Vegan Scarf Project

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28 August 2004
4 min read
1 Comment
In Craft
856 views

I love getting to play with exotic fibres, so I jumped at the chance to try spinning Soy Silk. The lovely Miss Gusset was kind enough procure me a bag full from the Victorian Guild, but it was to be quite a while until I got around to spinning it.

The chaps that make Soy Silk claim that it will take colour as well as silk. Perhaps that’s true using more caustic dyeing methods than I’m prepared to dabble in, but it certainly wasn’t the case when using Silk dyeing techniques. The colors turned out bright enough, but nowhere near the vibrancy of Silk.

Another exotic fibre winged it’s way to me from Colleen at Wild Rose Fibres, his one was Ingeo, a fibre produced from corn. Colleen did warn me not to take it above 160°C, so dyeing was out. Not a problem, as the brilliant white made a nice contrast with the dyed Soy Silk.
And a plyed yarn was born. The finished yarn was amazingly soft and pattable. You just wanted to fondle the stuff. Perhaps that’s just the spinner (very much out of the closet yarn fondler) in me talking.

I would have loved to get my hands on some hemp for warp, but Australian suppliers only seem to cater to the craft market at the only yarns available locally are more like string and quite coarse. Instead I opted for Cottolin, a cotton / linen blend, and was able to go quite silly with colours.

As it always seems a waste to go to the trouble of warping the loom for a single scarf, I warped it up for three and wove the second and third scarves using Ramie that a friend had spun. I got to weave and she got two rather nice scarves, both in keeping with the nature of my vegan project.

On finishing the scarves, I found that the Ingeo had a far lower melting point than Colleen indicated. A warm iron caused the Ingeo yarn to bead slightly on the edges of the Soy Silk / Ingeo scarf. It’s not the end of the world, but I was annoyed, and very glad to have plyed it with the Soy Silk instead of plying it on itself. As the manufacturer of Ingeo was blowing its own horn about selling a huge quantity of their product to Diesel Jeans, I hope they get their temperature stability sorted or there’s going to be a lot of pissed off consumers.
As usual, the photos don’t do the final results justice, but the shot of the skein is surprisingly good for a change.

Calls For Probe Into PM’s Spam

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27 August 2004
1 min read
1 Comment
In Politics, Technology
738 views

Labor has called for an investigation into John Howard‘s use of unsolicited email. Mr Howard has hired his son Tim’s company, Net Harbour, to spam voters in the prime minister’s blue ribbon Sydney seat of Bennelong. Labor’s technology spokeswoman Kate Lundy said the government’s own laws, which came into effect four months ago, banned commercial spamming. But the laws exempt political parties and charities from using spam, which has become a crucial tool in communicating with voters. The prime minister has breached the spirit, if not the letter of anti-spam laws, Senator Lundy said

New G5: Week 1

By
27 August 2004
6 min read
1 Comment
In Technology
1173 views

Work replaced my cruddy windows box for a G5 with a 20 inch cinema display. Now this is a design machine! It’s whisper quite, very stable going between Photoshop and Illustrator and just the usual mac gorgeousness encased in aluminium. This machine makes other things possible that my old one had either extreme difficulty or impossibility doing. For instance, right now, I am working on a 14 MB file (not huge), in Photoshop, going between my text editor, (BBedit), FTP client (Rbrowser Lite), Mail, iCal, Safari, IE 5.2 and drumroll… listening to a CD in iTunes! Yep, I couldn’t have the equivalent apps open at once while listening to a CD on my old machine, Photoshop would slow up, screen might not render terribly fast. But not now, I can listen to Red Hot Chili Peppers — Live in Hyde Park (highly reccomended) and go about my usual work stuff no probs!

My other annoyance was the colour, screen, graphics card and their interaction or lack thereof, with graphics apps. Sometimes 1px wide vertical lines would appear as two even though I new this was not so. I couldn’t get the geometry totally right either. Colour calibration was not fun on previous set up, despite having Illustrator and Photoshop set up to use the Adobe 1998 RGB profile. If I had to take screen shots, I had to do this weird song and dance, converting everything from my monitor colour space to what I wanted, to back again! Go figure! Quite often saving for web produced weird results, but resaving it fixed it. Go figure! Didn’t quite help when two geeks from work gave it a shot either. They thought they new a little about colour management. Go figure!

Such a grand screen demands a grand desktop. I haven chosen the puprle spookiness of Ravenswood Manor from pixelhuset.

The screen is gorgeous! It even comes with it’s own aluminium grey coloured cleaning cloth! How cool is that! The clarity and colour is in-fucking-credible! And the wide screen format is equally useful, I can have my psd file with my code window side by side, or a browser window. Or whatever. It’s fan-bloody-tastic! Of course Expose also makes light work of finding the appropriate document.

As I have a snazzy graphics tablet, this means I can use Inkwell to draw or write anywhere on the screen and use it in other apps as I see fit. Nice. I need to play around with it a bit more, but still nice. I haven’t played around with Fontbook as much as I’d like to, but I love what I see so far. A useless but human detail I like is in the login screen, if you enter your details incorrectly it shakes the login panel left to right like it’s saying, uh-uh! Nope!. Go on all you Panther (10.3.5) users, try it. I’ve been logging in wrong on purpose almost every morning just to see it!

Okay not so crash hot stuff: white mouse and keyboard. I am a grot. It’s already dirty. The tower is heavy I can’t lift it. Alright that’s to be expected.

Now I need some accessories: some speakers, headphones, keyboard cover might be an option. A proper graphics tablet cover would also be nice come to think of it.

How to Get a Mac When You’re Surrounded by Windows

By
27 August 2004
3 min read
Leave a comment
In Design, Technology
864 views

1. Rob bank
2. Buy mac

Or you can just rob a mac store up to you.

Or you can read on to see what I did.

I prefer macs. I’m a designer/illustrator, who can code without Dreamweaver. I’m an odd breed (job hunting and high school taught me that). I rarely use office apps, I spend my working days in Photoshop and/or Illustrator and/or Flash with a text editor, some browsers and an FTP app. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not gonna throw a tanty and demand a Mac, I’ve worked at companies with Windows machines, but I prefer the company of macs.

As a web-based software-ish travel company, the office is of course mainly Windows boxes except for the developers and some of our production team with Linux, I think there’s some Sun servers etc. The office is very anti-mac, so getting me a mac was looking impossible. We’ve got an OLD iMac for testing, but it’s hardly a design machine.

One of the previous designers, (now a project manager), used to use a mac at work, but was replaced with a windows machine for cost reasons I think. This too was indeed a strike against me getting a mac. It was looking pretty bleak, until we employed a technical documentation guy, Vergil. He and his 12 inch Powerbook G4 have been a here about 8 months and this seems to have added more credibility to the mac in the eyes of the office.

I casually said that I would like a mac at an office challenges day, (meetings where we got to make suggestions to improve working conditions and processes). This seemed to have sown the seed in our finance guy’s head.

First ‘Super Earth’ Planet Found

By
26 August 2004
50 second read
In Science
672 views

A new kind of planet has been discovered in a star system 50 light years away. It is the smallest world to be found outside our Solar System, and probably the first rocky planet found so far. The planet orbits the star mu Arae, which has been monitored by a European team of astronomers using an instrument called HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher), attached to the 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile

Bidding War Opens For Glenmorangie

By
25 August 2004
53 second read
In Business, Food
663 views

Glenmorangie was at the centre of a furious bidding war last night as the Macdonald family’s decision to sell its controlling share sent ripples of interest through the City, catapulting its shares up over 25%. The company has been valued at £250 million, but analysts say it could reach £300m if a bidding war ensues. Although no formal bids have come to the table, two front runners in Brown Foreman, (makers of Jack Daniel’s) and Bacardi have emerged

Transparent Aluminium Is Here

By
24 August 2004
50 second read
In Science
623 views

Scientists in the US have developed a novel technique to make bulk quantities of glass from alumina for the first time. Anatoly Rosenflanz and colleagues at 3M in Minnesota used a flame-spray technique to alloy alumina (aluminium oxide) with rare-earth metal oxides to produce strong glass with good optical properties. The method avoids many of the problems encountered in conventional glass forming and could, say the team, be extended to other oxides. Scotty would be pleased

Senator Blacklisted By No-Fly List

By
22 August 2004
54 second read
In Politics, Rights
550 views

Senator Edward Kennedy was turned down for a flight from Washington, DC to Boston because his name turned up on the TSA No-Fly list. He eventually got on a flight, but was again denied on his way back to DC. It took three weeks of calls to Tom Ridge and the Department of Homeland Security for the ordeal to get straightened out. But what are ordinary citizens supposed to do if the Secretary of Homeland Security won’t take their calls?

US Court Clears P2P Firms

By
21 August 2004
38 second read
In Rights, Technology, World
585 views

The makers of two leading file-sharing programs are not legally liable for the songs, movies and other copyright works swapped online by their users. Among other reasons, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals said Grokster and StreamCast Networks, unlike the original Napster, were not responsible because they don’t have central servers pointing users to copyright material

UK ISPs To Shut Down Spamvertised Web Sites

By
20 August 2004
49 second read
In Technology
568 views

UK ISPs are targeting ecommerce web sites run by spammers in a new get tough policy on junk mail. ISPs belonging to the London Internet Exchange (LINX) have voted through a code of practice which gives them the mandate to shut down web sites promoted through spam, even if junk mail messages are sent through a third-party or over a different network. The move is intended to remove the financial incentive to send spam

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