Random Thoughts

Couture: 7110

I’ve been meaning to get started with screen printing t-shirts. Because of reasons.

I have done some experiments with Inkodye, but that didn’t seem all that exciting. But in any case, you need a printer to print out transparent negatives (for Inkodye) or positives (for screen printing). So I got an HP Officejet 7110, because 1) it’s cheap, and 2) it can print out A3 paper and transparencies, and I want big images.

The 7110 prints beautifully on paper. The blacks are very black and juicy. However, with the transparencies I’ve bought, it all looks a bit off.

See? The black is very … pebbly, and there’s a white line every three centimeters.

So I’m not sure whether that’s going to work. I’ve tried using two different types of transparencies, and jiggling all the paper types the printer has, but I’m still getting those lines every three centimeters. It may be good enough — I’ve not actually tried making a t-shirt with these prints yet.

However, there’s apparently a transparency type called “film negative”, that’s supposed to be used when people are developing film. Which you’d think would work well for this type of stuff.

So I’ve ordered that, but I’m not all that hopeful. I may have to buy a better (i.e., more expensive) printer…

TO BE CONTINUED

My New Horticultural Blog

No horrors today. I bought some poison to spray over the rose bushes, which should take care of the critters living on them. Or it’ll give them resistance and they’ll kill me in my sleep.

But I bought a Sansevieria Victoria. There are a lot of weird sansevierias, and this is one of them.

It’s just one leaf!

Unless the garden centre sold me a fake. The way you usually propagate sansevierias is by cutting off one leaf and sticking it in soil, and new, smaller plants will sprout. And then you get rid of the original leaf.

But that’s not the case here. It’s got a very well-developed root system:

So plantey.

Snowman

I bought a “snowman” mains cable. Can you tell which one is the correct one?

No, they aren’t interchangeable.

Useful Consumer Review

Sony has a newish version of their “sporty” headphones branded “Walkman” (or “NWZ-W273”). They have a built-in mp3 player. I’ve got big headphones with built-in mp3 players, but it would be nice to have a pair in a more convenient form factor.

I bought the previous Sony iteration, but they were huge and fell out of my ears all the time, so they were basically unusable. This version is much smaller, so *crosses fingers*.

They come with an impressive number of very small manuals.

They also come with a pretty big cradle (heavier than the headphones). You have to plug the Walkman into the cradle to charge them and transfer data to them. The cradle is symmetrical, but the headphones have to be put in the right direction, so I got it wrong the two first times. Tsk, tsk. Bad design.

Apparently the Walkman doesn’t want me to write anything to the built-in storage in anything but utf8. When rsyncing to it I get errors like

rsync: mkstemp "/run/media/larsi/WALKMAN/MUSIC/Prize/.06-Ex 
  Pregui\#347a.mp3.vrixrA" failed: Invalid argument (22)

rsync can do anything, though:

[larsi@building ~]$ rsync -av --iconv=utf8,iso88591 \
  --exclude '*.flac' \
  "stories:/music/repository/Arto\\ Lindsay/Prize" \
  /run/media/larsi/WALKMAN/MUSIC/

So what’s the sound quality like? Surely the Walkman should be charged now after I’ve typed all this…

Geez, there are a lot of teensy weensy buttons on this this… Ok, after studying it under a magnifying glass, I managed to switch it on. Oh, nice. There’s a nice lady telling me what button I just hit. “Shuffle.” “Shuffle. Off.” She sounds like she’s an actress in a sci-fi tv series. A slight metallic tinge.

Oh, sound. Hey, it sounds pretty nice. There’s quite a lot of bass. I had never imagined that teensy headphones like this would have so much bass and such “big room” feeling.

There’s a slight hiss if you pump the volume up beyond what’s comfortable.

They block out a lot of external sound. Since these are in-ear, you end up listening to yourself breathing a bit. But overall, these are way better than I had thought was possible.

And I tried headbanging a bit now, and they don’t fall out of my ears. Wow!

Hm… so there’s buttons to skip to the next/previous track. And if you press them a longer time, they skip to the next directory! That’s perfect for skipping to the next album. Very nice. Hm. But when you switch them off and then on again, it starts playing at the start of the current song instead of continuing from where you left off. That really sucks for listening to podcasts and the like.

But overall I’m really impressed. I’ll probably start hating them once I start using them for real, but right now, I’m loving them.

My New Horticultural Blog

Due to the exceptionally warm winter, or exceptionally studly plants, the roses on my balcony survived. But one of the bushes looks kinda… odd…

See? There’s a white powder thing going on, and there seems to be a lot of spider web action going on, too. But mainly around the buds.

So is this a disease of some kind? Or is it environmental? They’ve been renovating the neighbouring house the last few weeks, and there’ a lot of white dust flowing around everywhere.

But I do think it looks kinda diseased.

Should I get rid of the roses? I had kinda assumed that they would die during the winter, so I would plant vegetables there this summer…

Mmm. Peas.