Couture: Caro

DSC01757I wanted to try to screen print a pre-rastered image, so I chose this rather striking face from a strip by Caro in one of the early Raw issues.  The images from that comic have remained vivid in my mind since I was a teenager. Especially from the last panel.  (Not featured here.)  If you’ve read it, you’d remember it as well.

Here’s a business idea: Reprint those eight tabloid sized Raw Magazine issues in one humongous book.  It’ll be the book of the year.  I re-read all of them the other month, and they’re all pretty fantastic.

(And they’re selling for like $150 per issue on Ebay, so somebody wants them…)

DSC01760Err…  Those two colours go well together (I just mixed them on the screen), but that green ear looks unfortunate…

Ok, this time for real:

DSC01763Yeah!  Silver on blue!  That’s the ticket!

Whatever happened to Caro, anyway?  The only stuff I’ve read by him? were in those early Raw Magazine issues.  Is this him? It says stuff like “It is also the first time we can see it as an actor.” in Google Translate.

Anyway!  I’m declaring the “printing dithered images project” a success.

Couture: Max

DSC01756I 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.

 

DSC01759Hey, it kinda worked.  I think the blue print got a millimeter too low or something, but I’m declaring this a success.

Live Camera/Emacs Link

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:

A short demonstration of watch-directory.el

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.

Couture: Interrupted

DSC01734I 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.