One of my many secret vices is NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me! [Read more…]
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
One of my many secret vices is NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me! [Read more…]
There are a bunch of videos of this on youtube; they started showing up in my feed around the time when I was hunting for wire rope for damascus-making.
Water and computers mix notoriously badly; that’s why shower faucets tend to be purely mechanical designs. Imagine my puzzlement when I got to my hotel in Stuttgart and discovered that someone had, obviously, spent a great deal of money and effort to make the bathroom shower more complicated than it needs to be.
The overall process of knife-making seems to be pretty standard. Weld, shape, grind, quench, grind, polish, do the handle.
Product photography is a really difficult thing to pull off well. You need drama and depth, but clarity as well. Your images are almost always highly constructed, but they need to look natural and spontaneous. They need to show a sense of the scale of the object, which means you need other things in the picture that convey scale without distracting. I used to have a whole shelf of books, which I practically memorized, about problem-solving different types of product photos.
Once upon a time, there were two demons talking. One of them looked at the other and said, “whoah, you’ve got the ‘made the damned suffer’ award, how did you earn that?” The other demon replied, “I made the integral bolster knife popular, and the overall suffering in the knife-maker community went off the charts.”
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is not a book I have read. Naturally, parts of it have leaked into my consciousness from various sources – it’s a remarkably pervasive fountain of memes.
Usually when I harden a blade, I let it get its tempering-cycles while I grind it. That can result in disasters, like a work-piece falling on the floor and shattering.
Anna and I were talking about my inordinate love of LED blinky things. She says that if something has LEDs all over it, I’ll buy it. That may be true.
This is an idea I stole from michaelcthulu on youtube. He’s the guy who makes gigantic swords from anime shows [youtube] and he’s quite a character.