Recycled Pull-Tab

We live in a world full of uniform, mass produced, cheap little wonders. Case in point, the humble pull tab. Tossed out as refuge in the millions every day, but what better way to attach something on the wall? Just screw a pull tab to it and hang it over a screw/nail in the wall.

Yet another brilliant redneck repair brought to you by the folks at thereifixedit.

Cardboard Gundam

I think all of us need a reminder sometimes that we don’t need expensive materials to make something awesome, as illustrated by this poseable cardboard Gundam.

(via Tomopop)

Rooster SteadyCam

If you want to avoid shakycam footage, there are a ton of ways to stabilize your camera, ranging from DIY projects, to a huge variety of devices (see here) ranging from simple and affordable, all the way to professional units where if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford them. All these options weren’t enough for this guy though, he’s taken the DIY approach to a new level, giving his rooster a helmet cam. If you’ve ever picked up a chicken, you know that when you move their body, their head stays in the same place (vestibular ocular reflex).

Why buy a fancy steadycam, when you can just carry a chicken? Video below.

It seems to me he has the camera pointed the wrong way. Chickens don’t look straight ahead, they look to the side. The real challenge here is to keep the chicken interested in looking at what you are filming, which could be a good way to make movies for people with short attention spans.

(via Hackaday)

Automatic Plant Waterer

The Groasis Waterboxx was the grand award winner in Popular Science’s 2010 top 100 innovations list. The base has a water reservoir which you fill once or very rarely. Any rainfall or morning dew runs down the top of the lid to water the plant, and the condensation from the reservoir collects on the underside of the lid and serves to water the plant in dry times.

At $275 for 10, it seems a bit pricey for it’s intended use in poor, arid nations, especially considering you could likely make a passable version of these out of old tires and trash can lids, but I see no reason it has to be an eyesore.  I can see a nicer version of this having use in parking lot plantings in semi-arid cities like Los Angeles, or for newly planted trees along highways.

Carved Watermelon – Skull and Brain

Happy Halloween everyone!

This is my Jack o’ Lantern for the year, my usual carved watermelon.  For anyone who isn’t tied down by tradition, I highly recommend them over pumpkins, it went really smooth and only took about twenty minutes using a birds-beak style paring knife.

This is the first time I’ve tried removing the skin and going for dimension. The skull is all one piece except for a few teeth in the back of the mouth, and the brain is still attached. I’ve hidden an ultrasonic mist maker and LED in the brain cavity so illuminated fog spills out over the brains.

Update, Chicken Zombies in search of brains:

Just when you thought Halloween was safely over, the zombie chickens show up to eat any melon brains that may have been left laying around.

A couple of my past watermelon carvings here.

Worlds Smallest Dustpan?

Proving once again that the Post-It Note is one of man’s most versatile inventions. (via thereifixedit)

Tilt Shifting Paintings

Tilt shifting in photography is when you deliberately put your lens out of line with the sensor in such a way that it changes the focus on the sensor/film rather than just based on distance of objects and depth of field. The resulting photos and videos trick the eye into thinking it is seeing a tiny scale model rather than something miles away. A similar effect can be created through video/image editing. In the above pictures, artcyclopedia has added an effect similar to tilt shift via software to several of Van Gogh’s works (click the picture to see their full gallery and the originals). I love the effect.

I think the kind of visual cues we take from tilt shifted photography are to some extent a product of the photographic age. We are used to seeing two dimensional representations of three dimensional space as seen through the single eye of a camera. When you look at a real scene through two eyes, whatever you are looking at is in focus, while anything out of focus is blurry and doubled (and by definition, not what you are currently looking at). One of the flaws with the current round of 3D movies is that while things have depth cues based on sending a different signal to each eye, there is no adjustable depth of field based on what you are looking at. The focus of any given object is chosen by the camera, rather than the viewer, and the whole image is the same distance away, even if each eye sees a different angle.

I did a little experimenting on my own to get a better understanding of things. I think the choice of impressionism is a good one. Impressionists have a tendency to capture the soul of a thing crisply, but without much detail. This means that when you blur a background, it looks believable rather than smeared. Creating this effect in Photoshop can be pretty simple.

Part of what makes tilt shift photography make things look miniature is the difference distance makes to depth of field. In tilt shift, focus is much more independent of distance. In a large scale photo, once you are focused a ways out, it tends to focus to infinity. Painters tend to make their paintings fully focused at all distances, which improves clarity, but degrades the feeling of depth. With a tilt shift effect I wanted to choose a subject in the composition, bring the eye to them, and then create the illusion of depth in the rest of the image by virtue of knowing where the eye is already looking. This is counter to one of the usual goals of composition: To keep the eye moving. Below is a Monet I found with a quick image search that served my needs nicely for a very simplified test.

The alterations I made can be seen below. I don’t think it made the image nicer, but I think it accomplished my compositional goal of directing the eye and holding it on the subject.

I chose it because it covers a vast distance, contains a subject to draw the eye, and has a tree that exists within the plane of focus, but in front of an area that I planned to blur. The  clarity of the tree is what makes the end result different from what you would see with a tilt shift lens. This only took a few minutes. Below are the steps I took. If you have a copy of Photoshop, give it a shot. It’s a good skill to have in your repertoire.

1. After opening the image, duplicate your background layer and work in the duplicate.
2. Select anything outside your intended focus area that needs to remain sharp. In this case, the tree and the canopy on the right.
3. Click on Select/Inverse.
4. Click the add layer mask button in your layers pallet.
5. Click select/Reselect.
6. Click on the gradient tool and make sure you have it set to a black to white reflected gradient.
7. Click on the part of your image that should remain focused and drag toward the edge of the picture perpendicular to the intended strip of focus and release.
8. Right Click on the layer mask and click on Apply Layer Mask.
9. Click on Filter/Blur/Gaussian blur, and drag the slider to create the blur.

I’m sure you can find a more long winded tutorial somewhere, but if you have a moderate knowledge of Photoshop, this should suffice as a bare bones process to get you started.

Pastels on the Plaza 2010

It’s that time of the year again. The first Saturday in October is one of those few days of the year when I’m glued to the weather channel, hoping to see that little puffy cloud icon that around here means dreary, overcast weather. Photography weather. Pastels on the Plaza weather. Overcast weather seems like such a fixture around here that I don’t know why we bother having a weather forecast at all. The weather guy could just put up a poster with a dreary little cloud and a sign reading, “Partly cloudy”, and go on vacation for a few months. He would probably improve his record. Somehow, that first Saturday in October seems to be an exception. In recent years we’ve found ourselves sitting in a puddle in the rain, trying to draw on the sidewalk with a muddy piece of chalk, or plagued with steep shadows and gusts of wind that erase an hour’s work in an instant. This year, things were terrifyingly different. The weather was perfect. There was no excuse for failure.

I was worried there for a bit, but it all came together pretty well. Click the image above to see my full picture. My entry once again was dedicated to local garden coach and designer Genevieve Schmidt. The event brings together local businesses and local artists on behalf of a north coast children’s charity, which is a big win for everyone involved. Here’s a shot of the east side of the plaza, one of the four sections of pastels:

I noticed a lot of returning artists from past years, though notably absent was Coco Thorpe, veteran of 17 Pastel years, who stopped by to cheer us on, but didn’t deign to coat herself in chalk this year. In her place for Holly Yashi, we once again have Leah Vaughn, with what I think is her best entry yet:

Her husband, graphic designer Casey Vaughn, designed this square for Tomas Jewelry:

Shortly after staking my claim on an empty square, an artist settled into the square beside me. It turns out it was Alan Sanborn, a former watercolor instructor for HSU with a master’s in art and quite a portfolio. At one point I accused the man of using luminous paint. His way with light is enviable. He was doing a farm scene from memory, a reproduction of one of his previous works which can be seen here on his site.

Also returning was a personal favorite of mine, Jerry Lee Wallace, who I missed once again this year. I was too focused on my own work to do a walkaround until later.

This one clearly came from Duane Flatmo, a man of many talents, everything from building fire breathing dragons, to playing the guitar with an eggbeater.

I was especially impressed by the square for The Sushi Spot. They did a flawless job of making the nori, and from concept to execution, it was truly exceptional. Their sushi is awesome as well, a contender for the best in town, and they do take out even when they’re busy, unlike someone else.

Another square that has been consistently good in recent years is The Alibi. If you like your bars dark, your gin and tonic glowing and with a burger on the side, this is the bar for you. I don’t know who the artist was on this one either, but I like their work.

I thought the entry for Kash Boodjeh was cute.

And this one from Humboldt Wildlife Care center was fun. I didn’t even know they made beer out of smashed owls.

Next year, should I participate again. I want to take a break part way through and just spend some time taking pictures of works in progress.

Related Posts:

Pastels on the Plaza 2011

Pastels on the Plaza 2009

DIY Guitar Tuner

HackaDay has a fun little project up for those of you who play the guitar and have a do-it-yourself mentality. This little device can be used like a guitar pick. Using the buttons to select your note will cause the LEDs to flash at that frequency. The light will only be visible on the string when it’s in tune.

Or, for around ten bucks, you can save yourself some time and buy one pre-made.

Pro-Ketch MouseTrap Review

Several years ago I had a mouse in my apartment. Being sadly catless, I found myself being awoken every night by skitterings and chewings. Every night, mulling over different mouse trap concepts in my head.

You see, the mousetrap is a sort of DIY right of passage into inventorhood. It pits the wits of man against those of mouse. Mano a mouseo.

After awaking one night to find the little bastard dragging one of my candles away, I started building. What I ended up with was a contraption built of cardboard boxes, fishing wights, levers and brass tubing. It was hardly Alcatraz, but it was effective enough as long as I got to it quickly after it was sprung.

Catching the little guy came with quite a feeling of accomplishment (and relief). I can’t stand poisons. My neighbors once put out some poison only to have the rat die in my wall. It stunk for months. Poisons come with a horrible death and I worry about the risk of the mouse staggering off only to be eaten by a pet.

The other day we started hearing a scrabbling and squeaking coming from the attic. It’s all full of insulation, so tossing the cats up there wasn’t going to be effective. My previous cobbled together solution wasn’t going to hold up long enough to do the job, and I really didn’t know what manner of animal I was dealing with, so I went shopping.

I started under the assumption that I had a roof rat. Unfortunately, the only rat traps I could find were either big electrocuting steel jawed death machines, glue traps, or really poorly made havahart-style traps, but there was a really great mouse trap at Harbor Freight.

The Pro-Ketch (pictured above) is a bit bigger than an old timey video cassette and has two cleverly designed entrances. It’s designed to be put along a wall to appeal to the natural tendency for rodents to run along the edges. It supposedly doesn’t need bait, and is made of steel with a clear plastic window in the top. The entrances have a steel ramp that see-saws on a central hinge. Laying over the bottom of this ramp sits another smaller one, hinged at the base. When the rodent is climbing the ramp, it is standing on the secondary ramp, but when it steps off, it is already past the central pivot of the first ramp and things start to tip, lifting the second ramp to block the exit. Going the rest of the way into the trap causes the smaller ramp to push the main ramp back into the original position, thus priming the trap to catch any addition rodents that are attracted by the first.

I only have tro complaints about the Pro-Ketch trap. First of all, while it comes in a few configurations for location, it really only comes for one size of rodent: small. Second, it doesn’t have a latching mechanism. There isn’t much to stop a mouse from just pushing open the whole lid.

After mostly unsuccessful attempts for a couple nights with various bait, I baited the trap with sunflower butter, putting a thin row of it up each ramp, and a bigger glob in the inside of the trap. I also added a rubber band to ensure it stayed closed. This did the trick almost immediately. Within a couple hours I had caught my mouse and could hear her trying to chew her way out of the metal box. It turns out she was just a cute little house mouse making a lot of racket.

And what became of our unwanted guest? We went for a little walk a few blocks away, where she will now likely be frequenting the home of a particularly irritating neighbor.

There is another nearly identical version of this trap (available with very quick shipping via amazon), the Tin Cat by Victor. Or you could build your own.

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