Monday, September 15, 2008

diy reaches maturity


i looked at this featured article How not to block cameras on instructables the other day and thought to myself: i might be witnessing the next step in the culture of diy. the fact is that this is a damned good review of the sensational project that shot across the net a few weeks ago.

what does it mean when the diy network users start really doing verification, peer review, and analysis? this is an amazing move forward when we can take back the property ceded to the cults of specialization (chew on that Keen!).

Randofo's parting shot: step 5Lastly... By all means, feel free to prove my test wrong with replicable results.

Bravo!

i think the caption in this lolcat style picture sums up his challenge to us:

Sunday, September 14, 2008

maybe i should start this post with that lame line such as: "wow it has been so long..." i will divert from that right now.

i have started working on my antenna painting project in a very real way today. i spent the last few weeks trying to find a good way to render the dragon curve (or any recursive folding system) in a vector like form so i can scale the lengths of the arms to the right wavelength(λ).



i found a nice script written in PostScript that renders the fractal beautifully posted on Dr. Charpentier's page about L-Systems. Gratefully this made my life very easy for the transfer to the image surface. i would like to improve on this so the curve never rolls on itself in the line. Guess i will need to learn some PostScript.

i decided to try to match channel 6 wavelength . This is of course the most overused channel partly because it is default. The λ of channel 6 will also allow me be sloppy as i am truly hand drawing this antenna; thus, a quarter millimeter here or there will not sink the ship.