Justin Kane’s Eden
My brother in law Justin is working on a short film. I just got the green light to post it, so here it is.
Eden (4th pass rough cut) from Justin Kane on Vimeo.
Technorati Tags: justinkane
print on demand showdown: Zazzle vs. Cafepress - part 1
So I did some user testing at my brother in law’s company and got paid properly, so I ordered a few of the t-shirts that I’ve been designing over the past 5 years or so but haven’t had a chance to actually purchase. 
Since black t-shirts are the best thing since sliced bread, that’s pretty much all I’m designing for anymore. Several companies are offering up print on demand t-shirts now. Recently, there was some magical improvement to print white ink onto dark garments as part of the process (thank you, alpha channel), and then just industrial-ink-jet-print as usual, and probably some kind of heat-setting process to lock it all into the fibers of the shirt.
So! part one of my research will cover Zazzle.com’s quality. In fact, I can tell you that that Zazzle already has one thing going for it over cafe press: I ordered t-shirts on the same day, early in the day, from both sites, and my zazzle order showed up today. No cafe press shirts so far.
While I’m waiting for my other order to show up, let’s take a look at how Zazzle did.
Overall, I’m happy with the quality of the print. When I look at the results from a north-american-personal-space distance away, the print resolution looks fine. When I just look down at the shirt while wearing it, it’s very pixelated. I know for a fact from over a decade of professional experience that my graphics are *not* low res… so I’m guessing that due to the sheer volume of work that their printers are subjected to that they have an automated process of de-rezing everyone’s graphics. Probably especially people like me, who intentionally load the absolute maximum resolution image size the system would accept. So, all in all, acceptable.
Once I wash these I’ll report back to see how well they handle it.
Price is one of the ways that Zazzle and Cafe Press differ. Zazzle says “hey! thanks for designing something with our system! Someone bought one of your things,so here’s a tiny tiny tiny commission.” They do give you a “discount” to buy your own stuff, but for some reason it calculated the discounts unequally when I ordered one of each of these two designs. I don’t know what the story is there, but it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. No doubt these shirts are sort of a luxury because they run near $20 each with shipping, so it’s sort of a big commitment.
I’ll cover how cafe press handles price and commissions… when my order arrives.
Technorati Tags: cafepress, design, printondemand, zazzle
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timelapse of me painting Balance/Imbalance
Back in 2007, I did a painting I ended up titling “balance/imbalance”. I also photographed myself painting it at 1 frame per second as I painted. Here now, in full vimeo glory, is the video I’ve been sitting on for over a year.
timelapse of me painting balance/imbalance from stevecooley on Vimeo.
The general rhythm is “mask, mask, mask, mask, mask, mask, paint” over and over and over.
Technorati Tags: painting, stevecooley, timelapse
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Steve Cooley showing at Works/San Jose
I have a small show called “through the prism of San Jose” in the windows of Works/San Jose while it is preparing for an upcoming members show. Check it out!
Check out higher res photos and more of my artwork on flickr.
Technorati Tags: stevecooley, works, Works/San José, workssanjose
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Bare Bones Board Arduino programming via ICSP
As of version 0011 of the IDE, you can now allegedly program arduino boards like the modern device bare bones board via the ICSP pins. This is way cool. Now you can supposedly forego the FTDI cable and just get a programmer box like LadyAda’s USBTinyISP, AND get the benefit of being able to program other AVR chips and circuits if you get beyond the Arduino.
I haven’t tried this out yet, but it’s exciting news! Here’s the link to the instructions for setup. And here is the forum topic where I got the confirmation.
Technorati Tags: arduino, ladyada, moderndevice, USBTinyISP
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arduino 0011 new function references
map() - similar to the processing.org function
interrupts() and noInterrupts()
degrees() and radians() (do not exist yet)
Support for uploading sketch using a programmer
Technorati Tags: arduino
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Pew! Pew! Pew! font
Check out my new Creative Commons licensed font titled “pew! pew! pew!” at fontstruct.
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Open Sim / Second Life Workshop at 01SJ 2008
James just wrote me to tell of a really interesting event coming up regarding open second life servers…
Ars Virtua & The CADRE Laboratory for New Media will host a workshop on open source alternatives to the Second Life(TM) grid, in conjunction with the 2nd Biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge.
This two hour workshop provides an overview of open-source, third-party virtual-world server technology based on Second Life(TM), and the opportunities afforded to artists and experimenters who are now able to cheaply host tailored synthetic spaces.
The first hour will be devoted to a brief overview of Second Life and the “OpenMetaverse” initiatives (libsl, opensim, etc.) Bennett Goble of Ars Virtua will discuss features and show demos of the most popular alternatives (OpenSim, OpenLife & realXtend), their qualities, strengths etc.
We will consider the issues surrounding installation, maintenance and function of the OpenSim server and will be connecting participants through third-party clients and through modifications of the Linden Lab Second Life client.
During this session participants will have an opportunity to look at code, and to consider the space as a place for artistic experimentation and collaboration. Special consideration will be given to coding within the environment and control afforded by building and running servers.
…
The workshop will be held from noon - 2 p.m. Friday June 6 in room 237 of the art building on SJSU campus. This workshop is free and open to the public.
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click through to learn more about it. It sounds really awesome.
Technorati Tags: opensim, second life
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Free typeface: “netlabel” at FontStruct
hackzine.com just posted a note about fontstruct, and that pretty much was my night last night. It’s an easy to use flash interface for building typefaces. I’ve completed a new font called “netlabel”, and it’s available for free download here:
Creative Commons licensed, no less! Oh yes, fontstruct… I like you a lot.
Technorati Tags: fonts, free, netlabel
