Not much to report this week other than we've decided to replace the air conditioner at the house, which will take place this coming Wednesday. Fun. Even though I'm not a huge football/soccer fan, I've been watching the last couple of World Cup games. I really enjoyed the France vs. England match yesterday (England won and obtained Bronze), but the big one is today in just a couple of hours (Spain vs. Argentina). Will be cooking come burgers and dogs and plopping down on the couch the rest of the day. Studio Infrastructure I’ve been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work over the last couple of months. Some has been boring, business-related tasks, and other things have been more fun and creative. All of this has required re-organizing the physical studio as well as the logical layout of files and digital assets. There’s been hardware and software purchases, proof-of-concept testing,...
Category: Studio
Back Home and Gettin’ Busy
A Nueva York Cari and I spent the 4th of July weekend in New York at her sister’s house. My mother-in-law has been staying with us since early March (she came down for Dominic and Elvira’s wedding), and it was finally time for her Florida vacation to come to an end. She won’t fly, doesn’t drive, and is getting up there in years, so a solo train ride isn’t happening either. So, driving is the only real option. Here’s a run-down of the trip: Wednesday, July 1: Dominic and Elvira picked me up around 5:00pm and dropped me off at the rental car company, which has a branch in the Brandon mall. I got a black Mazda CX50, which is a crossover SUV. For a road trip with three people and a bunch of luggage, it’s decent. After driving it back to the house, we all packed and prepared to...
Some Semblance of Order
Studio Organization After printing, assembling, and mounting the left-hand unit, the side-cabinet project is now complete. I found that the methodology for attaching the mounting buttons to the side of the organizer was very cumbersome, even after making some adjustments to the cabinet design before printing this second unit. I need to spend more time refining this before releasing the designs to the public, as it’s a big point of frustration. All-in-all, I’m very happy with the results and the clean look vs. old, ugly, open shelves is a big improvement. Retro Computing As mentioned in a previous post, I obtained and backed up about 200 floppy disks for the ST. I finally spent time going through all the disks, of which there were about 120 that weren’t bad. The data has been dropped on the hard drive of my STE and is roughly cataloged. The only thing left to...
Side Cabinet, Side Trip
Not much of an update his week as I had a bunch of dental work done Monday morning and I was down for the count until Thursday. I'm back to normal now, though. Akro-Mils Side Cabinet Success! After a pretty extensive workout, my Bambu Lab P1P finished printing all of the pieces for my first cabinet. I was able to design all of the parts so they didn't require supports, which kept the print time down. The cabinet sections took the longest; about 36 hours of printing. Designing them to not need supports really helped that time be as low as possible. Printed parts weren't the only things needed. I had some hardware left over from a previous project and I purposefully designed the cabinets to use them. Here's what it takes: (Qty. 4) 3D printed cabinet sections (Qty. 4) 3D printed cabinet doors (Qty. 2) 3D printed shelves (Qty....
Archiving and Organizing
The Annals I've officially added an archive feature to the site. It's VERY early and there's only a single, silly item in there, but if you want to check it out, visit the Annals. As new things get added, they'll be mentioned in the Miscellany section of this blog. Video Games Another Atari ST boxed game arrived this week: Droid: The Definitive Collection published by Bitmap Soft. Although the original Droid and it's follow-up, Droid II, were released back in the '90s, there's recently been an enhanced version created of the first game by Jamie Hamshere that adds support for the Atari STE hardware as well as provides quality-of-life improvements to the gameplay. All of these are bundled into this boxed release. All of the materials for the box have been scanned, so I just need some time to get it into online archives. Studio Organization A while back I...
Preparing for 2021
I've decided to focus on deep cleaning, organizing, and purging inventory in the studio. I'm halting all of my own projects until this is complete, with the hopes I can resume everything again on Jan 1st. To that end, about a month ago I started planning out drawer organizers using foam core boards held together with hot glue. Yesterday, I was able to complete two of them. Combination of foam boards and custom 3-D printed holders (left side). There are still two more drawers in that credenza, and eight drawers in my main desk pedestals that need to be done. I hope to be able to do two drawers per week. I also took the time to completely empty off my desk (computer monitors, charging stations, etc.) and dusted and wiped everything down. I rearranged and relocated a lot of things on the desktop to a point where I could...
Studio Organizing
Cleaning up and organizing the studio has been a high priority this weekend. It's started with some smaller projects like going through the literally cleaning, week's mail, going over finances, and ripping movies. It's now progressed into making forward movement on some small projects and looking at the space here and organizing. I heard Adam Savage recently reiterate a saying has: "drawers are where things go to die." And I would agree. But he reminded me that there's a particularly interesting way to organize drawers to prevent that, which is to build an insert with custom dividers out of foam-core. With that in mind, I started looking at all the drawers in the studio and now have it on the docket to properly organize, and subsequently clean out, the drawers. This will include organizing some items, such as spare external and internal hard drives, into caddies, which I currently have...
All Taped Up
This morning I finished capturing all of the DV tapes. In total there was about 17.5 hours of footage. The next step will be to figure out how to also capture the roughly ten or so 8mm/Hi-8 tapes, of which I don't have a camcorder or deck for that format. I've ordered a capture card and need to get my hands on a playback device. Next up is doing some work around the house. Going to go apply fertilizer to the lawn and then I need to fix one of the vertical blind blades. Added to the movie library today: Capote
Archiving In Progress
Yesterday I was able to capture and archive 11 DV tapes. There are 29 tapes in total. Some are full, some aren't, but in either case capturing the video is tedious as I have to capture in realtime (a 45 minute tape takes 45 minutes to capture). Lucikly, the new computer was powerful enough to also let me archive a slew of old video game CD-ROMs and DVDs, some old software on disc, and an archive of old projects. These, plus some personal tapes were additional archives I decided to create to elimiate the possibility of loosing the data due to tape and disc degradation. Today, I continue to archive. I'm hoping everything will be finished by end of day tomorrow. I'm also going to start researching how to properly insulate the garage doors today, which is the next house project.
Some Rest and Some Fun Work
Tonight I begin a 10-day time off stretch. I need the downtime from the craziness of the day job this year. I bunch of rest is in store for me over the next few days but that doesn't mean I'm doing nothing. Tonight I installed an inexpensive Vantec Firewire 400/800 card in the new computer and hauled the old Panasonic PV-GS150 out of retirement so I can re-capture a ton of old footage back onto the computer. The project in question was shot in 2005 and 2006 and, if I recall correctly, was about 12 total hours of footage. I mainly want to recapture so I can make sure that all of the tapes are in a digital format in case they deteriorate, etc.
