I thought I’d stray a bit from my usual hunting ground of early 80’s American punk-ish imagery… by picking something totally different. Car-Boy by Max Andersson. Yeah!
Different!
But what I want to attempt this time is doing a more tightly semi-registered print by using pins and stuff to mark off where the screen is supposed to go between colours.
Hey, it kinda worked. I think the blue print got a millimeter too low or something, but I’m declaring this a success.
I mostly use Emacs for WordPress blogging, and it works fine, but it’s a bit cumbersome to snap pictures, hunt around for them, and include them in the article manually.
It would be nice to be able to type away at a blog (or email), and then take some pictures and have them included in the Emacs buffer immediately.
So: This tiny Emacs function. (It requires an Emacs with lexical binding; i.e., one from the last two years or so? Four? Nine? Time flies. (This is the first time I’ve written something in Emacs using lexical binding, and everything just worked. Kudos to Stefan Monnier…))
See, I’m writing…
It worked!!!one!!!
Here’s the obligatory video:
Magic!
It’s not particularly snappy, because the FlashAir SD card isn’t all that snappy, and the cinematic epic up there ends with a close-up of the wifi range extender I have to use because the range of the FlashAir card is like two meters, but…
Oh, one final stupid trick: Most MTAs frown on sending jiggobytes of data via email. That’s so three months ago. To work around that, I send things directly to the WordPress MTA, which has pretty generous thresholds:
(setq smtpmail-smtp-server "mx1.lax.wordpress.com"
smtpmail-smtp-service 25)Or rather, I bind those variables around the `C-c C-c’ command…
The WordPress MTA/blog link thing is very fast. The drafts usually show up in the “all posts” list a second or two after the mail finished being sent.
I thought I’d try a really subtle print. This is from a panel of the imitable José Muñoz from an early Raw issue (I reread all of Raw v1 recently (and other tabloid size stuff like Bad News) (Mouly and Spiegelman are great editors, by the way)):
Perhaps too subtle…
That’s better.
Colours are difficult.
I said “-reverse” instead of “-negate” to ImageMagick, so I got an image with the wrong polarity. I interrupted the printer and the thing to the right is the result.
I thought it was mildly interesting that the interrupted edge of the print doesn’t just stop, but kinda drops off. It’s supposed to be 100% black, so I guess this means that my Epson R3000 is printing every bit many, many times when printing “best quality”.
I mean, the printer takes forever, but the result is immaculate.
On the previous screens, I got a bit too much emulsion wash-off. Yesterday I experimented with increasing the exposure time, thinking that if it washed off, it can’t have been exposed enough? But instead the un-exposed areas were very difficult to wash clear, and the exposed bits washed off, anyway, since I spent so much time hosing it down.
So today I went the other way: I decreased the exposure time.
And what do you know! The unexposed bits washed off straight away, and the exposed bits stayed put.
Note to self, this is apparently the magical exposure: 2x 150W light bulbs, 35 centimeters distance, 35 minutes.
(The image is from an early Raw issue: A Jimbo story I can’t recall the title of by Gary Panter.)
Bonus Jack Survives:
It’s really difficult lining up different parts of the print without one of those hinge thingies. I should get one of those…