📙 #040 - Renamed for Alphabetical Relevance
Inspiration, variable height pen plotting, giving up social media (again) and a renaming scheme.
# INTRO
It will be a short one this week; who knew that forcing yourself to read the whole thing out loud in front of a camera, often incorrectly, several times, and staring at your stupid face while editing it would inspire someone to write shorter newsletters?
With that said, the audio version should be above, and the video version is here for anyone wanting to watch me suffer:
# TEXT DASH MODE DOT ORG
You could do a lot worse than get some inspiration from the "typewriter" tag on https://text-mode.org/?tag=typewriter
Where I'm left thinking, "Yes, but code and handwriting".
Why not try Tumblr, too: https://text-mode.tumblr.com/? Are they not the same thing?
No.
Why?
I'm not sure.
# RENAMING THE NEWSLETTER
This is nerdy behind the scenes stuff, but...
I noticed that when I viewed other newsletters on SubStack and other writers, it listed the newsletters they were subscribed to in alphabetical order.
Even though I was interested in signing up for more newsletters and seeing what other people subscribed to, I got bored while scrolling down the sometimes long lists of titles.
"The Rev Dan Catt Pen Plotter Newsletter" is way down the list, while "Drawing Machines & Notes from Art Studio Robots" is much closer to the top.
Yes, I am that shallow.
But the new title is more suited to what I write about anyway.
# PRESEED
A quick note: PRESEED my plottable genart project went live last week for holders of my previous YYYSEED project. It opened up to everyone on Tuesday for a couple of weeks, and then I have... "plans" for it based on what/when things happen with the old studio sale.
# BRUSH HEIGHT + HANDWRITING
There are two things I've wanted to get working with the AxiDraw plotter; the first is generative handwriting (nailed it). The second is setting the pen height throughout the plotting process.
In a very horrid hacky/workaround I've wranged the Axidraw python library to do what I need. The short version is I keep setting the height I want on both the default pen-up and pen-down, then as I draw (using the goto command), I alternate between pen up and pen down, which forces the servo to move to the correct height.
In a very quick test I made it so the brush got lower as the drawing direction tended towards going down-left, and higher as it moved up-right. Basically a simple vector to height thingy. Even just that seems to work pretty well, although it could do with some tweaking.
There is a 100% chance that Substack would mess-up including the code here, even though it is very short, so I’ve put it here instead:
Running this spins up a little server. Then, hitting the URL http://localhost:4777/move?x=50&y=50&z=100 (and waiting/awaiting for the response) will set the pen into the highest position (z = 0-100) while also moving it to 50,50mm.
I tend not to use Python, preferring to use Nodejs (or Javascript in the browser). This allows me to still work with all the Canvas stuff and let Python handle the control.
Below are a couple of plots created from a source image.
The code above is totally unsupported and has room for improvement (controlling the speed would be one setting), but I figured someone could find it helpful.
# STUDIO UPDATE
I think everything is moving forward on the old studio sale. Last Friday, there was a deadline for something to happen for everyone to hit the deadline of the 31st. I wasn't told that the thing hadn't happened, and usually, I was told when important things hadn't happened.
Instead, I got a "things are progressing" - which ISN'T a "no".
# THE END
I’m pretty sure I’ve given social media, by which I mean twitter/X - that place is giving me more and more bad vibes, it’s, not good.
I’m not even sure if I’ll let Kitty carry on posting there, the place is overrun by bots 🤔
At the same time I don’t particularly feel like jumping into any of the replacements. So all those apps have been deleted, they’re not on my phone or my browser tabs.
Instagram is, I don’t know what any more. I liked it when it was for photos and I could see my friend’s posts. Now it’s just reels and adverts which makes me feel sad. The only saving grace is I can still toggle to the "Following" tab on mobile, so it’s staying on my phone for just a little longer.
Once again; newsletter, youtube and proper physical post, it seems. I feel like I’m probably shooting myself in the foot somewhat, but at the same time 👋
The next newsletter is all set for the 8th of August, fingers crossed for everything.
LOVE YOU ALL
Dan
❤️