The last four months have been great. I really had no intention of being able to make this much progress on my personal projects, but then my bandwidth opened up.
I budgeted my time, and I told my family what my plan was. I stayed on task, and I got a lot done. It was fun and it was real, but that’s my time, folks… back to the workforce for me.
So, what did I get done?
I did some work on an AR project. It is a way to see videos of my techno band’s performances around San Jose, as you are near where the performance was. I have the placeholders placed, and I have the videos cut, i just need to connect with the CEO again and try to get this finished.
I got a video edited of my band’s performance in Santa Cruz.
I created a couple of web toys.
- One to show off my typefaces that I’ve been working on forever.
Then I worked on one that draws images using emoji instead of pixels.
Next, Pajaro Iterations
- I spent 10 weeks making 24 new paintings.
- Some sad things happened in the middle.
- I finished strong and got a rigorous workflow going to record overhead realtime video, and wrote a script to truncate those videos down to timelapse length. I edited over a dozen videos and posted them to http://diode.zone
- I also took in-progress photos as much as I could remember.
- I tried out some animation ideas using the iterations
- I also tried out some morphing techniques
- I innovated on a technique to get high res scans of my 16×20″ watercolor paintings.. 25k x 20k pixels, wooo!!
- Then I evaluated some print-on-demand vendors.
I looked at Printful for backend with Gumroad for front end. Free, but costs 10% on sales. Should work, though?? Not a bad solution, just a lot of *work*. For instance, I’m looking at a product I built last month, using a low quality image.. so I have better images now, but to update the product with the new image, and update the mockup images… sigh, it’s many steps. Here’s some products I built with this combo:
one way to sell original prints (actually this is just gumroad)
- I like Fine Art America. (Link goes to my part of their website.) They have wall art and other things. Mostly I liked the fact that product setup was automatic, and they have a shop interface, too. After looking at the pair in the above paragraph, it was pretty great to just upload my high res images, and all of their products light up as ready. pillow? shower curtain? poster? framed canvas print with mattes? Ready. It’s all ready. Like these:
a relatively full-size canvas print of Sequence 19, which is the painting I picked for my END OF LINE album. Weird, and cool!
A tote bag with one of my meta-paintings from the Pajaro Iterations project.
- Then I revisited Zazzle. I ordered a few things. So far so good.
A t-shirt with a ha ha joke, using my Pajaro painting 😉
- I’m doing a LOT of work on my blog!
- Recently, I saw MC Frontalot and Mega Ran perform Frontalot’s song “I hate your blog“, haha. sigh. I’m tryin’ real hard, Ringo. Oh, and speaking of why I had to do this…
- I had my very long term web host attempt to throw a bill for $1000 at me for three years of service, moving forward. I’m not sure I need all that, so I’m consolidating my separate blogs into this one. It’s a work in progress. Speaking of wordpress…
- After four months of iterating, I feel like the Pajaro Iterations web experience is close enough for now. Feels good to be back on my own home court, self-hosting.
I ended up creating a wordpress plugin that rotates images 90 degrees. I needed this for my “Pajaro Iterations” website, because I wanted to let visitors be able to rotate or re-scale the images on the page. This painting project isn’t rigidly orientated. I like them vertical, and horizontal, mostly. I like some better one way or the other. So I wanted a way to let my web visitors be able to rotate my paintings… the wordpress plugin was not hard to produce with a LLM programming pair.
- Synthclub got me digging around in my project bins…
I re-discovered how far along I’d gotten on a couple of Synthseqr circuit boards, along with Adafruit Grand Central M4 Express microprocessors. I more durably solved some mechanical build quality issues. Hot glue is ok for temporary holding, but for a longer lasting soltion, that 3M VBH tape is strong stuff. I was able to get code compiled and loaded onto the boards. Anyway, they work just fine sending midi data over USB, so it works with outboard hardware that accepts USB midi. An iPad, for instance. So, I have a hardware 16 step sequencer that can run Thor, or Gadget, or anything that accepts midi.
- Firmware debugging??
Then I acquired the parts to connect a Segger J-Link Base to synthseqr’s grand central, for debugging. I’m hoping to quantify if my clock speed is accurate or not. First I just need to learn how this … thing… works… Coming soon, I hope!
- 2023 Music Album released!
I got my new album “END OF LINE” out!
- I’ve been getting out to events and talking with people. I got some trusted folks to take a peek at my Pajaro Iterations project and give feedback. So far so good.
- Then generally:
- I was relaxed
- I was more available for my family
- I was having a lot of fun
I can only hope to be able to afford to do this again someday!