Howay, man, I'm paggered but.

 Been a week of slow progress and small disappointments.

Take today. IT was dumping some old Mac Mini's, and I snagged one. Was thinking of setting it up for recording at the shop (so I can play trumpet parts without my neighbors screaming at me.) Had some company stuff on it. No problem, says Apple. Erase the hard disk, it will boot up from the restore sector and you can download the factory original OS right off the net.

Except no. Turns out Apple was either lying, have changed it, or were incomplete about it. But that took an hour or two of pressing buttons and hoping that it would actually work this time. So now I have a brick, and a copy of Lion on order just in case I feel up for making a boot disk for it.

My laptop has been running hot. Hot enough so it automatically cranks down the CPU cycles, which causes videos to stutter and CPU-intense applications like 3D stuff to get, well, ugly. That actually took a while to figure out. The same IT dump included a broken cooling pad so that got me thinking I should just order one of those.

Amazon lost the order. While it was wandering around the boondocks I thought a little harder and finally dug into it and opening up the laptop to clean out the vents and re-do the thermal paste turns out to not be quite as scary as I thought. But needs some special tools. So I ordered those.

And got to thinking about that. If I'm opening it up, why not replace the ailing optical drive, increase the RAM to maximum, and even put in an SSD? 

I got inspired enough I opened it up anyhow and blew out some of the dust. And then the cooling pad arrived anyhow so I'm using that for now.

***

And then there's software. Carrara no longer ran after the last OS "upgrade" and I had enough problems with it already. So I'd purchased Cheetah3D and that was good enough to knock off the calyx model I needed for the last cover.

The next model should have been simple. This was the section of Underground platform I needed for the next book cover. But it was a freaking pain to do in Cheetah. The UVmapper is not wonderful, there's no polygon groups (at least, not accessible), it can't manage to keep scale constant (I brought a model back out of the render to tweak, and it got thrown into a different scale and position the moment it had been opened by Cheetah.) And the poly tools -- well they basically don't exist. The thing is barely functional as a prims modeler and is useless for polys.

Well, fine. This time I'm finally going to learn Blender.

Oh, yeah. And while I was too sick and stupid to work on the novel over last weekend (and part of the week) I was messing around with Fallout 4. I've basically stopped playing the game. I think I spent as much time in console mode as out. "Player.additem" and "tcl" and the like are right at my fingertips.

More software skills learned at some expense and like as not never to be used again. 

Yesterday was all about making the busted UVmap Cheetah crapped out actually work. And then being very annoyed by the behavior of the Paths tool in PhotoShop...why? Because part of Leslie Green's look was a distinctive serif font that is apparently quite recognizable. There is a commercial font "inspired" by it, called Beeching, but several of the characters are clearly wrong and the serifs are the wrong shape and for twenty bucks...!

So I hand-edited Baskerville and it is close enough. Gives me even more respect for the art of font, with how to mix the thins and the thicks for grace and readability and all that other stuff I didn't actually do. I pretty much made a dog's breakfast of it but I'm using it anyhow.

Now I just have to add in the drips and broken tiles and the proper oxblood and so on. Plus displacement and spec maps and you know the drill.

***

And create the other graphics. I'm willing to put it out with a mock-up cover just as long as I'm printing author's copies for the beta readers. Because I really want my dad checking on the Britishisms and especially the Geordie. Because that's exactly the sort of thing he likes doing.

As I go through pass after pass, cleaning up and tightening, each pass I take out more of the Geordie and make it more obvious what they are saying. I was editing the first pub scene, though, just before I stopped to blog, and that turned out to be very annoying since I could either have Liam speaking Geordie or contributing. Which was only part of the picture; the characters in this scene aren't coming across as distinct voices. I realized I could swap lines around, they were that generic. And that's not good.

I've also been taking a lot of notes about ways I want to go through and bring the main plot lines out and make them more obvious. One of them being the "dun dun duuun!" pass; the one where I have the story (if not Penny herself) recognize that An Adventure Has Just Begun.

***

And one other rescue from IT's pile works fine; that's a 3 TB external drive. Which again slipped through their clutches with all the data intact and I just got done erasing it.

rough comp

 It doesn't feel like a productive weekend.

I've identified the things I want to edit in the new novel. Other than that, it has been a lot of poking around trying to learn about Amazon categories and font use, looking through stock image galleries, trying to work up the blurb, and so on.

The concept for the new cover is to this stage now:

Of course I still need to model, texture, and render the bit of wall that says "Nine Elms Station" in that lovely Leslie Green tile-work. And purchase assets and take the real photo with something other than 100-baht pieces.

The select-float-change tool-move-anchor layer routine of Gimp got really old for me so I've installed the (bah) membership version of PhotoShop. Which has mucked up mightily with the Adjustment Layers -- I think they still do the same things, but that simple functionality is now harder to access.

And I had Poser running for 10-12 hours rendering a single god ray for a revised and cleaned-up version of the old cover. I want to play more interesting games with the font, and I re-rendered with a new color map for the ground (and no bullets) and this time I'm doing most of the adjustments before I collapse all the layers.

And, yes, on the work list is Third Printing revisions to text of the first book.

I don't want to be doing ANY of this right now. Actually, I want to be playing Fallout. I'm burned out. 

Or writing something new. The Japan book, for instance. (Which is to be followed by the Paris Book, except that one is more of a multi-city National Treasure tour as Penny clashes with a gang who have Templar Secrets on the brain).

And then a break from Penny. I need it.

Came up with another possible project, though. Was using PublishRocket to look at the Amazon keyword and category listings and realized I was getting really tired of the Slab Beefjerky heroes. And this is one plot bunny I am keeping under my top hat -- all I will share is the tag line:

THE WEIRD WAR JUST GOT WEIRDER

***

Oh; here's the current state-of-draft of the Amazon come-on:

AN AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGIST IN LONDON. 

Penny Bright is going to be a real archaeologist. She’s not going to let tough classes, obnoxious fellow students, or her rapidly dwindling funds stop her. Nor the fact that she doesn’t, apparently, even speak the language.

Then things get interesting. Penny gets an opportunity to dig at an old Underground platform. At Nine Elms, she is drawn into the story of a young woman who sheltered there during the London Blitz. Meanwhile, a prickly and eccentric coin collector has come to her with his own mystery.

Before this is over she’ll have met mudlarkers and pantomime players, and gone from an illegal expedition into an abandoned power station to a bloody encounter on the very stage of Shakespeare’s Globe; all in search of answers about a lost love and a secret buried for over seventy years.

And when she is trapped deep under the streets of the old city and unsure of who her true enemy is, Penny is faced with the choice of becoming once again...Athena Fox.

What is it about 3D?

Maybe it is because working on a 3-dimensional form is largely incompatible with the interface of flat display, keyboard, and mouse? Like doing orchestral synthesis; even with keyboard, breath controller, and CC knobs you just can't put the same nuances in you can with an orchestral instrument in your own hands?

It seems that every 3d application I have worked with re-invents the wheel. Usually badly.

They are largely unintuitive and often have clunky workflow -- the kind of design where something you do once an hour has a hotkey sequence but something you have to do several times a minute requires selecting from a drop-down menu.

And they lack useful manuals.

It took three days of searching to find anything resembling a manual for Cheetah3D. It is a third-party, fan-written, but fortunately free manual. Still, every resource I've seen seems to jump over those early basic steps that become so rote everyone forgets they have to be explained to the beginner.

"Adjust UV's by applying the Scale tool to your Selection..." Okay, great, but how do I select UVs in the first place? The regular selection tools don't seem to do anything. That's the sort of thing that gets skipped over.

Two things annoy me very much from both a workflow and a "why are we doing this" angle; first is that selection and manipulation are separate. So if you want to operate on more than one polygon, you click the Select tool from the menu bar, possibly go into Area or another Select Mode (which does NOT toggle, but only acts for the duration of one selection), then go back and click the Manipulate tool also in the menu bar, go back and pick up your selection (don't accidentally click outside!) and then you can move it.

Oh, except you didn't "Make editable" so nothing happens. That's the other thing. Like Fusion's weird way of splitting editable objects into different types, I don't understand the underlying philosophy behind "make editable" and what it functionally does.

There is one fix which should be easy to make and I hope will happen soon; grey out menu items that don't apply to the kind of object you are working with. As it is now, all the menus open up; even contextual menu pops up with every operation that could be done on any object. Carrara, for all that I have and would say (It is dead ware -- Don't buy it), gathered the applicable tools to the contextual menus.

Actually, I lied a little above. Although it too has unintuitive aspects to it, and lacks any and all useful documentation, Fusion360 is hyper-fast and efficient at navigation and basic operations. The hotkey camera and selection controls and the multi-purpose contextual handles meant I could model pretty much as fast as I could think.

I had a lifetime subscription at a locked-in rate that was quite affordable. So of course they broke the contract, jacked the price, offered me another "lifetime" subscription at about ten times as much, and from what I can tell from their official pages, broke that contract for the people who were foolish enough to sign for it and is now at something approaching what I pay for rent.

Carrara, meanwhile, no longer works under the last four or five upgrades to the MacOS and there is no support and no plans to ever make it work properly. Although they will still sell you an "upgrade" to 8.5 (yes -- throughout its history, Carrara almost never released patches. Instead they'd sell you the point upgrade for full price, promising that it would include the bug fixes for the last version. Which it never did.)

So, yeah, I'm pretty much waiting for Cheetah to get over the early teething problems, to get popular and powerful, at which point they will stab the user base in the back, sell out to Autocad, and jack the price out of range of the ordinary user. But for now, I think I can get it to do what I want.

At least it is easier to navigate than Blender.

Scrivenings

Based on the actual draft starting somewhere in early April, I'm averaging 10K words a month. At that rate I actually would have the first draft done before the end of the year.

That's NaNoWriMo pacing.

Is even slightly better than that. I've hashed out a lot of deep plot and character issues over these early chapters, and I have hope and a not-unjustified expectation of getting faster. Also I'm doing a lot of editing as I go -- very much against NaNoWriMo tradition -- and it will take mostly clean-up passes to get it into final shape.



But today's essay is about Scrivener IOS.

I've written several scenes from scratch, and done some editing, with nothing but iPhone and -- the almost indispensable -- iClever keyboard. It works...well enough. All of my complaints are basically due to limitations of the iPhone, especially, the limited screen real estate.

Oh, and to my current working methods, which leverage parts of Scrivener which do not emulate well in the IOS version.

So. Basic typing is good. One immediate and wonderful enhancement over using the built-in notes function is pinch-zoom. Basic hotkey functions work. And you are within the Scrivener file structure, meaning instead of typing into one long document, you are typing into something of controllable length which is nested (and can be nested indefinitely) into a hierarchy of chapters and scenes and projects. You can also flip back and forth between certain related documents with a single key press.

I wouldn't want to work without the external keyboard, however. Too much screen real estate is lost otherwise.



But as for the more powerful edit functions: well, first, selection is a pain on IOS. So selecting a block of text to paste it elsewhere is better left for the main computer. Split screen doesn't seem to be functioning, either, and that hurts in two ways; one is being able to cut and paste between documents so as to, for instance, save a previous draft to the cut file. The other is being able to leave a window open with the research data.

The iPhone version also lacks corkboard view. And, because of how IOS handles files (and memory issues) it can't do Scrivening mode. This is the ability to seamlessly string together separate documents into a single continuous read. If I was splitting files at the scene level this would be more painful. As it is, though, it is easy enough to tab through consecutive files. Oh, and there also doesn't appear to be the ability to move files around in the hierarchy, not on IOS. So to have this ability to arrange and re-arrange you need to duck back to the main computer again.

Fortunately synchronization is easy and smooth.

A last edit function I miss on the IOS version is hotkey text color. Let me get to that in context of my current work flow, though. First I set up a file structure with named folders for research, draft, and general planning -- the later has theme, outline, elevator pitch, and side discussions I want to keep intact instead of spread out among other folders.

Within the draft folder I have, currently, a five-book structure. Each "book" folder contains three sets of files; a set of drafts by chapter, notes pertaining specifically to each chapter, and catch files for deleted material. As I write the first draft of a chapter I plan the basic structure within that chapter's notes file, then flip between that and research files in the lower part of the split-screen with the draft on top.

When I go back for editing, I add the cuts file to the split. Usually, though, I start by reading through and using colored text to mark potential deletions (red), potential insertions (green) and line notes (blue). Then when I do the actual edit the deletions get saved in the cuts file (in case I change my mind later, or hope to move that cut material to a different scene), the line notes get cut entirely, and the insertions, when properly expanded and integrated, are converted to standard black text.

And obviously none of this process works on IOS.

I could probably come up with alternate ways of working. I used to jumble notes and cuts at the bottom of chapters during construction and editing, and delineate line notes with ///. This would work on IOS, but would get annoying when you can see such a smaller slice of text to begin with, and have more work to scroll to the end of a file.



So, yes. If planned around the functionality that is in the IOS version, I could write a novel entirely on the iPhone. But as it is, I'm happier to be able to do certain kinds of work there and leave the heavy lifting for a full computer.

Painless Upgrades

Finally dropped the bucks on Scrivener IOS. Right away was best money I've spent in a while. Typing into the Scrivener window was much more comfortable than typing into Notes, and better organized. With that and my folding bluetooth keyboard I could probably write a novel on the iPhone alone.

But the real power is being able to synchronize work files between machines. Of course that requires Dropbox, and Dropbox stopped supporting OS 10.9 or below. So finally took the risk of updating to High Sierra.

No, there aren't any whistles and bells I was interested in. I don't need Siri on my laptop, for instance. And I'm not sure I care for the new theme. But...so far all my core applications have worked or been an easy update, and I didn't lose any files, passwords, or even bookmarks.

(Just the usual run-around of turning back off all the, "Please share my identity with the world and while you are at it, put my critical files on the cloud so you can hold them hostage at some future date" stuff.)

(The only real annoyance is the pop-up window that happens when you open an ap for the first time; it says "This ap is not fully compatible with your mac" and the "tell me more" button takes you to an apple web page about how they will be dropping 32-bit compatibility in some eventual upgrade. The "okay" button seems to quit the ap -- or maybe the whole process is just so slow it only looks like it does.)




So did the acid test for Scrivener IOS today. Most things worked. I lost the macro I'd set up to color blocks of text, and selecting blocks of text is annoying on the iPhone anyhow. Also there is no Scrivenings mode (a mode that presents all the selected text as a single contiguous page -- helpful for scanning through a series of scenes nested into chapters). But navigation is smooth enough, typing is fine.

(An odd wrinkle is Scrivener IOS doesn't recognize the "command" key on the iClever keyboard. Instead I have to remember to use the "Windows" key for control-key sequences. But I already went through mental keyboard remapping when messing with programming inside a Raspberry Pi.)

I took it to the cafe and managed to create a new draft of the Agora scene. While I was drafting it discovered an opportunity to plant a couple of ideas; the idea of all Europe being a Euro-rail pass away once you've made the Big Leap across the Pond. And the idea of Penny having this vacation all planned out in her head, a dream she will have to tearfully give up during the events in Germany.

Didn't end up talking about that palimpsest. Although I think I snuck in mention of a well. So it all basically works for me and I can move on to filling the next hole in the current draft.

Oh, one last discovery. Don't synch files unless you have wifi. It takes far too long on cellular data.



Also switched to the 5C mouthpiece in the trumpet to continue my daily practice sessions, and retuned the gue to C - F. Both give me a clearer tone and make it more distinct when I'm locked into the right pitch and articulation.

Best advance? I took out the mute and was able to achieve the high c at pianissimo. That means I'm finally getting some strength in my embouchure. I'm still pressing too hard or something and my lips get a little numb. Is probably a mistake to keep working on the top end of the range. But I got that Disney songbook and the very first number on it goes to the top e on the staff within the first dozen bars...and finishes with the a' above the staff. (The last marked notes are a gliss from d to D).

(For a moment I thought it was the top c'. I'm still learning how to sight-read.)

I have this terrible idea of practicing up enough until I can record my Gue-and-Lyre cover of Game of Thrones before I get a hair cut. I don't have the beard to go Viking on it, though. I am not an actor. I'm barely able to make the music.

Sherds

Here's the "Murder wall" I worked up in Scapple.

This isn't the plot, per se. These are all the elements of a central problem I'm trying to solve. The names are shorthand if not stand-ins; Chandler, Scion, and Dumont are all Greeks (the latter handle because of a certain resemblance to the kind of Grand Dame so wonderfully portrayed by Margaret Dumont). Atlantis is an art gallery.

A lot of lines are missing because of lack of space, and there may be some missing characters. One thing I wish I could do is label the lines, because sometimes the connections are tenuous ones ("crashed a car in which the Carabinieri discovered a picture of..." for instance.) Making them different colors would only go so far.

##

It's all about the orphan. This is something that was done for various reasons by real-world antiquities rings, particularly the one centered around a certain Medici. This was partly for triangulation; washing an antiquity through various methods including putting it up for auction with Sotheby's then buying it back themselves. And partly as a marketing scheme. However, only the Getty really got into buying their antiquities piece by piece (the heart of the marketing scheme was, "I can sell you the last puzzle piece if you'll also agree to get these plates.")

I am still on the fence if this was ever intended in this case. In some documented cases a pot was partially restored for photographing (the old school traffickers really loved Polaroids. I'm not sure that flies as well today...getting pretty hard to find those self-developing packs.) Then it would be separated again and it might be years before full restoration was accomplished. In other cases, an intact piece was broken up to make sale-able bits (sometimes because the original was too large to move).

The backstory I'm going with now is this is a Cycladic workshop either in competition with the keramikos or a sort of off-shore workshop for the burgeoning Attic industry, and most of what is found on site is kiln misfires and other rejects. Which means the Enceladus Calyx might have been never whole but fractured in the kiln. One thing I haven't decided is if it was looted whole, or if the orphan was found separately. 

(One flaw with the intentional creation of orphans is they will have visibly fresh edges. They also tend to be broken conveniently between figures or other high-detail areas; both are things the Carabinieri Art Squad have learned to detect.)

So that's the Janus problem I'm having. Parts of the plot work best if the calyx is whole. Other parts work best if it is in pieces. And a whole lot of the string-and-photos above is trying to figure out when those pieces get separated and how that changes the rest of the plot. Perhaps it is Schrödinger's Pot.

Other questions are more an either-or. I'm thinking the material coming out of the Cycladic site is useful to the Dorian Invasion delusions of Professor Sharp and he could have seen, documented, and collected some of same through social connections to the rich dilettante who owns the land. Thing is, if it works for one Dorian, it works for another, and Atlantis Gallery would love to sell the stuff along with their Crystal Skulls and Ica Stones, but making that connection would make it too obvious that the good stuff in the Professor's collection came to him much later than the UNESCO cut-off year of 1970.

There are multiple other places where I'm trying to stretch the diagram to ask is it one branch of the decision tree, or another. So...maybe a better tool would be a programmers flow chart?

(Four hours of work later). And I've got it. It ain't neat, but it will work. Sharp picked up the orphan when the Scion had started on a new boathouse. He gave it to his protege Xander, who at a low spot in career decided to "find" it on a dig in Germany, announcing it on social media. The Atlantis gallery, who had acquired Sharp's collection towards the end of his life, saw a business opportunity and threw a lot more publicity at Xander than he had been expecting. Perhaps now the organization could move some of the low-grade stuff that had come out of the ground around the boathouse. What they didn't expect was to find a work of art and even partial restoration attracted the attention of some serious buyers. Unfortunately the pot had this one missing piece...)

Hack it out

Oscar Wilde once removed a comma. I just removed a book. That's actually less progress than he made, but at least it's progress.

One tiny step at a time I'm getting closer to my outline. It is frustrating. Perhaps the worst part of outlining is the pressure to get it done. As I told a fellow sound designer once, there's a point at which the effort of optimization becomes itself sub-optimal. You can procrastinate forever trying to find the perfect plan.

The trick is knowing when you stop. Another circle in the N-dimensional Venn Diagram that makes up the goals and structures of a story. The nasty thing about writing is that unlike, say, trying to work up a microphone plot and a speaker hang, there are vanishingly few beginning constraints. The theme, the plot, the style, the world; all are up for grabs.

Really, a big part of plotting and outlining is letting go of the paths not taken. The only progress is in how small you can shrink the circles, how many options you take off the table. That also makes it nearly impossible for anyone, even another writer, to help you with the process. It is difficult to explain whatever parameterization you may have already achieved on these wibbly-wobbly balls of character arc/narrative density/extended allusions/world building stuff. It is even harder to defend the reasoning behind any of these choices. So when the person who is trying to help says, "Why don't you just do this?" it would almost inevitably require rethinking a choice made many branches ago, and by re-making it cause changes to cascade across everything you'd hoped you had already nailed down.

I took a look at Scapple, a planning software from the same guys who make Scrivener. It is cute but too limited. It allows you to make text blocks or images that can be linked with lines in the honored photographs-and-bits-of-string model. Something which has been asked for in Scrivener but proves difficult to conceptualize how it could actually be integrated usefully.

For me it is insufficient. Scrivener at least allows me to create an index card where a brief description can be drilled into a full-length text or even a nested file structure. With split screen, you can even unpack a card or folder whilst still displaying the hierarchy above it.

Unfortunately you can't unpack two branches and compare material within them while still viewing their place in the overall file structure. Really, I think a lot of these schemes fail on the problem that the data of writing is generally text, and text is graphically inefficient, and it would be tough to find the monitor space to display anything but the most trivial layer of what is a deeply fractal data set.

Another way of viewing the data set is of multiple threads, or multiple slices. A physical progression, a mental evolution (say, solving a mystery), and a character arc may be happening simultaneously, but not all of these elements start, crest, or conclude at the same points. So one scene might contain bits from all three, or none at all.

The best I've seen from various software packages is keyword tracking. Some even have ways of linking to a live timeline, or a map, so the evolution over time or space is implicitly carried along these keyword links. Alas, this doesn't help all the other arcs you might want to track. Even tracking where you've dropped background information and world building the reader needs to know is a difficult task.

I think what might work for me is if I could hyperlink; if I created a folder containing discrete scene particles of each major moment in an arc, I could have those aliased from folders representing scenes or chapters while remaining editable in their original relationship.

So I've defined a lot of the top level of The Enceladus Calyx. The length, the time I'm willing to invest until First Draft, the general flavor, the subject area. Those are all things that can't be changed because they define the project itself. Next down are elements I have enough planning time invested in I'd really rather not change; the protagonist and a bunch of supporting cast, the bones of the plot, locations, several set-piece scenes.

As in my other novel (other other novel?) I'm trying very hard to do only general research until the outline is locked, at which point I can focus in on smaller more specific questions. Instead of having to learn everything there is about the Hess, I just have to reconstruct Bad Münster am Stein-Ehrenberg.

Given the above, everything revolves around the titular antiquity and that's been my struggle for the last couple of weeks. The places the calyx has been, who has seen it, who has held it, form the whodunnit part of the plot. What the characters, including my protagonist, know about the calyx and its journey and how they react forms the basis of the functional plot; this is what generates everything from dialogs to fight scenes. What the calyx says about definitions and ownership of antiquities and Antiquity forms the themes I am working. And of course it would be nice if it all fell within what is actually true in the current-day antiquities market.

So everything influences everything. It's a fuzzy logic problem that's grown into a giant hairball.

The big progress I made today is there is no longer a book signing and there is no living author. That saves me from having to flesh out the author and figure out where he fits in (instead the book was written by the recently deceased collector of antiquities who was already in my character list.) That also means there's less attention on the book, meaning the gallery is about Dead Guy's tantalizing pre-UNESCO collection of antiquities.

That gets me way more than is possible to explain in any terse fashion. It means that a key early scene can be framed more cleanly around the experience of my protagonist defining her relationship with the role she finds herself playing. It means that the scenes in Germany allow it to be, well, Germany; not a stand-in for issues in contemporary America. It means there is a lot more discovery to be had when she returns to Athens. It also gives the gallery something to legitimately display and sell.

It hasn't solved the problem that I've shoved too much action into the front end and I'm still looking at a sagging middle. But still...it has moved me one step closer to being able to wrestle with commas, instead of with abstractions and labels attempting to stand in for tens of thousands of words of text.

Round Earth Atheist

I've been trying out a new piece of software called Campfire. It is a writer's helper; not a word processor optimized for writing books, like Scrivener, but a story planner.

It is practically public beta so it might seem unfair to rate it now, but in the current state I don't find Campfire useful to me. At the root of the problem is the problem of being prescriptive without also being proscriptive.

Okay, take the character page as example. It prompts you to fill in a box for first, last, and middle name. That's prescriptive; it is reminding you that you might need to come up with the full name of the character because it may very well come up in the story. This is why this software exists; it is a planning software, an outlining software, that helps you nail down details and get them all in a form where it is easy to look them up again in the middle of writing an action scene.

But. Commander Spock doesn't have a first name. His culture doesn't apparently do those. But he does have a naval rank. So this first, last, middle name format is proscriptive here. My new protagonist has at least three names and they are situational, which is an approach that clashes completely with the "this is the real name, it has surname and family name just like everyone we hang out with."

As I said above, this isn't necessarily a criticism of the software as executed. I know they are working on it and will give more flexibility in later versions. (Top of my list is the mandatory background images for all the work pages are pre-installed. I have to look at either Watercolor Portland or Romantic Sunset and that really throws me off when I'm trying to think about sun-drenched Athens and Classical Greek architecture.)

The real conflict is that between having something that will hold your hand and make sure you dot your t's, that puts things in a format where you can easily find, search, compare across file; and with having the freedom to go outside of those rules.

(In the current version the, well I have to call them compromises, are that you can add additional custom blocks on top of the required blocks. Sort of. They appear in a second screen and the primary screen can't be edited. And as for sorting, all of that is handled by meta tags which are not abstracted from any of the previously mentioned blocks but have to be added by hand.)

For the moment, then, I'll stick with Scrivener. (Out of the things I would really love to see in Scrivener, the ability to add string between the index cards would be a wonderful, wonderful thing. It does do some sharing of meta data and will actually track things like character names across files, but being able to visually track connections between elements...)

I'm doing this because I'm trying to solve a little plotting problem. Well, it looked like a little plotting problem ("who thought it was a good idea to invite her?") but it turned out to be just the corner of a big carpet. In the back of my head, events are being manipulated. Manipulated by people that basically are the Greek Gods as presented in Homer.

But I haven't solved if this is obvious to the protagonist. Or to the reader. Or if it is actually a thing and some book down the line we'll actually meet them. Right now the gods are being deniable. It might just be a string of coincidence.

And that's the problem. If "Guilleo" (this character's place-holder name, and that's another thing that clashes with the name block scheme of Campfire) is talking the people at the gallery reception into letting "Athena Fox" visit the archaeological dig in Germany, is that because he is an honest art dealer and doesn't like looters, or because he's an undercover cop possibly pretending to be a crooked dealer himself, or because he's actually in Venice right now and this is the Goddess Athena herself indulging in her second favorite past-time (impersonating a mortal)?

If he is just what he seems I have a cute little scene in which the two of them are bonding with some language games -- but then who thought inviting her to the dig was a good idea? If he is undercover then I get both that scene and a later scene when he is surprisingly hostile (because he's trying to maintain his cover) and I can use him again at the climax -- but then why did he think it was a good idea to get them to invite her, a civilian? (The goddess's motivations are no problem; she figures tossing an Athena Fox into the henhouse is going to stir up things usefully. She's right.) It could even be that the goddess is working at cross-purposes to the cops, but that still begs the question of...are there actually gods in play, and does anyone notice?

This is even getting into my map, because if "Guilleo" is actually Italian then I have an excuse to stop off there on the way back from Germany, and that means I'm going the Venice-Patras ferry boat. (I am dead set on a ferry boat scene but my experience -- and the first draft in my head -- was based on the particulars of the Pireaus-Heraklion ferry. And I know the final action is on an island off the mainland but another thing I am absolutely going to get into the finale even if it makes no sense is The Olympias.)

So, gods. I'm also on for the deniable...but even this is tricky. I have a spooky little girl showing up early on (to do a short info-dump) and there's going to be hints all over her that she's not what she seems. Hints that my protagonist isn't seeped enough yet in the classics to pick up on; for instance, Spooky might give her a necklace with the head of Medusa on it.  And there may be owls later.

I mean, Penny has got to figure this stuff out eventually because that's how her character works. She figures stuff out. And the reader needs to figure it out otherwise why waste the paper on it. But what is it that they are figuring out....and is it actually necessary and functional at some junctions of the plot?

I had hoped that if I could stick all these characters and their relationships in Campfire I might be able to figure it out. But as I said at the top......nope.

OpenShotCutEditor

First draft of the video for the "Khajiit" piece done. It's not working for me.

Not just for technical issues, but for a lack of focus and flow. Also...a thing that is unique about this piece is that I performed all the parts on acoustic instruments. On period acoustic instruments, in some cases. So the video should show that off and the first draft doesn't.

I was going to get a little crazy with costumes and chromakey and shadow-filled lighting because I'm shy (and because it looks like it would be fun). But seeing as I've already stuck my mug on several YouTube videos on my efforts to learn violin and trumpet, maybe I'll just set up the camera in front of the nice wooden fence we have in the backyard and film that way.



So the first quest was footage. Used QuickTime Movie Player as a screen recorder, which caused the game to slow and stutter quite a bit. I created Yakima the Location Scout-Cat and sent him out into the wilds of Skyrim for footage, armed largely with a barrel full of console codes (as I didn't have the patience to build him up to where he could actually survive the war zones we wanted to photograph).

Skyrim, as far as I am aware, doesn't really have a Mechanima plug-in, so there was a lot of ducking in and out of camera options via console. Unfortunately there seems to be no easy way to trigger a performance animation or even a walk from the "free camera" -- which really restricts the available shot angles -- and of course there's no keyframe spline to guide a tracking shot.



Then edit. iMovie is of course nearly useless. Pity the Mac never had something as nice as Windows Movie Maker. I tried out ShotCut, which generally did the job but I wanted full keyframing. Filmora keeps pushing itself everywhere that purports to be a list of "best editors" but even without the $50 price tag it just seems...underpowered.

OpenShot was well worth a try. Full keyframing, infinite layers of video tracks. The most recent versions have moved from a friendly floating tabbed window for certain functions to a tiny docked panel in which the options are less clear and a lot harder to manipulate. Still, it technically did the job...except that it borked on anything bigger than a still frame. It would hang for minutes before displaying what was right under the timeline pointer.

Natron was very interesting and worth a second look. This is the only node-based compositor in this list. One of the warning signs of open-source software is when the Linux version is highlighted. This software is deep, complex, and largely undocumented. It took a few hours to get over the hump and figure out how to patch input file through processing and merge nodes to an output render. Unfortunately, it too didn't run smoothly enough on my Mac Powerbook to allow cutting video to a music track.

So back to ShotCut. The lack of keyframes means you can't animate changes in position and scale of your clips, but it does offer fade and cross-fade. Since filters are applied per clip, not per track, you can arbitrarily slice a single clip into sub-clips and apply different filters to each; essentially keyframes without any of the inbetweening that usually smooths it out.



So how to the next version? I think I need to pen-and-paper this; to actually make something like a storyboard, if not a full script and shot list. On the flip side, I only want to spend so much time on this project. I have other, better, music waiting. And the Sea Peoples, of course.

iMovie Sucks

I'm in a rant mood today.

Some of that is germane to Maker Faire, some of that is me struggling with a several pieces of software that seemed designed primarily by marketing.

Here's a nice example; there were dozens of the usual PLA printers at Maker Faire advertising as a big selling point that you could print from your phone. Well whoop-de-doo. I design on my laptop, edit and slice on my laptop, catalog and share and store on my laptop, and have printed from my laptop. What would be the advantage of having to send it to my phone? So I could save myself reaching thirty inches to the printer which needs me to hand-tend it anyhow?

And don't sell me the the cloud-based, phone-centric, all-sharing paradigm. I'm not printing the work that someone else did. I'm designing tough, precision CAD stuff that needs a full desktop to play with. You think I want to do this:

on a phone?

Rant continues below the fold.

Goodbye Inkscape?

Sometimes in the last month or two Inkscape developed a crippling lag. "Lag" is not even the right word. All the windows lose focus in the middle of doing something. Merely dragging a selection rectangle is an exercise in frustration, and it is actually impossible to rename a layer (because the typing box is dropped before you can get more than two characters in).

I'm frustrated enough to give up on it now, despite it having been a mainstay of my graphic/2D CAD work for years now. I just wasted an entire potentially productive day trying to get it to work again, and that is on top of several days and multiple hours of previous attempts.

Here's what I've tried:

Hunting through Preferences and turning down all the various aliasing and so forth (things that are described as causing "slow" behavior)

Trying on clean and new files.

Playing with the X11 settings.

Reverting to an older version of Inkscape.

Deleting the preferences and the Apple applications state files.

Reverting to an older version of Xquartz.

Checking endless forums for help.

Trying (and failing) to register at the official forums to get help.

Trying (and failing) to get into the bug reporter.



Nothing has had a measurable effect on the problem. I can't even draw a rectangle without the selection dropping in the middle.

I saw a pocket watch

That pretty much sums up the current direction of Fusion360.

Fusion is a great ap, and the new pricing schedule is actually affordable. But it does have it's peccadilloes. Chief among them being that it is being revised and revamped so frequently there are no current manuals or online help sources or other instructions that actually apply to the real program (they all reference buttons, functions, or entire modes of employ that got taken out several program versions ago).

This updating is, also, forced. On at least three occasions I've had a deadline -- I had to finish a model and I only had a few hours to do so -- but Fusion360 (unlike every other, intelligent, application) makes updates mandatory. Stop work and wait for their extremely slow server (two hours wait to download the latest update, not infrequently). No, you can't work in the background. No, you can't put it off. No, you can't even "fool" it by turning off wifi -- because Fusion360 is so damned cloud-minded all of your data files become inaccessible when you go offline. No matter where you try to force their storage.

So the latest update pushed through (along with the ominous warning that the next update will require an OS update, forcing me to use an OS with known and serious flaws), and it took even longer to start working. The side panel where all of my files are accessed stayed blank for a frighteningly long time, and when I hovered the mouse over it.......

....I got a watch face.

Anyone who knows anything about the Mac OS flees in terror at this point. You should NEVER be that deep into legacy cruft where you see the watch face. It basically means some programmer screwed up bad.

New Instructable

I put up an Instructable on the raygun, mostly to collect the basics of the build in one place. And it got an editor's pick.

I'm of two minds about that. My first reaction is the world is being unfair in my favor. I look at the other work people are doing, and I look at all my mistakes and my sloppy, unhelpful Instructables, and I'd say pick someone else to honor.

But then I did a search for other people doing AVR projects. And a lot of good work, but it is odd that so far every single LED fader project I've seen continues to use power darlingtons as switches (well, sometimes MOSFETs), and usually resistors as current limiters, and the clock-cycle hog of Arduino's digitalWrite() function when doing software PWM (instead of direct writes to the port). And nary a one of them includes a gamma function.

Okay. I've seen a better gamma; I'm using a crude, hand-drawn look-up table. I've seen someone who calculated it properly -- and if running on a fast enough processor, you can do the calculation on the fly. My current gamma table is also hand-optimized for "Piranha" RGB's and doesn't look right on the 1- watt-and-up "cree"s.

Also, I'm probably the only person crazy enough to calculated fractional changes using a long INT, allowing a single gradual fade from one specific color mix to another. (Which makes the key line a rather daunting "if (gamma[BYTE(long INT)] == PWM_clock)) ...")

Mavericks

No, still not this guy.

Nor is it this:

But, in fact, a long-delayed OS upgrade. And no...I don't really want to go to Yosemite yet. There's no clear evidence that it breaks any of my production aps, but there's also no good evidence that it doesn't.

Mavericks, though. So far...everything works! I'd heard of some minor audio issues so I started by testing Audacity, QLab, and Vox. All worked normally. Tried Scrivener. Tried Steam, Wine, and Steam Wine, and played a little Dead Space (a PC game). Then played Tomb Raider 2013 on the Mac side -- and it looked nicer than it had on the PC emulator (better color balance, basically).

And Fusion 360. Which was the main reason. Autodesk had pushed through a basically mandatory upgrade to Fusion, and the upgrade wouldn't run on my previous OS. And since the upgrade either stalled or required me to quit, the only recourse I had to finish the Raygun project was to take the computer off line every time I needed Fusion. But with it off line, it could not import, nor could it open the "cloud stored" (really, I have no idea where they are stored) other projects I wanted to work on. Like this:

I stil have yet to test Eagle, Cura, Arduino, Reaper...

Lighting Lamps

This has been a challenging and sobering time for lighting.

I'm about to go into tech on a micro-budget show, and I've been up for four hours wrestling with drivers before I finally got the dimmer pack to talk to my laptop. Not fun. I did a lot of calling around and pulling favors and so forth, and I've managed to rent a pair of Elation 4x dimmer packs and several lighting instruments to go with them. The sole lighting equipment the company owns is an Enttec DMX512 interface.

Enttec is a good company. A lot of companies would chose to make their hardware proprietary and closed-doc and force you to use only their software. Not only does this company allow third parties to use their hardware, they also understand and accept that companies move on and they are making sure to make the hardware documented enough so it can still be used even when that line has been discontinued.

One wishes Apple would act that way sometimes. Instead of pretending that no other Mac existed prior to the one they are selling now (so much does Apple have this attitude, they make it difficult to even figure out if the model you have is actually different from the model they sell...little details like model number are made purposely obscure.)

Anyhow. There was a very nice project known as QLC, which forked and stuck around a little at SourceForge as QLC+. It is a Max/MSP flavored free-form open source lighting controller.

Apple's craziness with how they support FTDI drivers nearly did me in, but finally through either doing a manual uninstall (typing sudo stuff down at the UNIX core -- always a scary business) or running a nice little helper ap created by one of the Enttec programmers I finally got DMX flowing through the box.

What's also nice is the forensics are clear. Not just what failed, but how it passed the pre-test. Well before the dimmers arrived, I plugged in the interface to see if the software would see it. The software recognized it was connected to hardware and displayed the correct hardware name. I didn't see an issue until I (fortunately!) took the dimmer home with me last night in order to confirm it responded to the upstream hardware. Good thing I forgot my USB cable, eh? Otherwise I would have been at the theater all night struggling with it, instead of home where I have wifi and could look for help.

So what happened? Simple. Hardware name is in the basic USB stack. And the lighting software was only using that as a hardware check (it wasn't actually looking for through data.) The DMX functionality, however, has to pass through the FTDI drivers. And that's why the interface recognized and displayed okay but there was no DMX passing through it.




This is going to be a tough show on my computer. I'll be running video through QLab (or possibly just VLC), sound effects through QLab (likely triggered via MIDI so I don't have to lose focus from the lighting console), and of course lighting. Which meant I also had to juggle video cables, finally finding a mini-DVI to VGA adaptor (for far too much money) after being confused by both the existing DVI connector I had and the mini Firewire connectors I'd also purchased recently. Stupid Apple and their ever-changing connector types!

And what is the lighting? Turns out the lights that came with the rental package are a pair of Source-4's -- in 19 degrees. Oops. I think I can still use them as a long raking side light. Then there's two Source-4 PARS: thankfully with all the lenses still in the box, so with WFLs in them I should be able to get a decent backlight. That leaves two generic 6x9's I picked up at another place (and have to put Edison plugs on, still). And my own little 6" fresnel. With no better choices, those will have to do for all of my front light.

It is a very strangely-shaped space, with pillars in the way, and it is going to be pretty ugly no matter what I do. I do wish I'd managed to score the smart light I was asking for (a Studio Spot 250). Unfortunately, that fell afoul of politics. The theater that owns it would be happy to loan it to us, but the theater that currently has it upstairs and unused in their loft doesn't want to let it leave the building.

I did manage to hoosier another company around to loaning a scroller or two, but backed off when I realized I didn't have any five-pin DMX to spare. I also tried to talk them into letting me have one of their broken ones so I could see if I could repair it. I'll try that negotiation again another time.




One of the eye-openers in QLC+ is seeing just how many automated fixtures, color changers, LEDs, and so forth there are, and how much more evolved the software control of these has gotten since the old 2-scene preset days. But this was already underlined for me; I worked two lighting calls over the weekend, and both spaces had ETC Ions and wireless RFUs (both running on what looked to be Apple products). Even the RFU was confusing to me; it presented lights not just in dimmers and channels but in groups as well, and multiple universes were visible in a way that makes it obvious that multiple universes are expected as part of a standard plot.

I got to talking to one of the techs at the second house. Since I last designed sound there, they upgraded the sound board -- and added full digital snakes on Cat-5 to backstage and the pit. Plus finally installed the new speakers they'd been holding on to when my company was in there. I didn't see a hot controller for them, not even a Galileo (or, pasta forbid, a Drive Rack). But according to the tech they had gone for a full Dante system so maybe that was the controller. It looks like a hot system now, and I wish I was designing shows on it now. With, however, the budget to get some decent microphones!

(This was the company where I was babying a grab-bag of aging body mics, down to such horrible things as old Telex's -- built like a tank with a steel frame, and using a 9V battery -- and even a trio of Sampsons. Oddly enough, the least trustworthy of all these mics was the more recent and expensive Shure SLX. Shure? Unsure! And I'm not talking the T4f pulling out; we had solutions for that. I'm talking multiple RF issues.)

Fusion Cooking

I've started the CAD for the raygun. No matter how I end up constructing it, having a scaled 3d model is going to be a help.

Fusion360 is still annoying. There is no instruction manual, the online tutorial videos are entirely people demonstrating how nice the software is without actually bothering to explain which commands they are using or where they found them (to partially excuse them, the software has changed radically over the course of the existing training videos, to the point where none of the menus, key commands, or even function names can be expected to match any more). And the forum is unhelpful -- pretty much the old Lightwave forum again ("Look at the stupid noob, asking for help!")

So I figured out myself how to remap the necessary middle mouse button via a piece of Mac shareware, and I'm able to navigate the viewspace. Finally. Still basically trying menu items at random; select two profiles, hit "loft," watch as an error message flashes too briefly for anyone but an Evelyn Woods graduate to read (no...there's no way to get it to persist, come back, or get logged), then flip over to a different menu and hit an identically-labeled command over there...and maybe this time it actually works.

I also got the CNC part of the application to work, but I'm not happy with the results just yet.

Instead, I'm turning to Cut3d, which is the starter CNC toolpath generating software recommended by and running on the computers at TechShop. Again it took a little tinkering. According to the error logs Wine was generating, Cut3d was crashing when it tried to use the GLX graphics code to display an imported model. So some jiggling with the display preferences in the Wine shell (to force use of native or X11 rendering instead) and the Cut3d demo is working pretty well on my Mac.

So, yes, those are Windows window controls you see there. (Win XP is the flavor Wine is set to mimic for this software) Oddly enough, I could change that to Mac standard, too, but I chose to leave them in that flavor as a reminder of where I am. Just like I (and a lot of other uses) leave Terminal in a green-text-in-black-background just to remind them that they are deeper in the OS than one normally is, and text commands here are phrased in the Deep Magic.

It looks even more baby software than it is. It is actually surprisingly deep, with a lot of control over your options.

And so, yeah, my first ever solo run on the Tormach CNC mill is going to be a fully 3d part, curved, with double-sided cutting AND a tool change. I'm heading out to the shop now, and hopefully my g-code will be ready to go by the time my machine reservation rolls around...

Navigation

The stumbling block in 3d software is display of 3d information in a 2D medium. To be able to create and edit an object in 3d space, you need to be able to move either the object or your viewpoint.

Frequently. Fluidly. Having to stop in the middle of a scaling operation to grab a navigation widget (as Poser still insists on thinking is state-of-the-art) is rather like expecting you could play a First Person Shooter in which you had to put down your gun every time you wanted to look over your shoulder.

What you need, basically, is hot-key combinations; ways you can fly around the model or space without losing the selections or operations you are in the middle of. The way I work -- the way a lot of people work, I suspect -- is to move a LOT, constantly bobbing around to check alignment from different directions.

The best 3d software allows customization of the navigation controls. There are several good reasons for that. One is personal preference. Another is that forcing the user to always have a dual-scrolling mouse with haptic feedback is not a wise choice.

The last is because every piece of software seems to chose differently. Even the spacebar-drag is co-opted into some other function in some applications (or ignored entirely, as it is with Fusion360.)

So I'm flipping back and forth between multiple pieces of software just to continue any one project (like the Raygun, for which I'm currently working up the CAD and will be generating g-code for to send to the CNC milling machine). And since fast and fluid camera motion (as well as other basic operations like selection, copying, etc.) is required to model efficiently, every way in which different packages insist on their own hotkeys is a huge loss of production efficiency.

Heck -- playing Tomb Raider then switching to Half Life (or worse, playing Lugaru then switching to Overgrowth) will get your avatar killed as you try to remember that crouch and change weapon and throw are all mapped in different ways.

And these are similar changes. I build a mesh in Carrara -- where control/command/option left click let you smoothly navigate around -- to import into Poser; where clicking in the workspace does nothing but enable an unconstrained pan (as in, your camera flies off into a nasty Dutch Angle and has to be manually restored to default position from a drop-down menu).

At least Inkscape matches up with the Illustrator I'm porting laser files to; both map the Apple command-key functions to control-key functions.

And now Fusion, which is entirely different in navigation from Carrara (or Blender...but Blender is one of those rare aps that is almost completely customizable), and even from Cut3d (not that I need to do as much navigation in Cut3d)...

Gah Software

In Star Wars (the first film, the original film, which is to be known as "Star Wars," period) a small farming homestead purchases a droid that can speak Bocce -- purchases a functional AI because that's easier than learning the computer language some of their old evaporators use.

Meanwhile on Next Generation and later, everyone can use everything that has microcircuits, and there's never even a moment of realizing the docs are all in Klingon or whatever. I think Star Wars gets it a lot closer.

Anyhow.

I've been really sick for a couple of days. And spent it delving into some software I haven't used in far too long. Still learning my way around GIMP, getting better with Inkscape -- and flipping back and forth between those two with great rapidity as I develop the most recent iteration of the Holocron:

This image is watermarked because the art for this one I want to keep exclusive to the client that ordered it.

And I'm pretty much volunteering the design time, but aside from the vector on the center image, it is all re-purposable for the holocron kits I'll be offering soon at the RPF.

I'm going to be able to offer a fair number of customization options right off the rack, plus option to do new design work as I find time.

Perhaps I'll even some time solve the assembly issue. I've seen some Holocron designs that use a staggered outer edge to hide the way the shell has to be assembled: and those would not need to be sanded and painted.




Anyhow. Figured out an option for the DuckLight battery issue and rigged up a quick test with the prototype; hooked the main circuit to regulated 5v, and plugged the Cree into a separate 4-cell battery pack. It seems to deliver almost the output I achieved with an overall regulated 500ma power supply.

So the scheme now is to add a 3.3v LDO to the PCB. It won't be that wasteful of space; I already need to add the filter capacitors to stabilize the ATtiny.

Pity there's no easy way to cram that in to the current PCB so I could do some proper in-place prototyping. But the boards were only ten bucks.

For completely random reasons, I spent most of my sick time messing around with a software I'd started to forget. Poser. Poser 9, to be precise, which saves all the parts of the interface that worked badly in Poser 6, and adds flash-driven menus that work poorly, non-scalable interface fonts, and other nice little details that make it excruciatingly inefficient and frustrating.

It's worse than that. I also flip into Poser 6 when I'm rigging a prop, because it is simpler to work in and makes cleaner files.

And for some stuff, DAZstudio is a little easier. At least the camera is superior. But of course the interface is entirely different, in almost every way it can be.

I'm really not looking forward to having to go back into Carrara, but I have some modeling projects in the pipeline that need it. Well, that or Blender...and I'm still having terrible trouble coming to grips with Blender.

Even Fusion 360. Some of the specific curves and edges I need out of it are far too difficult to
achieve inside the interface. So like pretty much everything else I do, I need to flip the meshes into another application to do some work, then re-import them.

And I just realized it has been several months since I last used that software. They've probably changed the entire thing by now!

At least EagleCAD was a relatively small learning curve, and shouldn't take too long to pick up again...

Knot Working

I still need another job.

The props stuff is keeping me busy, but with only a sound op gig, a small lighting design, and some microphone rentals I'm just barely going to scrape by.

I was messing around with knotwork today -- or more specifically, looking at a lot of stuff about Islamic interlace patterns. The idea was to work up something for my new Jedi Holocron project that takes the "Millennium Falcon Circuitry" pattern of the last one and moves it to more of a repeating decorative pattern...and the religious-art connotations don't hurt, as this is a design for a Jedi Temple.

Not sure why I thought of going in that direction. Maybe memories of the fantastic clockwork facade of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.

So I'm slowly getting used to both Inkscape, and GIMP. Flipping back and forth between them is still...interesting...however, as the key commands are completely different for each. In fact, because Inkscape is running on Xquartz via a Java VM, it remaps command (Mac standard) to control. So something as simple as saving the file takes an extra little bit of concentration.

I still have no idea how to proceed on my power issues with the DuckLight. Seems like I need to live with the idea of larger battery packs if I want the full output power, and add on-board regulators. Which not only adds parts, and footprint, but also means you'd have to change jumpers or something for all those applications where a smaller battery pack is more appropriate. 

Hrm. Maybe regulating the ATtiny down to 3.3 volts regardless of battery source makes the most sense. 2xAAA just doesn't light anything but a red LED anyhow, and that's the only set that would be too low for even an LDO. And with a powerful enough regulator, it could supply an XBee, meaning I wouldn't really need a custom daughterboard for those.

One thing I have figured out is what I want to do with those flexible USB lights I picked up for a buck each at Wallgreens. Make little Steampunk-Tiffany task lights out of them. Add a laser-cut acrylic clip/magnet on one end, paint the flexible rod up a nice brass, stick a super blue LED in, and pull some painted/dyed PETG over a hand-carved buck to make a shade.

Now if only I had some sketches I liked for the Raygun. I need to start getting client approval and move into the next design phase!

Dead Head

Ran out to the Rose Garden to take some pictures, but the roses are very much not in bloom at the moment. Whoops. We stayed until it got cold and dark anyhow. Yes; a sheet of foam-core works very well at providing a nice diffuse fill light....when there's enough direct light falling on it.

Ran the prototype current-controlled DuckLight for about four hours without any sign of overheating or the LED being overdriven. Next I think is an acid test; put a minimal heatsink on the LED and run it full-out for an hour or two. Those AMC7135's are totally the ticket!

The Holocron enquiry got one response. I'm working up a new Holocron design for a Jedi Academy now. Have in mind a combination I think will work, but haven't actually gotten into Illustrator (rather, InkScape) yet.

HP is now on my "nice" list. The scanner software I was using demanded I upgrade, told me upgrades were no longer free, and threw up its hands when presented with a 64-bit OS and what was apparently a 32-bit scanner driver. "Go call HP and see if they have any drivers," was all the software could offer. So I did, and HP had...a completely free and compatible scanner package I'm using now instead.

And I finally got off one sketch of the "art gun" direction for the raygun commission that I actually like.

Sure, I have to work on the proportions some more, and I have no idea how to machine some of it, but it in my mind finally achieves that blend of looking like the shape came out of art school but the details and machining are tight and quality.

It may not be quite period-looking enough, though. (Especially since to my mind the perfect combination would be stained and varnished wood furniture, and aluminium parts anodized in a pale green.)

So continue the sketches. Eventually I'll stumble upon a few that are decent enough to show to the client.