Silver Case

From Woot

The saga of Polaroid is practically an American tragedy. Those instant cameras were mindblowing in 1948 and a household name by 1960. They have been loved by grandmothers, insurance investigators, experimenting couples and kidnappers with vans.

See an article on the Republican presidential candidate debates.

The confrontation came at the start of an innovative CNN-YouTube debate that forced the candidates…

I didn’t watch them myself. What’s innovative about these debates?

The eight Republican candidates encountered a range of questions, including abortion, gun control from a gun wielding NRA member, and farm subsidies from a man eating an ear of corn.

Wow. That must have been a seriously profound debate.

Weird, weird thing driving home today.

 Driving along a normal city street when all of the sudden I hear a massive and escalating grinding clatter from underneath my car.  It sounded like something serious had broken loose and was grinding against the road.

 I pulled over, undid my seatbelt and just leaned out the door, looking under the car.

 Sure enough, I see a handle descending from the car body, right from under the driver compartment. It was as if some kind of internal jack handle had shaken loose or something.

I reached under to grab it, and found a screwdriver in my hand. It was little worse for wear, a small amount of the handle end had been ground off.  Otherwise, it’s a really nice made-in-Japan screwdriver.  Somehow I was driving along the street with it wedged between car and street.

I was astonished. My two theories?  A mechanic “forgot” it long ago and it finally rattled loose.  Or it was on the street and an amazingly lucky run-over-and-bounce knocked it into this precarious position.

The reason it stuck was (I think) that the point of the screwdriver had driven into the soft, tarry underbody spray coating.

Anyway, know I have a nice, large, Phillips head screwdriver made in Japan in 99% good condition.

The animation below shows the Cosco Busan as it leaves the Port of Oakland on November 7, 2007, and hits the Bay Bridge at 8:30 am on its way to the Golden Gate, triggering the largest oil spill in San Francisco Bay in more than a decade.

Found a few sofas we like today. We need a big L-shaped thing for the living room. We’re going to get the L-configuration of the Natuzzi 2410 in a dark brown. (hides dog and kid stains, and isn’t as slippery). This sofa is a lot more comfortable than it looks. I like its looks because it manages to seem simultaneously modern and retro. Suits our Bauhaus home.

And then for the family room, we found this semi-vintage looking couch from Natuzzi that is also insanely comfortable.

I have a lot of business cards from work and from home. Well, not a lot like a Salesman might have, but at least several hundred. I’m not organized with them, I just store them randomly in boxes. The most useless possible format.

Recently I looked into business card scanners and decided to go with CardScan. I chose it even though it’s a windows-only application. Why? Because it has a webservice that synchronizes with my local client. This means I can scan in my business cards at home (from inside a Parallels Windows Virtual Machine) but then retrieve them from anywhere else, including the web. It’s really handy.

The scanning works well. Not only does it scan the card (in about 5seconds ) but it also does text recognition, and figures out (suprisingly accurately) where all the fields go.  It has most problems with (of course) Japanese restaurant business cards and a few cards that have a lot of photography with the information inside the photo. By-and-large it works very well. Even if the character recognition fails, it still keeps an image of the scanned card, so I can read it for myself.

Although cardscan has a facility to rescan the back of the card and include it with the front, I just wish it would scan front and back simultaneously.

 The only thing I don’t like about Cardscan Online is that it is always tempted to “contact all your contacts by email and offer to organize their business cards for them.”  I think I have this feature turned off. I really don’t want a spam-bomb that originates from me. I know how much I hate that crap myself.

…there is a reason I’m seeking refuge in my infrequently-air-conditioned study this afternoon:

It’s atrocious. Monsoon rain that hasn’t 1) brought down the humidity or 2) brought down the temperature. I am sure it’s hotter than 79f right now. And it was north of 90 most of the afternoon. This sucks.

About five years ago I had a brilliant idea for a Christmas gift for Ling, an expensive, fine Janome sewing machine. Boy that went over really well. It sat in a closet forever, labelled ‘The White Elephant’ by Ling and never touched.

Dad used it once to repair some luggage. Recently I got it out to make some messenger bags. It works well, to a point, until I start taking on heavy layers of tough material. It’s really better suited to making clothes, not munitions. I ‘need’ a stronger sewing machine.

Ling did some research with her mom’s seamstress friend and found a sewing machine store that specializes in new and used industrial sewing machines. So as a suprise today, she took me to the store to let me pick out my Christmas present, an industrial sewing machine!

These things are no toys. Rather than some puny electric motor in the sewing machine, these sit on a dedicated table with a massive 0.5-1hp electric motor mounted below. Rather than the foot pedal controlling power to the motor, it is a mechanical linkage that engages a clutch linkage between motor and machine. And when I say clutch, it’s just like learning to drive a 1967 GTO. Total tire burnout. A home sewing machine, at top speed, might do 600 stitches per minute. These things do more like 2500-3000 stitches per minute. They sound like a vulcan chain gun.

An example of electric clutch sewing machine motor. Not for my unit, but similar.

I brought along a bunch of ‘difficult’ fabric and webbing. This thing chewed through it like a total joke. No problem at all.

I tested my stitching out on a Brother machine. But it only did straight stitches. I need one that can do zig-zag so that I can do embroidery and bar-tacks. So she pointed me at a Japanese Yamato DP-1111. This has those features, and against the odds, is even more powerful than the Brother I tested out. Demented.

Yamato DP-1111

So they’re going to setup this sewing machine on a proper seamstress table (even has built in meter stick on the table) and tune it up. I asked them to take pity on me and significantly gear-down the motor. It’s just too fast to use for my purposes. This should be trivial to switch out some pulley ratios.

Once it’s setup, I’ll go over during the week and test it out. Unfortunately I can’t find much at all about this machine online, let alone a manual. I’ll have to give a shot at contacting Yamato Sewing Machines directly and begging them for one.

Ling’s mom bought home several bags of Solea potato chips. They are really superior. They look homemade. Thick, irregular slices peeled straight from a Washington Russet. They’re browner than most chips. They are seasoned thoroughly and the seasonings (salt, garlic, pepper, etc) taste real, not fake or like chemicals. They are terribly good. Brilliant with nice cheese.

I haven’t tried all “Eight delectable varieties: Sea Salt, Rosemary, Cracked Pepper & Salt, Garlic, Blue, Sweet Potato, Trio and new Parmesan.” But I can definitely vouch for the Garlic being incredibly good.

Although they’re called healthy, I wouldn’t count on these being too good for you, but if you’re going to eat some junk food, these are an excellent candidate.

I went to the dentist today and had an ‘orthopantomogram‘ done of my teeth. It’s some sort of rotating, thin-sliver x-ray of my head with very low-dosage x-rays (1/25th of my yearly budget of gamma rays).  Nothing exciting. Just a bunch of old silver fillings from when I was a kid. She also pointed out I had a fractured nose in the past. I think this happened in 3rd grade.  I vividly remember crashing face first into another kid and having a bloody nose for the better part of three days.

When I visited Pennsylvania this summer, Dad gave me a handed-down pocketwatch from a few generations ago. It’s been sitting around in a candy tin for a while and this weekend I took a closer look at it.

I couldn’t identify it, and it didn’t have a clear way to pop open the back of the case. I gingerly wound it and the hands moved for a while. I thought that there was a method to turning the winder to release the back.

I looked at it again tonight and tried to simply unscrew the back of the case. This was trivially easy and the case came off effortlessly.

Manufactured by Seth Thomas in Thomaston, Connecticut.

Serial Number 70622. This apparently puts its manufacture at around 1888.

This appears to be a fine-tuner to the watch speed.

Inside of the back case: Fahys Oresilver No. 1 Pat February 19th 1884

Joseph Fahys.  From the NY Times, December 14, 1915, Tuesday

So I guess the next step is to find a reputable Pocket Watch restorer and see about getting this thing cleaned, lubricated, and maybe recalibrated.

Since we finished selecting all our kitchen appliances, our layout is pretty much finished.

Watering can

Originally uploaded by karavshin.

Today Luke went into a pool for the first time

Workers are bricking walls and installing door frames now.

The L-Shaped Kitchen

The Workshop

Master bathroom

Front corner

Last week we bought a bunch of appliances, including a 4-door commercial refrigerator, a Lainox combi-oven, and a gas hob.   Last night I ordered a custom Diedrich HR-1 coffee roaster (custom colored (RAL 7008) and pin-striped (RAL 1015) hahaha).

Today we finished up most of the major appliance shopping.  We bought a Bosch SGI 58MO5EU dishwasher, two De Dietrich DHD492 fume hoods, and a De Dietrich DTI309 5-zone Induction Hob.  [finding links for these products is AWFUL. Lots of different id’s for the same product, pages locked behind awful flash pages, etc]

Took a scan of a tiny, ripped, dirty, poorly-printed Favorit sticker and tried to turn it into a vector logo.

Was an excuse to use Vector Magic more. It has some clever heuristic questions it asks during the import process and has a suprisingly good post-import editing function. Was much more like a client application than a web app.

Dirty Scan

Vectorized Logo

Oh man… it’s worse. I exported a png from Vector Magic. VectorMagic generated a 4-color vector file. When I imported the png into Illustrator, and re-traced it, Illustrator insisted on including a fifth color. Totally retarded. VectorMagic is clearly far superior. Hope Adobe buys them an incorporates their technology into Illustrator.

Went through some old cookbooks in the pantry and found a set of satay recipes in an out-of-print cookbook.

• Satay Ayam Bakar (Grilled spiced chicken)
• Satay Lembu or Satay Kambing (mutton or beef satay w/ peanut sauce)
• Satay Ayam or Satay Babi (pork or chicken satay)
• Simplified Satay sauces

Most of the ingredients are easy to find. The balance of them you can find at any asian grocery store. I haven’t made any of these recipes, I am not a fan of satay, but they look correct to me, and this comes from a well-respected Nonya cookbook.

There will be only one Sammy Davis Jr notebook. I took a heart-cut out of the middle of the album cover, but I think the graphic comes out really nice. I’m getting the internals tighter and straighter and neater too. I enjoy the endpapers in this one, too.

Front Cover

Back Cover

Endpapers

Folio (One of five different pictures)

RogerWarez pointed us to the Stanford’s web-based service VectorMagic.  It vectorizes images (making them infinitely scalable). Results are meaningfully better than Illustrator, anecdotally to me, and according to Stanford, quantifiably.

Here’s the test I ran:

Illustrator’s High Fidelity Live Trace (was better than their Low Fidelity Photo result)

VectorMagic’s much better result

Illustrator produces, rough, jagged results that looks more like posterization than tracing. VectorMagic produces a much nicer result.

Freight containers are an interesting market. I think they’re very much a commodity. So I would be interesting to study the Ebay results for shipping containers.

My hypothesis is that the price of a freight container is f(pickupLocation, amenities).   Amenities would be some sort of refrigeration or something that makes it different from a sealable steel box.  The value of amenities should be easy to solve for. Then what would be interesting to see what location premium/discounts are.

RogerWarez mentioned that there is a huge surplus of containers in the US from all the imports from China. (with the rapidly-plummeting dollar, this should sort itself out a bit).  So perhaps the location adjustment will have a sensitivity to the export/import balance of whatever port it’s located at.

Is buying freight containers a “buy US exports/sell USD” trade?

I spent an hour or two tonight binding up the second and last of my ‘The Supremes‘ notebooks. This one was faster and tidier.

Improvements:

• The cheese cloth spine-binding didn’t smear out under the end papers
• The end papers were graphic’d too
• All the folios had translucent Supremes pictures
• The spine is rounder and doesn’t show strain marks. (Although I did manage to slice it through with my knife accidentally and did a mediocre job putting a protective tape on the spine)

Front

Back

Endpapers: The Supremes AND The Temptations!

Via World Of Wonder