My Life on the Net

I looked all weekend for a basic screen printing kit. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while and not just pay cafepress a fee to print my ideas onto a t-shirt. I want to MAKE it. I’m sure most people will understand that.

No art store seemed to have the photo-sensitive paint I was looking for - unless it was in a kit that was too expensive for me to afford. I didn’t want to spend £30 just on a small bottle of paint and a whole load of useless tools.

It’s a surprise what you can do with the stuff you have around you. All I had was some cotton mesh, some glue, fabric paint, drawing pins and an old picture frame. All that I needed.

The Tools of the Trade (and my feet)

It’s a surprisingly basic technique:

• Stretch and pin the cotton mesh onto the back of the picture frame.
• Draw the design.
• Brush on the glue into the negative parts of the design (e.g. the bits you don’t want to get paint going through).
• Wait to dry.
• Place the design onto the medium.
• Scrape the paint through the mesh onto the medium.
• Take off and wash.
• Enjoy your new screen print!

The tester print. It seemed to work pretty well although I didn’t get the paint as through as I would have liked.

Unfortunately, the final print on the t-shirt didn’t go as well as I had hoped - and some of the screen had come off. It still works I think - but next time I need to remember to apply the glue a little thicker.

I think it went well, and it’s not bad for a first attempt. I’m going to spend some time perfecting the screen and design (this one only took a couple of minutes) and hopefully it’ll look even better.

What do you think as a first attempt?

It took a little longer than expected, but the revamped look is up and running. Sure there are little problems, but I’ll get them squezed out when I’m less knackered.

Things you’ll like about it:

• It’s scalable - so if you increase text size it’ll go with it. (Something I’m normally to lazy to set up).
• A nice print stylesheet (for those who are interested in… printing)
• OpenID support (working but a little fiddily)
• A nice e-mail for the first time you comment.

Things coming very soon:

• Reply-to feature. I’m finding it hard to find a plugin (So if you know one… *hint* *hint*)
• Anything you want.
• Anything I can think of when I’ve had a good nights sleep.

I’ve not beeing looking after this place very well. Just look at it! When was the last time I cleaned the carpet?

Unfortunately, I’m not talking about real life - I’m talking about here, this site.  Today I’m bringing in the cleaners to make this place squeaky clean. I’m optimising code, rebuilding stylesheets (and finally putting a print style back in) and moving some furniture around. I might even put some curtains up to make this place look a little more roomy.

Same content, same feel… just… comfier and nicer to look at.

Sometimes I just don’t understand you two. You are both selling eBook readers to people in the US, and only the US? Did you do your fact-finding before trying to produce a product?

Sure, you’re one of the cheapest places to buy tech - but is it the best market. No offense to the yanks, but it would seem that the stereotype of the standard person of the States as someone who pigs out on junk food and watches T.V. twelve hours a day isn’t the perfect image to sell reading devices too.

However, the stereotype of the standard Briton, and more relatively English - is that of a person who owns too many of books and knows the entire collection of Shakespeare off by heart. So why no love? Even a Scottish person like me, although I don’t wear a kilt everyday (though that seems like it’d be kinda cool if we did) make some of the best literature in the world.

I remember playing about with various methods of reading eBooks when I was a lot more interested in reading. I hate carrying books around me but I always had a few things I carried with me each time I went out in my early teens. My iPod and my HP iPaq h1930 PDA. Each one is capable of reading text in a variety of methods, but nothing seemed to feel… right. The back-light was a major concern - I wanted to read books for more than a couple of hours - something I couldn’t do too well on a PDA - and I wanted to read them on a book-size-ish screen, something that seemed impossible in 2002 without some massive battery pack or an AC adaptor connected at all times - and I definitely wasn’t going to retrofit one of those Game Boy magnifying devices onto my iPod.

I doubt I’m the only one who would be at least interested in buying one of your readers. I almost bought a Sony Reader on my way back home from New York during the summer, something I wish I did now. I have full and free access to eBooks of quite a lot of the course books I need for the coming years, and the cost of the print versions of these textbooks are very comparable to the price of a Sony Reader or Amazon Kindle - so what would be better for me? Should I keep 10,000 pages of literature for my course taking up my so very limited space, or can I replace it with something that’s only half-an-inch thick?

You set your release dates soon, because I’m bored waiting.

There something you never live up to, but for a few weeks you try you’re best to keep them going for as long as possible.  It never happens though, does it?  Do you still remember your resolution from last year?  The year before?  I thought not, unless it was something stereotypically terrible like ‘loose weight’ or ‘go out more on my bike’.

To ensure this dilema does not occur again, i’ve painstakingly weeded out all of the bad ideas into a massive great idea. It’s not hard, it’s something I should enjoy.  I’m going to read more books. One a month.

Ok, so it’s not difficult. I’ve finished books in weeks before - but the true reason most resolutions don’t happen is because people don’t want to do them.  It’s like chores - I still have to take out some rubbish from a month ago.

Wish me luck.

Hi all,

I met most of you at this week’s first lecture for SA0731a XHTML & CSS. In fact, I met 48 of you, which is 70% of the class. You learnt much about the demise of the dinosaurs.

What of the other 21 folk? The 30% of the class that didn’t make it to the first lecture? Hrmn…not a good start for them. Have they already dropped out? Are they, even now, sunning themselves on a tropical beach as we freeze our butts off in the north?

So - here’s the deal. If lecture attendance ever goes above 85%, I’ll buy you all a chocolate bar. (I have a stash of them in my office fridge, next to the beers, and the head of that decapitated third year that kept using <blink> and <marquee>.) That’s 59 of you attending, and 10 missing. I figure my chocolate’s safe.

See you in the labs,

Linton

I’ve been hinting about a project I’ve been working on for a little while now, so it’s about time I spilled the beans just a little further and ask for a little help.

When I go on holiday people freak about how much equipment I take. A couple of SLRs, monopod, filters, beanbag and a whole load more.  What can I say, I like to be prepared - and I like to take photos.  This first came into mind when I was visiting Dublin.  It was a city I’d never been to before - wasn’t interested in the nightlife, the booze (although I did have a few too many), the shops and we definitely didn’t have the time to fully explore the city in 2 nights in the centre of the town.

Searching the net for some photographer’s favourite spots didn’t really help.  Not many hits, and the one’s that did turn up were the acclaimed tourist spots.  I wanted to find out the real Dublin, not the doors to the Guinness factory.

Photo.net has some great articles about where to shoot, and when to shoot in a select few cities around the world.  But that’s the problem. It’s TOO select.  I wanted to know from the people.  I wanted to know from the kids, the teens and the adults around the place and know where they liked to go - sneaking in early in the morning to a beach, a dock, a back alley.  Not only that, I want to SEE these places, know where they are and head out there myself.

So, I’m finding a solution to that problem.  The only thing is, I just can’t develop it without information.  I have some for Edinburgh, for Dundee - but hardly anywhere else around the globe.  I need your help.  When I go into beta at the end of the month - I already want some information to be there, otherwise the people who try to use it will find it small and not worth visiting again.

So help me!  I’m begging you! 

It’s not hard. Share a few spots you like, even if you’re not a photographer.  Comment here or send me some mail at help@phwoto.com and I’ll thank you for life!

I’m taking some inspiration from Chris Brogan’s 100 Blog Topics I Hope YOU Write…

1. When you start to think that 12 hours a day is a minimum requirement to be on your computer.
2. If you find that you have more friends online than you do offline. Keep a balance.
3. All of your twitter followers know everything about your daily habits, including each and every time you go to the bathroom.
4. You order all of your food, movies and sort out all of your bills online and never leave the house.
5. The furthest you’ve walked in the past few days is to the refrigerator.
6. When you see anything out of the ordinary in the outside world, you twitter it.
7. If you don’t blog for a few days, you get emails from your readers wondering if everything is ok.
8. Your ISP calls you daily to inform you that you’re running out of bandwidth for this month.
9. You find your sleep pattern is tuned to a different time zone, just like mine is now to CET.
10. When you start to make websites to fill in the blanks of the web, just because it’s bothering you.
11. If you have more domain names than you can count or remember.
12. You have to wear earplugs to drone out the souns of the fans you have installed on your multiple computers
13. When you have triple the amount of screens than you have computers (although that has been a dream of mine for quite a while)
14. Sleep is something you wish you had more of, but you feel that if you miss the latest story on the front page of digg before the server crashes then it’s not worth seeing.
15. If you travel, you need to check in advance to see if your hotel provides free wifi - and if not, you rebook.

I’m finding it hard to believe that two thousand and seven has already passed, it seemed not long ago since I was in high school preparing for an onslaught of exams and applying for university. Now it’s all different, i’ve seen people come and go in my life, and seen my life change completely as I moved out of my home in Edinburgh to stay with new people in Dundee.

But this change did not come lightly, as some may have realised. I found it incredibly difficult to take photos, and less than a dozen have been uploaded to flickr in the past few months. So before I change my ways back to the trigger-happy guy you’ve known to love, what are my favourite photos of 2007?

I wanted this photo to portray something that wasn’t what it appeared, and this was about how I was uncertain about where I was going in life. Still unsure about university and how things would end up, I felt like the future was unseen and unknown.

Travelling up Arthur’s Seat.

On a trip to a skate park, there were a plethora of skaters and bikers who were more than interested in getting their pictures taken.. A little but it a show off, but fun to shoot nonetheless.

And my favourite of 2007…