good at gardening, or rather I've never really done gardening so I haven't had a chance to get good or not at it.

One thing I've very not-good at is knowing if something is a weed or not, especially when it's just sprouting. Which is why I now have a greenhouse where I can start everything off, and then, once big enough put it into the garden.

The rule is now simple, if it's currently growing or sprouting in one of the borders, it's a weed, if it's growing or sprouting in the greenhouse it's a plant.

I'm going to assume if I do it enough, and photograph things enough, and document things enough I will slowly somehow learn what's a weed and what isn't. But that feels like a few years away, for the moment this is a safer bet.

Bulbs though, I'm pretty good at knowing they're not weeds 'cuase they're generally sturdy as fuck and pretty distinct. Even so, it's nice to have these growing in the greenhouse rather than out as squirrel and bird fodder in the garden.

I made a bad decision at the start of the year and that was to embark on a photo365 project; I've done it before on Flickr and Twitter (when it was the Good Place), and this time over on SubStack.

I know it's a bad idea, in the same way as committing to 10,000 steps a day is, you get to 11:30 at night and realise you haven't done the thing for the day.

Which for a photo360 generally involves stepping outside and take a photo of "the dark". And yet here I am, doing another stupid year long daily project.

Today I had some early morning meetings and then couldn't face walking in the cold, to the cold studio to basically get through a pile of work created from the morning meetings. Instead I took myself off upstairs to the spare room where I've been since, only emerging to grab some clementines.

It's now 5pm (this'll be scheduled for a couple of hours time) and I'm cutting my losses and taking a selfie now to get day 16/365 out of the way.

I finished these last week, but the process of getting the envelopes sorted and everything ready to send off still takes a bit of time. I had all these ready to go yesterday, but as today was posting off artworks for Patreon supporters day I decided to just do everything all in one go.

Nice to get the desk space back!

Today was a tough one, the studio was cold, I felt slow and tired, and I had a lot of work to do. But, Kitty helped by writing all the addresses on the envelopes, and putting a message on the cards inside for me.

The process too a while, an mainly involved me sitting next at the desk swapping cards and envelopes in and out when I was told to.

Didn't take any photos today apart from this one, so here we ar.

I'm still trying to get the hang of writing here daily, it doesn't really show up on the site, although I can always change that later I suppose. Anyway, I had an interesting time today getting brushes to work with the ArtFrame, for the Patreon post that's going to go out on Thursday.

Trying to fit everything in is tricky, and in an ideal world I'd be shooting video from this project and making something fun to go up on YouTube, but I've tied myself to making the tutorial videos and I need to get the next one out ASAP, the sooner they're all done the better, or at least when I get into the swing more and start making one after another I can now and then drop my own type of thing in.

This wasn't supposed to be that kind of ramble though. In the meantime here's one of the results of playing with the brushes and algorithms.

This morning I cut the A3 sheets of brush stroke designs into postcards, and then stamped the back of them with my new numbering system. Next up I need to get Kitty to write on the back of them and then I can get them into the post.

It's fair to say I'm pretty fucking excited about the work I got done today. I've been playing with putting brushes into the drawing machine and then controlling the z-height to get nice sweeps. I've been using these Pentel brush pens which are good and all, before you can use them you have to kinda "activate" them by removing a bit of plastic that allows the ink to get to the brush.

But, I have all these fancy shimmer and sheen inks that I just can't get through quickly enough. Turns out with a bit of finagling I could put a small amount of ink into the feed to the brush. It can get nicely through about four of these plots before the ink gets a little "scratchy".

I've absolutely loving how the colours blend together, it's delicious!

And then wrote about it a bit. But I'm pretty pleased with the whole set up, in that it actually cuts!! After that it's just like using it like a pen, write the SVG or GCODE and good to go.

There's a couple of extra steps, I have to get it to "draw" the same path a few times, getting deeper each time so it can cut through various thicknesses of paper/card. And I have to leave little "bridges" or gaps in the cut so the whole shape isn't truly cut out, you have to go and snap off those little bits. Fairly standard but it makes all the difference to getting better simple shapes cut out.

I still need to wrap that logic up into code, where to place the "bridges", but that's a problem for another time.

...are spent sewing notebooks in the greenhouse at the bottom of the garden.

My thumb is perfectly okay.

Today’s cat is feeling a little bothered by everything.