Silver Case

Published in the Straits Times

This chart muffles the information on turns almost as effectively as the fonts cigarette makers use to smother the Surgeon General’s warnings.

The Colors convey no information. The rectangles convey no information. You must read all the squares of numbers before you understand anything about the speed and cornering of the map. It’s scarcely better than a table of numbers. At least a table wouldn’t have skipped some of the turns for space reasons.

You could come up with a dozen better ways to present the data. For instance the examples below, of turns 2 and 3. One is a mild turn at high speed, and the second is a sharp turn at modest speed. The super-imposed numbers are almost an uncessary afterthought. Now you can quickly see the sharpest corners, the fastest corners, maximum RPM corners, etc. All the context is in a single cell itself. You don’t need to have scanned all the turns and identify max/min of gearings, g-force, and speed to understand the context of an individual cell.

Fastest corner on the track

Most punishing corner on the track

Beautiful idea that sounds simple when described, but has amazing results.  Watch the demo.

Not even sure how the guy conceived of something so weird. His project write-ups are hilarious.

My brother in law gave me this cool present today, a self-maintaining jar-of-fire.

I have a few collections of fonts totaling six or seven thousand different font samples. Of course there is no useful categorization or naming conventions for it. It’s a flat file. All I can do is randomly walk through it looking for something that catches my eye.

Font.com’s Search By Sight promised that by answering some questions it would give me the font I needed. I’ve thought about this idea before, so I was curious to try.

My thoughts are based on the premise that I am not a type designer and am never going to learn the terms and taxonomy of type design. When I read through the fonts, I have a certain impression I’m looking for (’1950s Heavy Industry’, ‘typewriter’, ‘Neuromancer’, ‘old letter’, ‘Soviet military map’, etc) Don’t expect me to want to search for fonts by type feature (serifs, spacing, etc) — I don’t know what they are, and they wouldn’t necessarily help me find what I am looking for.

That’s why this font finding expert system was so disappointing. To test it I decided I’d use it to help me find a font that looked like it came from a galvanometer made in 1935. It was hopeless. The system just asked me fifteen tedious questions about the font I wanted, but never anything that got to the heart of what I wanted. Honestly, the critical element of a 1935 galvanometer font isn’t how the tail crosses the upper-case ‘Q’. It’s probably something more like the font being relatively thin relative to its height, for being very unadorned, for having a consistent line width, etc.

I’m not taking the piss out of the system, but this is literally the recommendation it gave me:

Sinaloa? Please. This is more like 1925 Ritz-Carlton New Year’s Eve drinking champagne in a Dusenberg font, not austere scientific equipment of the 30’s.

I have a better idea for a font finder. The interface would be much easier, too.

The artist gives some sample text, and then is shown a list of ten fonts of a wide range. Click on any ones that, for any reason, are close to what you are looking for. Then the system, sees what you liked, what you didn’t, and shows you another selection, repeating the cycle, and narrowing down to a few best choices for the font you want.

The trick here is that as the system shows many iterations of fonts that users choose/discard, it can imply groupings of fonts that transcend their type family or other standard categorization methods. The categorization is implicit and invisible.

Problems with this?

• Would take a long time to build up enough iterations to get any meaningful grouping. (6000 fonts, in iterations of 10 each, is 600 iterations to see each font just once). One solution would be for the system to have an underlying understanding of type and be smart enough to show a variety of fonts from widely different font types. I don’t need to see six examples of Arial in my initial iterations.
• If you mingle different users’ iterations, you might just turn the grouping data into a murky, gray soup. The categorization might just be too person-specific.
• You’d have to be careful in your seeding of fonts to the users to prevent them from consistently running down the same choice paths and choosing similar fonts every time.

There are probably some good computational methods for doing this sort of matching stuff, but I think the key issue is building up the database of comparison results.

Tried some more applique today. Used two pieces of denim to eliminate the fabric-softness issue and just concentrate on needle/throttle control. Worked out a lot better. The radii weren’t as tight, which made it easier.

One thing I didn’t do was to tie off the long threads. This results in the embroidery unravelling trivially. Need to remember to do it in my production run.

Front

Back

I need to get some square feet of tyvek for another draft of a messenger bag.  It blocks liquid water, but allows vapor water to pass. This should be good for a bag laying across my sweaty back.

From the craft websites, it’s clear the best way to get nice chunks of Tyvek is from the ends of the 10ft rolls used by contractors to wrap houses.  Alas, houses are made with poured concrete in Singapore, not wood, so no one has Tyvek here.

Can someone, perhaps Construction Engineer Aunty She-She, get me some tyvek?

Along that line, another thing I am looking for is vintage/old/used/recycled paper that is distinctive. Preferably with lots of lines/ledgers/or colors.  Old record books, things like that.  I need some distinctive papers to bind up with my old LP covers into some dandy notebooks.  Anyone that sends me tyvek or recycled papers will get a notebook in return.  Sadly, the recycling centre scene in Singapore is pretty bad, too.

Over the weekend I finished up my second messenger bag.

New features?

• Inside I sewed a waterproofed, sealable pocket that is large enough to hold an A3-size document.
• I added an internal, elastic keychain for my bike lock.
• Did some experimental logo work with my Print Gocco. Didn’t turn out great.

Materials?

• Used this hard canvas-like stuff called ‘Ticking’. It’s the same material I made my bespoke railroad engineer hat from.

• For the strap I used the belt from a construction worker’s safety harness. It’s really strong and supple, and I love the crude metal buckle and “PROLOCK” label sewn on.

The only thing left to do is to assemble My Adafruit Industries MiniPOV3 LED micro-controller kit so that I can illuminate my bag with a series of LEDs. The kit just arrived today.

I’ve been wanting to make a railroad engineer’s hat for a while now. When I was in the US, I tried to find the right striped denim cloth. I didn’t manage to, but I found this swell blue-and-white striped heavy cloth. Later Dad pointed out that it was called ‘ticking’ and it was for making mattresses. Oh well.

Anyway, I’ve been searching for hat patterns for a while and never found anything. I found a really lousy tutorial somewhere on making a “train driver” hat. The tutorial was awful, but I decided to say fuck it, and make one from scratch. The only cheat I did was to steal the brim-lining from a crappy hat I bought for $3 at walmart.

Making the folded top part of the hat is definitely the hardest thing to do. I could really use a decent pattern for that part. The rest I handled fine. My first top made the hat look something like a cross between General Erwin Rommel and the admiral on Star Wars who’s choked to death by Darth Vader. But instead of it being desert camoflauge or Deathstar black, the hat’s made out of mattress covering.

I’m quite pleased with the fit. It’s rare that I have a hat that fits, and this one is fitted perfectly to me. If I make another one, I think I’ll raise the top part a bit longer so that it can fall over to the side a bit. Also the center band should have its stripes running horizontally, not vertically. If I can get a decent pattern design (make my own?) for the top part, I’ll be able to put the thing together so efficiently that I’ll be able to include a tidy liner to hide all the sew-hacking underneath.

but I couldn’t resist this tutorial plus my friend’s perfectly-suitable head.

It’s exactly what it claims to be. Their ice cream (gelateriaadfaskdfm whatever they want to call it) is really good.

Understand that I am not an ice-cream enthusiast in any way. For me to have eaten two orders of ice cream there says something! I had something called ‘kinder’ which was white chocolate and gnutella. It was probably the creamiest ice cream I’ve ever eaten in my life. The sweetness level was perfect and the texture of ribbons of gnutella in it made it a real treat. My second order was a cone of screaming Blood Orange. It had a fantastic color and a really punchy, powerful taste. Maybe a bit exhausting after a while, in fact, but still, good.

Espresso Bar? Well, yeah, they run lavazza beans. I had an espresso. It was fine.

362 Pacific Highway

Lindfield NSW 2070

9416-2275

One of my long-term aspirations is to have a couple retreats spread around the world. I want a cabin in a remote, blasted corner of a mountainous desert, four hours’ drive from nowhere. I also want a cabin in forested mountains somewhere in Japan. I even have thought it would be nice to have a cabin tucked away somewhere in the Appalachians.

I read with interest an article in today’s ‘Escapes’ section of the New York times about companies selling tiny, pre-fabricated homes.

The two companies that looked most interesting at first were Alchemy Architects and Blue Sky Mod. Some of those other ones looked like clapboard shanties or ridiculous glass boxes. $100,000USD for a house construction is not cheap, and my guess is that actually getting a house delivered and installed to a nice remote site is an expensive operation. $10k? $15k?

I’ve seen Freitag bags before. They’re pretty expensive, but if I had a job/lifestyle/home that allowed me to ride a bicycle to work, I’d probably buy one. They look  unique and genuine because they’re made out of recycled truck tarpaulins, seatbelts, and other heavy hardware. They make many different models, all unique.

Taking a break between katakana practice sessions, I browsed their website and found their incredible “design your own Freitag messenger bag” applet.” (to pick it, select the “F-Cut” option on the left menu of their main page). It’s really well done. You choose from the current available tarpaulins and select exactly from where on which tarpaulin you want each of the five component pieces cut from. It’s really quite neat. The tarpaulins seem to change slowly over time. When I was looking most tarpaulins seem to have been sliced up pretty badly already.

The only suggestion I’d make would be a way to save selections. Of course you run the risk of having some of the sections taken by others who already paid for their bag, but it would allow you to think about and refine them.