I’ve finally signed up for math-class, and am struggling with the “Matematik C” curriculum. I need it to get into any course related to computers or natural sciences, but I’m not putting near enough effort into it. It’s been fifteen years since I last took math, and back then my antipathy to math was so strong I was actively trying to forget what little I learned.

Actually, the course is officially over but I’ve asked for a month extension to allow me to catch up, so we’ll see how that’ll go. I need to do the test the 18th at the latest to be sure that my uni application for fall goes through, but this requires a couple of hours of daily practice. And I’m out of practice.

I might be doing the same mistake I did when studying philosophy, assuming that as long as you put your mind to it you ought to be able to figure things out from first principles. So you start with an intuitive understanding of 1+1 and build on that. But at this level math is mostly about learning by rote, and because I’ve been out to the loop for so long, half the time I don’t even know what problem I’m tasked with answering. “Describe a function” is not an invitation to write an essay, but something with an actual answer, and as always when you’re learning something new, the glossary seems arbitrary and made up by a stupid-poopy-head.

The TI-82 graphing calculator Zenobia lent me has a 150 page manual, and having been spoiled by GUIs for so long it feels as if I’m learning Dwarf Fortress. But it’s fun in a PRESS SHIFT+Ln+min/max way and I’m scouring the second hand market for a calculator of my own. SMBC sums up my findings quite well so far.

On the upside, I designed and printed my own graphing paper, and had it bound. Each page has different colours, and the paper is watermarked and really nice to write on using the extra soft pencil leds I found in the third store I asked. My priorities are not what they ought to be, but at least my notebook is perty.

As a small vacation, I and Sara took a weekend in Malmö. I haven’t spent much time there, so we had three days walking about, taking pictures of her old haunts and apartments, gorging ourselves on vegan cake and whatnots. Nice city, and it would have been even better if we’d gotten ourselves bikes. Speaking of which, the Malmö initiative Cykelköket has a branch in Göteborg. They seem nice!

Regardless of how bland and uninspiring you find something — be it music, art, food, whatever — there will be some people for whom it was a defining moment of their lives. For example, Jakob Hellman had some hits twenty years ago and is still fondly remembered for his one and only album. He performed yesterday at the city theatre, and Sara got us on the guest list. The cover charge for this low key evening was 250 kronor, which is 200 more than I would have considered paying, but judging from the 200 odd people in attendance others aren’t as cheap as I.

Hearing a song live which you’ve been singing in the shower for a couple of years can be great fun, and there’s something to be said about seeing the original artist perform it. But I’m not sure if Hellman managed to rekindle the memories of youthful naïveté in his audience, or if he just piddled on the embers.

So, anyway. Last couple of months have been eventful.

I’ve moved in with Sara and Tura in our own apartment. For the first time in forever I have my own name on the door and actually live where I am registered. Beside everything else, it’s a good feeling to be able to greet neighbours without wondering who will start asking questions about when you moved in and if you’re subletting legally. Besides the everyday hassle of arranging to pay bills in someone elses name, and getting the mailman to deliver your post, it’s grating to constantly be nervous that something might break which you won’t be able to fix yourself and can’t call a super about.

We’ve already called the super over twice, and actually getting a busted bathroom tap repaired within a day is a surreal experience. Renting an apartment feels good. Of course, there are some minor issues. For example, since only Sara is on the contract, the super put up only her name on the door. Apparently it’s policy, and besides he couldn’t be arsed to get over here with a Dymo to print a new label. So I bought a Dymo and now have a fancy label on the door, set in a “hollow, italic, fat, border” style, which says “S. Henriksson & M. Pozar.” Yes, I’ll be posting a picture as soon as I’m done admiring it. There’s another option for the styling on the Dymo, a wide papyrus scroll, and I’ll have to see which one is more classy.

Petter showed up with the kids last week and we had the first “guests over for dinner” event, and just the other day Carl-Johan dropped by for lunch, so we’ve checked “someone just casually stopping by” on the todo-list as well. We’re going to throw a housewarming party or somesuch as soon as we have the “somewhere to sit” issue resolved, but so long as we keep to a manageable number of visitors at any given time, we’re open for business.

Unless I’ve explicitly told you to fuck off, we have a standing blood feud, or I owe you lots of money, consider this an invitation to drop by at any time for tea, coffee, beans or wine (bring wine). Look me up in the book, I’m listed at my own adress, dontcha know.

There’s a good chance that you haven’t seen the webcomic Hark! A vagrant! even though you ought to.

Kate Beaton, the artist, also runs a Tumblr with stuff related to the comic over at beatonna.tumblr.com and in a post she asked people to email her links to comics. It’s a very long list, and if you ever feel like you have too much free time on your hands, or if you just don’t care to be a productive member of society, take a gander: Be excellent to each other.

I don’t follow all that many comics these days: Octopus Pie, Abominable Charles Christopher, lackadaisycats Oglaf, Perry Bible Followship, Penny Arcade, Battlepug, Powernap, and I wish that Warbot in accounting would start up again.

It’s kinda amusing when you read the list over at Kates post, and then take a look at the fare that readers of Warren Ellis generally repost.

Two gigs I’ve been to recently. Koloni presented Charles Haywood at Kajskjul Fyra Sex, and Kylesa performed along with two other bands at Truckstop Alaska. Haywood was rather fun to watch as he was making a twisted angry face at the microphone — his music is repetitive and manic, just as his stage presence — and occasionally it’s great fun to listen to good and tight drums.

A week later, four of us took the ferry over to see Kylesa at Truckstop. I thought their melodic trash metal was humdrum and uninspired, and the headbanging so perfunctory they might as well have hired extras to do it. Mine was a minority opinion though, and Petter even bought their record.

This can be interesting: The Pirate Bay is sharing 3D models for printing, so far only using the category Physibles on the original site. Right now there are mostly dupes of stuff from Thingiverse, and seeing as the interface is the usual forum link-dump there’s no preview or version control, but it’s still an interesting development for two reasons: For one, once 3D sharing sites will start to be harassed on IP-issues, there will be be a chilling effect on the distribution and usage of models, so we’ll need a safe haven for that. TPB has proved rather resilient.

(Further on, it’s easy to foresee 3D-printers which won’t print non-signed models, taxation on printing materials used privately, consumer protection laws which are stretched to encompass personal fabrication, etc, so there will have to be forums to discuss circumvention and open source practices)

Think about it this way: If piracy of IP today mostly is a concern for a few companies in the western world – regardless if it’s clothes, movies or medicine — what will happen when the manufacturing industries start to feel threatened by the infringement on their manufacturing prerogative? Previously, someone ordered 1000 Gucci bags from your factory and you spat them out, regardless if the person you ordered them from was a pirate or Gucci; either way, you had a business model – making stuff. If now the pirates are not only threatening the IP of some of your clients, but also the necessity of including you in their piracy, you’re suddenly standing with a factory without orders.

I think that fabbing can be a boon to humanity in many ways, but as always with disruptive technologies there will be a huge backlash, and the sooner we can build infrastructures for dealing with reactionary policies the better. Which ties in with the second reason this is interesting, which has to do with the development of a public discourse on the subject.

So far the ideas surrounding fabbing are best described in science fiction and by those in the field – Bruce Sterlings Shaping Things comes to mind — but they’re slowly gaining mainstream attention; Petter told me he saw 3D printing mentioned in a lifestyle & decoration magazine which usually is concerned with spring colours and feelgood food. Just as in art though, the debate will sooner or later come down to what we are printing, rather than that we are printing, and if TPB can be a platform to foster experimentation with fabbing, we’ll have another generation which is used to remix and copy and paste and mash things up, only now with physical objects rather than media. But for that to happen there needs to be practice and debate, and tpb putting it’s weight behind the issue can only accelerate that.

—It’s miserable, utterly and totally miserable.
—Miserable, really?
—Yeah, really. It’s not clean enough, people leave stuff everywhere, and then someone does something like this.

She waves at the noise from the two furthermost washing machines. Someone had had the temerity to use the machines she had booked, and hadn’t left a note explaining that the two other machines were free to use; the guy had shown up early and switched sets. —Really, how thoughtless and stupid can you be?

One has to sympathise with anyone who gets up early on Saturday to disorder sown by an interloper, who doesn’t even have so much courtesy as to be present for a good telling to. But “misery” is something I’d reserve for suffering dysentery on a bus with overflowing bathrooms, or losing an arm in an industrial accident because you’re worn out by pulling double shifts to afford chemo. Poor scheduling just doesn’t fill out the burlap sack of “misery.”

The woman doing the complaining was my age, perhaps slightly younger, and I was surprised that she chose me to commiserate with. Granted, I was the only person available, and possibly she suspected that I was the culprit and tried to shame me, but still; What did she expect once I’d mumbled sympathetically to the first two stanzas?

When I moved to my own place a while back I had to engage with a lot of stuff that I hadn’t given a thought of before. On Facebook, I asked for advice on which dish rack to get. The post received more comments than any other I’d made, so clearly I had touched a nerve. I took it as an informed debate on the merits of different materials and designs, but I got another perspective on the matter when I spoke to Anna some time later. She was upset exactly because the question had garnered so many replies.

And I can understand the unease and even anger: Is this really something which is worthwhile to think about, let alone discuss? Isn’t this a typical example of the banalities we complicate to give ourselves meaning? There’s an impulse there to say “fuck it, we’re googling ‘dish rack’ and ordering the first hit,” but to give up conscious thought in favour of apparent randomness, seems misguided at best and possibly disingenuous.

Of course, I think that being upset at the smaller preoccupations of everyday life only has a limited use. It’s good because it forces you to set clear goals for yourself, and make manifest your values and those expected of your surroundings. On the other hand, if you sweat the small stuff too much you’ll soon start to think of yourself not as someone who has control and ambitions, but as someone who has to obey certain rules and keep standards, and then you lose track of the bigger picture. In fact, you might end up wondering why your idiot neighbour doesn’t understand the importance of lint in the dryer.

The holidays passed with little fanfare, I spent them in Stockholm with the closest family at hand and the rest at Skype distance. Mom isn’t her full self at the moment, and the dinners were slightly less elaborate than the five course meals we usually make. I rediscovered how much work goes into making the potatoe-dumplings, which I wolf down by the dozens. Christmas Day I and Tomasz joined in the public celebration of the birth of beer, and sat with Admas in a bar and discussed ambitions, and fashion, and then I think I had Calvados?

On a recommendation from Miss Walker I visited Tevere, a bakery which also carries vegan pizza. Rather on the expensive side, but the pizzas were awesome both times I ate there.

New Years day was spent at the gym with Sara, where I nearly passed out. I can only assume that my body shut down out of fear that I would become too fit and muscular. In the evening a bunch of us gathered at Petters new place. We saw the fireworks over Hissingen skyline, although I saw most of it through the viewfinder, being concerned with capturing it. Next year I’d like to be somewhere where the explosions can actually be felt. It’s well know that arrhythmia heightens ones appreciation of sparkling things.

Andreas visited for a short while, and then he left for New York — or as it’s henceforth known: Nävvan. I’m still working on the mixtape he’s getting for birthday. I’ll have to make up for it by making it really good, and perhaps actually sending him a magnetic tape. I have half a sack of those just waiting for coming to use…

And speaking of having a bunch of old stuff laying around, I’m trying to getting rid of as much of it as possible, as we’re moving in together. This is momentous and exciting, and a first for me. We’re already discussing wall colours and such, and my suggestions of stripes the colours of a 1920 ice-cream stand have met with tacit approval. Perhaps it’s not so much approval as acceptance and stoic suffering; “Enduring love” as it were. Or perhaps it’s just an understanding that I talk a lot and will likely have changed my mind before we move in.

I’m moving out of my place as soon as possible and have hopefully already found a taker, and we’re moving into our new place beginning of March. This is going to be an exciting spring! I’m gonna Sawyer y’all into plastering and painting walls, so you might as well start digging out your coveralls. I’ll consider offering light snacks and coffee to sweeten the deal even further. But before we get to that, there’s the whole “moving” thing. You’ll be happy to know that you’re welcome for that as well, as there’s no end of the enjoyment my friendship offers.

Then, you start interpreting the high heart rate, and odd feelings, as you being *really* aroused. And lo, people end up with things like zombie fetishes, from masturbating late at night while watching horror movies. Or, your particular kink. Seriously, I wish this was something that was covered in sex-ed. Kids! Don’t masturbate to something unless you are willing to develop a fetish for it!

→ Ask.metafilter, Elysum: Comment on How does one get rid of ones scat fetisch?

The initial scale of thirteen classes (zero to twelve) did not reference wind speed numbers but related qualitative wind conditions to effects on the sails of a man-of-war, then the main ship of the Royal Navy, from “just sufficient to give steerage” to “that which no canvas sails could withstand.”[2] At zero, all his sails would be up; at six, half of his sails would have been taken down; and at twelve, all sails would be stowed away.[3]

→ Wikipedia: Beufort scale

Toward the end of the 1950s, N. W. Ayer reported to De Beers that twenty years of advertisements and publicity had had a pronounced effect on the American psyche. “Since 1939 an entirely new generation of young people has grown to marriageable age,” it said. “To this new generation a diamond ring is considered a necessity to engagements by virtually everyone.” The message had been so successfully impressed on the minds of this generation that those who could not afford to buy a diamond at the time of their marriage would “defer the purchase” rather than forgo it.

→ The Atlantic, Edward Jay Epstein: Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?

Your piracy is only ultimately ‘costing’ the overall economy anything if you then reduce your working hours and take a pay cut that exactly offsets the money you would otherwise have spent on music. If instead you do the same amount of work and take the money and do something else with it – anything else – then the overall world economy has lost precisely nothing. That money winds up going to someone, somewhere. It stays in the system. It isn’t magically destroyed.

→ Slashdot comment, AdamWill (604569): Swiss Gov’t: Downloading Movies and Music Will Stay Legal

Olle Essvik has been working on a computer game based on Beckets Waiting for Godot. A month ago he gave a presentation of the finished first part of it at Gallery 54, and I took the opportunity to record a short video. If you like to play the game you can do so at jimpalt.org/waitingfor and should you want to learn more about the making of and thoughts behind it, you can read an interview in Swedish at konsten.net and another in English over at Game Scenes.

Following that, Andreas Vesterlund is presenting the Skup Palet event week Your Mentality is Alert. It was a week-long process oriented collaboration which ended with not so much an “opening” as a “closing of the process so far.” In practice, it’s difficult to organize something which looks like an opening without interpreting it as one, but in the video Andreas tries his best to explain what has been going on and some of the ambitions going into it.

Both videos are in Swedish.

Every once in a while I think I ought to be more serious in documenting these kinds of events in Gothenburg, but can’t seem to make good on my ruminations. If you enjoy these videos, or if you have suggestions on improvements, let me know and I’ll add your voice to the todo-choir.

Honestly, one of the things driving my ambition to make a more focused video blog is that I get to play with my old MIDI keyboard, and I’d have to finally learn After Effects properly to do titles and whatnot. In addition to, you know, providing a cultural service with above average editing and good taste.

For the first time since I got back from Finland, I strapped on my tights, beanie and running shoes, and ventured into an absurdly warm november evening to frighten people by doing wheezing and shuffling noises. It went well. And to rekindle another positive habit I entertained in Turku, I’m posting another video from my residency; I finally have an edited version of the presentation I gave at the end of the project.

It’s just short of forty minutes, and it includes a short backstory of me and projects which seemed relevant to fabbing, a brief timeline and explanation of 3D printing in general and the RepRap specifically, and then an overview of how the project changed during in the process of realisation.

Over at Changesurfer Radio, J. Hughes interviews Erik Olin Wright about the definition of “class” and how that concept has changed the past hundred years. It’s very basic stuff, but seeing as much of the debate and polemics of the day assume so much — especially on the topic of post-industrial or post-class society — that it’s good to be reminded of what a useful tool class analysis can be, and that it’s still highly relevant. I recommend that you follow the link below.

→ Changesurfer Radio, J.Hughes: Class Analysis: Interview with Erik Olin Wright

I rejected the offer to work with Abramovic and MOCA — to participate in perpetuating unethical, exploitative and discriminatory labor practices — with my community in mind. It has moved me to work towards the establishment of ethical standards, labor rights and equal pay for artists, especially dancers, who tend to be some of the lowest paid artists.

→ Artinfo, Sara Wookey: Letter From a Dancer Who Refused to Participate in Abramovic’s MOCA Performance

Paid posting is a well-managed activity involving thousands of individuals and tens of thousands of different online IDs. The posters are usually given a task to register on a website and then to start generating content in the form of posts, articles, links to websites and videos, even carrying out Q&A sessions.

→ Technology review, KFC: Undercover Researchers Expose Chinese Internet Water Army

After I asked her scary things like what’s her reason for wanting to become a celebrity while enduring such difficulties at a young age, and hasn’t she heard of idols whose youth and talent were exploited after they signed so-called ‘unfair contracts,’ she answered me. ‘Reporter Onni, be honest. If a person like me, without money or connections, and whose grades are so-so, somehow goes to university, what is there after that? Even though it’s a little difficult now, you know that if I just get an agency, that is a real opportunity to me.

→ The Grand Narrative, Kang In-kyu: What did Depraved Oppas Do to Girls’ Generation?

My cousin is visiting with me for a couple of days, and since I ran out of ideas for sightseeing after one day, yesterday found us sitting in a bar and me forcing him to lie to the camera; this is the resulting video. You will note that it says “01″ which is indicative of my ambition of making him lie some more. The next time I’ll set the audio levels lower.

Here’s something that I didn’t think about. I had skipping on extruder as well as Y & X, but hadn’t thought that the pulley grub screw needed a flat surface to press against. Here I was thinking that the heat was melting the inner bore and allowing slippage (which might still be happening) but filing the motor shafts flat hadn’t occurred to me. Lucky me there’s an instructional video on the process, which seems straightforward enough.

→ Filing flat a motor shaft: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBnKPEnt9a4

Regardless, I’m still getting metal pulleys, and having looked at how coarse the T5 belt is and how it’s jumping on my printed pulleys, I’m probably moving to T2.5 belts. Now if I could only find a local source of the stuff which didn’t cost a fortune, I’d be set. On IRC I spoke with some guy in Poland who was buying and shipping the stuff, but couldn’t get a quote from him. And the pulleys had to be hand drilled, which seems a bother if there are pre-drilled ones available. Suggestions are welcome; the ones I’ve found so far seem too expensive for what it is, I mean, how much can diecasting pulleys cost?

Someone is starting to assemble a guide for beginners into the art and magic of building a RepRap, and it’s off to a good start. If you want an overview of the build process, check out reprapbook.appspot.com. I wish that page had been live when I started out, but you know what? Back then we didn’t have fancy e-books but read the wiki and begged in chats, and we would count ourselves lucky!

Svart Katt is an Alleycat in Gothenburg, and yesterday was the third time it was organized in as many years. As soon as I’d heard about the first one, I wanted to take part. Who wouldn’t like to wear corpse paint and bike furiously across the city, scouting out dark places in search of clues and whatnots? Apparently most people are uninterested in this, Tobbe calling it “hipster orienteering,” so I ended up not going. This year though, I thought that I’d give it a chance, alone or otherwise. And it was awesome.

There were plenty of solo riders there, but I got to chatting with John, a friendly Irish fellow, and we teamed up — he needed someone reading Swedish, I needed motivation to go through with it — and it worked out well. With a delayed start at twenty past nine we set out to find answers to all the questions on our map. It was stuff like “how many cherubs are there on the lamp-posts in Vasaparken” and “when did the youngest unwed daughter of this family die,” questions which quite often had us running about cemeteries with flashlights.

All were in costume, and it was grand to see groups swish by on bikes, navigating drunk kids near Trädgården or slippery leafs and taxicabs. The theme of the night was “bad mood” — dålig stämning — which later would serve to explain why some stuff was marked out wrong on the map, annoying the shit out of us. The theme was successful, as it were. At half twelve we came in for a checkpoint and received a new map with new missions, and had one hour until deadline.

In hindsight, we should have paid more attention to the instructions. We thought we were still looking for answers to questions, but twenty minutes in we realise that we’re probably looking for a physical object — most likely the chains I had overheard mentioned at the stop. So goddamn fuckbucket, now with a drizzle and headwind we head toward Majorna in hope of scoring one of the chains furthest from city center. We found bike traces but no chains, and the clues were obtuse and hilariously annoying. Theme succeeded once again.

So with no chains found, we head back to the finish just in time to not be disqualified, and John gets some beers which I’m looking forward to repaying at some point. It’s too cold outside the bike club, and stifling inside, so we alternate until it’s time for the prize announcements. The winner had only two chains, so it’s a comfort knowing it wasn’t just us being stupid. John came in seventh, but not I, which was a surprise because we had filled in the same answers to everything. I assumed that I’d forgotten to fill something out and ask to check it out, and was told that the final score is adjusted by some dice you got to throw at the half-way stop; I rolled “white” which deduced some points, while John rolled “black” which gave him some. Once again, annoying as hell in it’s arbitrariness, and a success for the theme.

All in all, it was great fun, made even more so when I had someone to bike with. Until next time I’ll have to fix my brakes. And perhaps some gears, a headlamp, something waterproof to wear, not to mention my wheezing, coughing and general unfittiness. I got to see new places and pedal furiously, eat vegan space sausage in a dark cemetery, and met some friendly people. Good time and I’m looking forward to the video of it all. Below is the video from the first year.

iTunes keeps track of how many times you listen to songs, and upon my return from Finland I’ve apparently listened to Fucking Werewolf Asso’s album Kid, just letting you know we’re doing it again 69 times. I was sure the number would be higher, but there you go. Ever since I saw them at Henriksberg two years ago, I’ve been hoping to catch them again, and yesterday they played at Pustervik for the release of their computer game, made by Cactusoid I think. The game looks like any self-respecting retro LOL-pixel adventure ought to, judging from the video loop the band had in the background.

It was enjoyable to hear old and new ditties, and singer Dennis is shouty and entertaining. There was a strange vibe to their show though; While Dennis is a spastic nihilist who’s jumping around (probably very bruised today) Martin is an angry drummer who keeps tipping over cymbals and swatting at things, particularly the new bass player EmoHair who mostly tries to hit people with his instrument and whose strongest card is “menacing pose.”

Had I been a bit more drunk or a half my age I wouldn’t have minded the posturing and the throwing of stuff, but since I got the show straight from work I was too sober not to frown disapprovingly on throwing cymbals at audience and staff. In all, it was a throwback to the days of mosh pits and bodysurfing; The music is excellent and would the energy be focused more on kicking ass instead of each other the show would be even better.

I’ve been back from Finland for a week, but my ambitions and sense of urgency hasn’t caught up yet. I have enough material for a couple of more Turku videos, not to mention the hours and hours of assembly footage I should put together for the general betterment of the RepRap noob community. Somehow the beer and the Sara and the visiting mom and — not to put too fine a point on it — the stupendous amount of lazy I can bring forth has been given priority above most other things.

The printer is on my kitchen table, in pieces, but with an aura of assembliness about it. I left the printing bed in Finland, seeing as it was temporary to begin with and the plexi was all messed up like, so I need to get one of those; Need to decide on either a solid metal or PCB heating element, and find a source of cut and drilled glass.

Sara has already invited people over to my place for a print party next week in an attempt at social blackmail. So with the start of a few evening courses this week, I go back to work for money as well as continue the printing work for glory.

Tomorrow I start teaching two photo courses, and after the last one finishes I’m hoping to catch Fucking Werewolf Asso play at Pustervik. You should really come because they’re bloody awesome and their albums — which you can practically steal here — kept me going late night in the studio. I first saw them play a set just after Civil Civic two years ago, and as it happens Civil Civic played yesterday at Jazzhuset and I ended up going since Petter had a man-cold and Sara needed company.

I’ve seen them the three times they’ve played Gothenburg, and even though the music is made for driving cars through deserts and/or biking very fast, it’s quite a treat to have the base and drum hit you at a live show as well. As it happens, they just finished recording their crowdfunded album, and you can listen to it in the nifty embed below, or just go to their homepage and give them your ill-gotten gains: civilcivic.com. Sixty odd people where at the concert yesterday, and the mood was good and I was very happy that I’d brought my Etymotic in-ear headphones cause the noise was noisy as all fuck.

Also, as a public service announcement: I shoot video quite often and imagine that people are annoyed when I’m in their way. I do my best not to be too much of a bother, and try not overdo it. For example, I don’t stand front and center of the small stage wearing a stupid hat, trying to record half the concert on my iPhone. Don’t be that guy, cause that guy is a jerk.

As my residency is coming to a close, I’m getting to the things I’d initially thought I’d get done the first week. Like for example putting up a presentation of Gallery Titanik where the residency is housed. With the co-operation of Kimmo Modig, the director of the gallery, I finally got around to it.

It’s been a long road, but my Reprap Mendel Prusa 3D printer is finished and I’m printing stuff. There have been so many problems and fuckups along the way, that when I finally started printing stuff a week ago I didn’t think much of it, but with hindsight it was a Grand Moment™. I’ve joined the ranks of 3D printers. You may now commence the “oohing” and “aahing” I understand are my dues.

So far, with the exception of a frog and a replacement LM8UU Y axis holder, I’ve mostly been printing calibration cubes. These are shapes intended to troubleshoot your printer and give you an opportunity to get your Skeinforge/Sfact setting correct. As you can hear in the video there’s some rattling going on on the Z-axis, and I have some trouble with Y-alignment on some prints, but with lowered acceleration on Z and Y, and perhaps tightening of the belt on the latter, I think I’ll be able to print halfway decent parts.

Sara came over for a few days, and as any good boyfriend I set about making her feel comfortable helping out with the build. It was much appreciated as it often seems I have three hands too few to get something assembled. Making the print bed was slow going, and as I’m using plexiglass for print surface we broke off a couple of pieces before getting a more-or-less square one. The plexi is actually good for printing on cold, at least once the PLA starts sticking to it, but if your hotend gets too close the PLA fuses with the surface, and you’ll inadvertently run the head through the board which will create pockmarks in the surface, and possibly plug your nozzle with plexi — which is the reason I’m printing with the 0.5mm nozzle instead of the 0.35 I started with.

We were leveling the print table for a good two hours, and found that the design with springs between the lower and print bed wasn’t optimal, since the springs were unevenly springy. I had bought a whole kit with the suckers but none seem to fit well enough and give enough force to work. It’s a good design on paper, but we found that it was just easier to use two sets of nuts per fastener bolt. Protip: Get spanners which fit instead of fiddling with adjustable ones or pliers; it’ll save you so much time and temperament it’s worth the expense.

At this moment thanks might be in order. A great amount of those go out to Traumflug for design and massive help with the electronics, and Kliment, Triffid_Hunter, Action68 and everybody else who’s been quick to lend support in #RepRap on IRC or on the reprap.org forums. When you’re as ignorant of a subject as I was about the RepRap, you rely on the help and input of friends and strangers, and without the support of everyone from awesome girlfriend Sara to KKV electro to that guy who barely spoke English but cut me some metal rods, this project might have fallen over and not gotten up after any of innumerable stumbles.

Of course, thanks to the people here in Turku for providing an incentive to start this, as well as the means and time to finish it. Ultimately, bigup to Adrian Bowyer for getting the RepRap project started, as well as all those who keep improving upon it. I have a public presentation of the project on Thursday 6th October at 1800 in Gallery Titanik in Turku, and if you’re nearby I’d love to see you there.

Last Friday, while Pilvari Pirtolas had his opening here at gallery Titanik, I was sitting in an adjacent room and fiddled with my machine. I had managed to get the extruder to heat up and the thermistor to register in Pronterface — a previous day of troubleshooting revealed that I’d connected the hotend to the wrong two pins of the Gen7 board — and now it was heating up with no problem and only a slightly worrying amount of smoke. Once it was mounted on the Accesible Wade’s extruder I was good to go for extrusion test.

I got some visitors from the opening next door, and it was fun to see some people react with curiosity and others with disinterest to the machine. To the uninitiated it looks mostly like a heap of metal and plastic, so the awesome disruptive power isn’t always readily apparent, so I got to practice my pedagogical skills on young and old, tipsy and wasted alike. Once I realized that all motors had the wrong polarity in relation to the Teacup firmware, I pressed “reverse” instead of “extrude” and lo! there was extrusion and much exaltation all around!

For the past three weeks I’ve been in Turku, in the studio of Gallery Titanik, whacking away at the RepRap Mendel Prusa 3D printer. I’ve been kept so busy toiling with this that I’ve lost sight of the grander scheme of things, like why I’ve been building the printer in the first place. I’ve been putting off communicating what I’m doing not because I don’t think it’s worthwhile, but rather because the more immediate problems of finding screws or getting the electronics to work seemed so much more pressing; and besides, it ought to be obvious what I’m doing, no?

Then again, every once in a while it’s good to remind oneself that one of the few telling differences between an artist and a crazy person is that an artist at least nominally does her stuff for an audience, while the crazy keeps to herself or only occasionally performs for medical personnel.

If the Work of art in the age of reproduction spoke about the disappearance of aura, of authenticity and a direct interaction between any one artist and her audience, the means of reproduction through RepRaps and similar DIY machines reintroduce at least the authenticity of the machine — or its configuration, parts and calibration — into the object.

There are things about fabbing which sets it apart from traditional reproduction, as for example there is no original on which any copy is modeled but only a digital model created to exist in a different medium from that of any physical copy. Any artworks which are printed from a CAD file are originally only ever mathematical descriptions in a 3D-file format on computer storage. So although the printed object isn’t unrelated to the artwork, it certainly has a random element to it, a stutter in its materiality.

Historically art was about creating objects which based on esthetics and social function were considered “artistic,” then around the time of Fountain it became explicitly about an artistic aura, and then fluxus removed even the “work” part of “art work” which after post-modernism left us with the free-for-all shit buffet we’re at today. Perhaps fabbing could at least offer a lifesaver?

With fabbing, we have the possibility of having art which is highly conceptual, but which manifests itself physically not by the mediation of the initial artist, but rather through printers — machines and their operators — which exist in a DIY sphere and so are all different, temperamental, uneven; In another word, they are unique. But just as we don’t give artistic merit to the assembly-line worker who manufactures the printer with which we print our photographs, we are unlikely to attribute artistic merit to whomever assembled the printer which prints our CAD-models.

Rather, an actualized 3D-print might be the artwork of an artist, but it’ll have the aura of the machine, or rather the aura of the DIY home fabrication process of building and tuning the machines; If movements can impart aura, it’s an aura of industry dependent on craft, an inversion of industrialization, transforming engineers into cottage industry artisans churning out other peoples art objects.

nathan7: and I want a good print
nathan7: a really good print
nathan7: without overhangs ruining things
nathan7: it’s about the end result here

From a discussion on IRC #RepRap

The idea of personal fabrication is positioned to affect the manifestation and appreciation of art as soon as some critical mass and manufacturing capacity is reached: The result will be analogue objects bearing the likeness of art; not simulacrum or simulation, but a second order relation to the artwork, twinned with the aura of machine. Perhaps fabbing can be a disruptive enough technology to change the artists role into something new, something interesting, something other than making artworks.

I got the frame of the Prusa more or less assembled, even though I still need to make sure that it’s straight and so forth. The motors are mounted and connected to the correct rods or belts, and they are stepping at 1/16 nicely, although the LM8UU bearings don’t seem as smooth as I’d like them to be; I will probably re-assemble the Y-carriage whenever I add the hotbed, seeing as that might be cause for some misalignment and grinding.

Robin from the forums popped by the studio and we compared builds and I got some advice which is always welcome; where to source materials, in what order to assemble specific parts, why patience usually pays off better than a flamethrower, etc.

The long M3×60 screws for the adjustable extruder have proved elusive, so I’ve gone for an M3 rod I’ll put wingnuts on. Once you get warmed up and understand how things are supposed to fit together and what functions they perform, you relax enough to improvise. It’s a good feeling. The Makergear hotend shipped with a mounting plate which doesn’t fit my Accessible Wade’s Extruder so I schlepped the studio bike around looking for 4mm plywood to drill a replacement. Once that’s done and the hotend built, I’m pretty close to testing to print.

Perhaps I’ll be able to melt som plastic into a horrible blob in time for tomorrows opening of the new show here at Titanik and impress Sara who’s coming over for a few days. That would be most excellent.

Before you can print from your STL file you need to convert it to gcode. Think of it as Postscript for 3D-printers and 2D routers. The tool of choice for people working with RepRap has been Skeinforge, which has acquired tons of functionality at the expense of usability: It’s ugly as sin and has more features than are properly documented (or documented at all) so I’m happy to see that there are alternative versions cropping up, like SFACT.

Also, putting the printer together I ran into some issues with the otherwise excellent documentation put together by Gary Hodgeson, namely the parts using the LM8UU linear bearings instead of printed bushings. Because I don’t have any spare parts I’m terrified of messing up those I bought from Greg Frost (shipped all the way from Australia) so am anxiously browsing the RepRap wiki and forums in search of instructions. I’ve already managed to put the Y-motor bracket in every position possible, and finally had to email Greg to get a picture of how to do it properly. I’m documenting every step, but so far it’s more of a blooper reel…

I finally found an excellent description of how to fit all the parts together: How to build up a LM8UU Linear Bearing Prusa. It does exactly what it says on the tin, and with the exception that I’m going for a three bearing bottom plate, I ought to be able to finish the build in no time. Now, if I could only settle on which lubricant to use for the rods, I’d be set. “Light machine oil” or “PTFE spray” is the question.

————————————

Update from the comments. In the video below I’ve inserted the pins from the wrong side. The black plastic bits should go on the underside of the Polo, so that it’ll sit flush with the mounts. As it stands, the Polos work for me soldered this way as well, but it’s more finicky and there’s a risk that you’ll have too much solder left and won’t be able to push the pins far enough into the mounts.

So I re-read the Gen7 1.2 instructions, and found there a note that one should solder the male headers onto the Pololus. I had thought that the pins were a tight enough fit not to necessitate soldering, but gave it a go regardless. And what do you know, it bloody worked. Getting this to work has been a major hurdle, and it’s been an ongoing bother the past two months. So yay me, and yay to Traumflug who has been a great help, and yay let’s move on to other problems now. Like for example finding spare parts to the hot end I just broke.

Perhaps I ought to learn at least some phrases in Finnish. I feel as close to an imperialist as I’ve ever have, asking people “svenska, talar du svenska?” all the time. Case in point: I forgot to bring a carry-around bag so went hunting for one in second hand stores. In one cramped store I find a cloth bag but try to ask the older lady if she possibly has something similar but with longer handles, appropriate for fashionable slinging up on ones shoulder. I go through English and Swedish and pantomime and am bringing out my notebook for some Pictionary, when both she and her co-worker just wave me out of the store, with a “thank you” (unless “kippis” has a second meaning, such as “shove off”) and gesturing that I can take the bag and leave. At least I hope that’s what they meant, but for all I know they thought I was telling them to “put all your money in this bag, make it large money,” and they were thanking me for not hurting them. I don’t know.

I had ambitions when I first got here that I’d use the time to whip my pasty butt into some sort of shape resembling an actual butt, and started out strong with jogging every second day and even going so far as to checking out the dorm gym. A week later I’m feeling a slight cold coming on and I’m drinking beer and eating crisps for dinner. I’m sure there is a middle-ground somewhere, but I’d be fucked if I can find it. I do hope that I’ll keep up the running though, if for no other reason than to balance out the hours sitting in the studio poking at the RepRap.

Speaking of which, I’m having some progress in the building department, and have half of it put together already. It’s probably the most straightforward part of this whole endeavor, and mostly entails following instructions and spinning a lot of bolts onto rods and such, but at least there’s a physical thing I can point to and say: Behold! Yesterday twas but a heap of rods, today it stands on it’s extruded feet. Verily, progress! etc. etc.

Two more observations regarding the traffic in Turku: First off, the bikers here drive poorly, often on sidewalks or against the flow of other bikes, while at the same time not signaling. This is in large part because the bike lanes are merged with sidewalks more often than motor traffic, and it’s just too crowded with pedestrians to allow smooth going.

Secondly, drivers are much less likely to stop for you at a zebra crossing, even if you’re already halfway in the road. Anecdotal data, and so on, but it’s happened enough times for me to notice. Also, people are very hesitant to walk on red on a crossing, even when it’s safe; It’s possible they know something I don’t. My lack of inhibition in this area makes me feel very low level badass, as pedestrian badassery goes.

Maybe related: back home people get the hell out of the way when there’s an emergency vehicle flashing lights, while on three occasions I’ve seen an ambulance or cop car stuck behind traffic which didn’t budge. Granted, once it was an older driver obviously lost and looking for the right exit, but you’d imagine that the honking, blinking, waving and shouting police behind her was a clear enough signal. So perhaps it’s an indication of an individualistic yet wary mindset? Should one do generalizations of a whole city — nay people —  on the basis of walking back and forth along four streets for a week? Of course one should, what kind of question is that?

Having set up the studio space here in gallery Titanik I’m once again struggling with the electronics of the RepRap. I got the board back from Traumflug — in addition to fixing it he’d also made it shiny! — and he had successfully used it to move motors and such, so the board is OK. But when I plug in my Pololus and motors and PSU, nothing much happens. Frustration runs high with this one. I have two videos of the troubleshooting below:

In the first video I have a 300W PSU hooked in to the board, and in the second video I try to use a DVD as a load resistor, after recommendation from Traumflug. Spoiler alert: In neither of the videos does the board move the motors, nor give me a reading on the meter. The next step will be to to add a proper load resistor onto the PSU instead of the DVD player— this is slightly more involved than just jamming a bunch of ¼W resistors in there, so I’ll have to do some research on it. The following links might give a clue:

How to Convert a Computer ATX Power Supply to a Lab Power Supply
Desktop power supply from a PC

An alternative to this would be to get a totally new power supply. I know that people have been using Xbox 360 bricks for power, and I’m sure there’s a crapload of alternatives which would work. I’m just hesitant to give up on the only part of the RepRap which I’ve actually scrounged myselft — The PSU was going to be thrown out with a bunch of computer trash at Chalmers, and I thought I’d give it a second chance at usefulness. Not that this project lacks DIY spirit and such, but you catch my drift; Ideally you’d be building the whole printer out of garbage and driftwood.

Besides walking around Turku and trying out vegan cupcakes (yay cupcakes!) I’ve started work on building the RepRap at the gallery. I have all the metal bits cut to proper length, and the threads fit the screws and the printed parts I got from Greg Frost in Australia. Last night I was polishing the threaded rods, after which I realised that I could actually start assembly of the rig. I was too tired to do it yesterday, and I still haven’t decided on how to do with the bottom plate (I’ll forego the heated plate at the moment, it’s easy to drop in once I have it) but after the weekend I’ll have somehthing which actually looks like a RepRap. It will feel good to have a frame on which I could pin my ambitions literally instead of all figuratively, in my head.

Of course, the hot-end from Makergear still needs assembly — and it’s a total PITA to put together, let me tell you — and the electronics are still home to a stubborn ghost, but it’s getting there. Once I’ll relax a bit more perhaps I could actually scout opportunities to do something with the printer which doesn’t revolve around the printer itself…

With my arrival date set, I was invited to go along as audience on a Performance Bus™ with a bunch of spectators and performance artists. It seemed an excellent opportunity to see the surroundings of the city as well as meet people, so of course I signed up. Ever since my ask over at Metafilter I’ve been trying to come up with coping strategies for performances, and immersion therapy might be just the thing to push me over the edge into something resembling professional behaviour.

Most of the time, I’m not comfortable enough with the form to have an opinion one way or another, but insofar as I have a taste, it skews toward those performances which don’t take themselves too seriously. A group performing in the bus did so in Finnish, allowing me to fill in the blanks of their text, or rather just focus on the rhythm and rhymes — as a result their performance was one of the more interesting ones. This goes to the heart of what David Sedaris learned from his career as a performance artist:

It was the artist’s duty to find the appropriate objects, and the audience’s job to decipher meaning. If the piece failed to work, it was their fault, not yours.

Kimmo Modig, the director of Gallery Titanik was along for the ride to do a performance, and we spent the trip chatting about art and related topics, as well as chickpea pancakes. We seem to agree on many things, so he’s obviously a clever and sharp fellow. For his performance, people could help themselves to a bucket with all the money he’d received to do the performance; in the end he tossed the remainder into the river. Value-destroying performances have been done before of course, but I imagine that actually tossing fifty Euro into the drink feels different from thinking about it.

All in all, driving people around from one event to another is a good way to ensure a captivated audience, and it was a day well spend, especially with an excellent picnic at the end of it. You can read a short article in Finnish about it on uudenkaupunginsanomat.fi and in English on Facebook, and I’ll post some reviews as well once I find them. Leena Kela, who is the regional performance artist of Finland Proper (and who organised this Performance Bus, see video) does some other projects of her own which might be interesting to check out. For example, I’m going to read up on the outcome of Alter ego — being someone else for a month, and then having to refer to oneself in third person. “Yes, she was much ruder and ate a lot of cheese.”

I still require parts for the RepRap, so I walked south on the recommendation that K-Rauta might stock the metal rods I need. The surroundings quickly changed into an industrial park, and shortly thereafter I find out that K-Rauta does not have what I need, unless I what I need are two burly men behind a counter. They did point me to an adjacent store which looked promising albeit closed, so I’m going back there Monday.

I’m staying in a student dorm named Domus, and have found a jogging route. The shared kitchen is a dump but there’s Al Jazeera English on the TV and a balcony I’d appreciated were I still smoking. The room is nice enough, fridge kettle shelves, and the smell of soap will be renewed once a week when someone cleans the room. Oh, and there’s a sewing machine in a cupboard, which will come in handy since my last pair of Cheap Monday jeans once again have experienced crotch failure.

The esthetics of the city is odd — it’s a mixture of fifties functionalism and drab Soviet buildings — and wherever there might have been an uncertainty about what to build, they just poured more asphalt; The roads are wide and everywhere. If there’s a city planner, that guy sure likes cars. Given a chance, I’ll ask.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks here at HQ, consisting mostly of me troubleshooting my Gen7 1.2 board in the forums and on IRC. You can read of my ordeals under the title “Getting movement with Teacup + Gen7 1.2” and my aborted attempts at troubleshooting the (probably dead) Pololus is here: How to check if A4988 is fried?

Finally, Traumflug offered to take a look at the board if I could send it to Germany. I dropped it in a mailbox quicker than you can say “Spitze!” and worried my head about getting a multimeter which wouldn’t give me random readings instead. A couple of days later I got an email back which opened with:

Your board arrived today. It took me something like a minute to find the bridge … :-) See the attached picture.

Which at once had me feeling happy that it’s solved, and rather dull for not having spottet the short. I actually got a small microscope and went over the board to find shorts, but I ignored the areas easily visible by the naked eye… Since I have very little dignity left to salvage I’m taking this in stride and the board is on it’s way to Turku, where I’ll assembly the 3D printer. Shouldn’t take more than a day or so, right? What could go wrong?

Speaking of being on it’s way to Turku: I’m writing this at Landvetter airport — amongst screaming children and the smell of fear which is probably I — and my plane leaves in a while. I’m drinking expensive beer and hoping that my luggage is under the weight limit. Seeing as this is my first residency, I’m looking forwards to having a change of scenery and a deadline for the project. Although these open-ended processess are all good and fun, actually setting print to paper — or plastic to Turku, as it were — will feel nice.

As for the multimeter, at first I got the Fluke 115 — all the reviews list Fluke as the doubleplusbest — but switched to an Agilent U1242B after watching the one hour “multimeter buying guide” with David Jones over at the EEV blog (it gets better once you get used to his voice. Your ears take five six hours to adapt, in my experience). The deciding factor was that the Agilent had μA while the Fluke only did mA — I’m not good enough at these things to know when I’ll be using what, but will take others word for it. Also, the Agilent can use temperature probes which might be handy if I’m calibrating the Makergear hotend or the heated bed.

Ok, enough with this light banter. Off I go.

In anticipation of fucking shit up I had ordered two ATMegas and having succeeded once it took me one try to get the bootloader to take this time around. The board looked fine, but after a lot of trial and error, error, and error, I resigned to the fact that my Pololus probably were fried and ordered new ones. And that, kids, is how you literally burn 600 SEK by being a lazy bum and not double-checking your solders. Lesson learned and so on.

Having received the new Pololus, and with an extruder underway from the States and the plastic parts coming over from Australia, I only need to get the motors to spin to have a semblance of a printer up and running. I have most metal parts except for some springs and wingnuts, and to celebrate the birthplace of the machine I got some SKF 608 bearings. Oh, and I still need two T5 timing belts.

In the IRC channel I was suggested to use Pronterface.py instead of ReplicatorG as a computer side controller of the board, but after the first few times I couldn’t get the thing to launch and reverted to ReplicatorG. Not that it matters at the moment, because even with the ATMega replaced and properly bootloaded and running Gen7 Teacup, I can’t get any readings or functions out of it. I made a video of my attempts and you can watch it below; it’s dry but you get to watch me prod an inanimate object with clumsy fingers.

Mom and Tomasz decided to visit now as well. I’ve shown them the archipelago and then my allotment garden and then the KKV workshop and them mom left and now Tomasz is stuck with me while I whine about the RepRap and hush him while recording troubleshooting videos. You can actually hear him in the video above, so it’s well worth watching for that alone! Also, I totally destroyed him at pingpong earlier today, and have video of that as well.

Good god damn goat balls.

I finally got the bootloader onto the ATMega — thanks to a lot of trial and error and handwringing and help from ethereal beings on the Internets and KKV, and with the motors and Pololus installed I hook the PSU into the board and the LEDs are shining and — wait a minute, isn’t the processor a teensy bit too hot? Oh, let’s touch it — well whaddayaknow, it’s blistering my finger, how peculiar!

As it turns out, I’ve soldered the Molex connector the wrong way around, so am feeding 5V to where I need 12V and vice versa. Which means some components are now fucked, possibly including the ATMega. I guess I ought to be grateful that none of the capacitors blew up in my face, but right now I’m just going to bed.

Below are some helpful links left for future reference

I found a good description for what the bootloading process is about here: http://smileymicros.com/blog/2011/03/04/busy-as-a-beavratmega644-on-a-breadboard/

Resources on what AVR’s are: http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/avrstuff

A tutorial on what AVR programming is about, somewhat technical: http://www.ladyada.net/learn/avr/

Using the AVR ISP MkII as a programmer to bootload ATMegas. Relevant if I get me the programmer, but can give inside into the process: http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Code/OSXISPMKII

Crosspack is a complete AVR developing package, not sure how to implement the homebrewn boards there, but the bootloaders should be more or less generic, right? http://www.obdev.at/products/crosspack/index-de.html

Wormfood has a baud to Mhz calculator here, which I’m sure is good for something down the line: www.wormfood.net

A thread started in 2006 about the process of getting the Arduino to act as an ISP, which I never succeeded in doing: Turn Arduino into an ISP programmer

The schematics for my model of Arduino, the old NG, are here: arduino_NG_schematic.png and there’s a description of most of the parts and ports here: www.arduino.cc

I’m not sure of what this page does but it seems handy: http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-ohm.htm

As a preface to this post, let me reiterate that I’m doing this writeup so that people in a similar position as I might benefit from my mistakes and experiences. I’m learning all of this as I go, and imagine that anyone somewhat dedicated but with no prior experience might run into the same conceptual problems as I. The past week has proven that reasoning ab initio is all good and well if you actually know the “initio” part. My ignorance of physics and maths leave me with little but a smidgen of formal logic to draw any conclusions from electric schematics, and that’s really not helpful when it comes to burning a blasted bootloader onto a gosh darned ATMega644 20PU.

As the saying goes: When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And right now I feel as if I have one of those oversized blow-up hammers, banging away at the problems like a drooling cretin.

Let’s start with what I’ve actually accomplished. I’ve scavenged a small computer fan and a 300W power supply, which made me feel all dumpster diving and glowing. Not sure if the PSU is enough to drive the heated bed alongside everything else, but it’s a start. I ordered and received four Pololus A4988 to control the five hybrid stepper motors (1.8°, 1200mA, 4V, 3.17kg holding torque) from Wetterott I also ordered

UPS didn’t bother to ring me when they where outside my door, so I had to bike for an hour to get the package; Apparently “courier” is Latin for “duuuur I’m driving around with your stuff.”

The Pololus are not the kosher ones, but according to spec they are almost the same as the recommended A4983, and can be used as “drop in replacements,” which remains to be seen. The holding torque of the motors might be too low to use for the extruder, but fine for everything else; worst case, I’ll get a stronger NEMA 17 sized motor for the extruder.

I also got the TTL-232R USB-to-serial-cable, which I thought would be enough to get the bootloader onto the ATMega 644 20PU. It turns out it’s good for controlling the final motherboard, but not burning the actual bootloader. I’ll get to that.

A couple of days ago Magnus over at KKV Elektronen brought his MakerBot over for a demonstration. It was swell to finally see a 3D printer in action, and I got a tiny teensy part for my RepRap printed. In the upcoming days I’m hoping to get the rest done, and I’ve found a local source for most, if not all of the metal parts. Hornbach turns out to have a large enough selection of washers and bolts and whatnuts to probably cover everything I need except the springs. I got threaded rods and unthreaded rods, at a fraction of the price I’d pay at Järnia, so I’ve scrapped the plans on getting it all as a kit from UK as the postage was prohibitive.

Perhaps it’s because I’m an anxious person, but it feels reassuring when I actually make the decision that what I have listed on the printout is the same thing which I hold in my hand, and put it into the shopping basket. It’s such a banal thing, but it took me a good five minutes before feeling sure that the “M8 fender washer” I was holding was similar enough to the one described.

Once I had the Pololus I figured I would upload the bootloader and try to see if I could get the motors to spin. Piece of cake, no? Well, not really, as my desperate post over at the RepRap forums indicate.

The problem, as Traumflug points out in the above post, is that I have wired the whole thing wrong. I’m using the USB-to-serial cable, where I ought to use a programmer hooked into the six smaller pins on CONN6. I don’t have the programmer in the image he links, but find information to on how to use an Arduino microcontroller as a programmer instead; Arduino ISP – In-System Programmer.

I find one page on Instructables which seems to solve my problem: Using your Arduino ISP: Burning a bootloader. I set up the ATMega on a breadboard and hook it into my Macbook. At first, I get “USB pulling too much power” warnings, but that’s cause I hadn’t doublechecked my breadboard and was actually shorting the USB-port. Did you know that shorting your USB port can kill your wifi? Oopsie.

The only difference from the Instructable page is that I use the hardware files for the Gen7 electronics instead of the Sanguino. The option to use my board with my processor shows up under Tools>board so all is fine there.

I run “burn bootloader” with “Arduino as ISP” but get a timeout. So I try the other bootloader options and get the same thing. Doublechecking the processor I have the correct one set, so it’s not that. The Arduino works and runs other applications with no complaints. Searching the Arduino website I find Using Arduino as AVR ISP, which tells me that I need to upload a special sketch (Arduino application) called ArduinoISP to the microcontroller before using it as a programmer. That takes with no problem (I’m using the Arduino NG, and if you’re following along then don’t forget to hit the reset button before sending a new sketch to the Arduino)

I run Tools>burn bootloader>Arduino as ISP and get the error

avrdude: Yikes! Invalid device signature. Double check connections and try again, or use -F to override this check.

And running Tools>burn bootloader>AVR ISP gives:

avrdude: stk500_recv(): programmer is not responding
avrdude: stk500_disable(): protocol error, expect=0x14, resp=0xe0

Using the Arduino IDE for the bootloader isn’t supported in the official wiki, but Kliment over in the #RepRap channel mentions that starting the Arduino IDE as root allows him to use it to burn the bootloader. I get the same result regardless. Following the instructions for Linux terminal (bash) gives me balls, probably because the syntax differs from OSX — I’m going to check this out tomorrow.

According to the datasheet of ATMega 644, the voltage is ok, and the current shouldn’t be higher than 200mA over the pins 10-11 and 30-31, which they aren’t. I’m clearly missing something. I log into the #AVR channel on IRC and get a short description of what a bootloader is and that one can burn those in serial and parallell mode. What I’m trying to do is apparently “parallell mode” which is all fine and well but doesn’t get me closer to an answer.

I take a look at the top of the in-line documentation of the Arduino IDE sketch, and see this:

// this sketch turns the Arduino into a AVRISP
// using the following pins:
// 10: slave reset
// 11: MOSI
// 12: MISO
// 13: SCK

I realise that those are the same names that are listed on the Gen7 1.2 schematic as COMM6. Hosianna, perhaps my prayers are answered and problem solved. I drop the ATMega into its slot on my Gen7 board, and hook up the COMM6 to the Arduino. With much the same result as on the breadboard. Cockbucket!

The day before Traumflug has mentioned that using the Arduino IDE doesn’t work cause it’s communicating too fast for the ATMega to keep up. It’s set to 1Mhz as default, but should go up to 8Mhz after a fuse has been burned on the chip. I have no clear grasp of what the Mhz denotes or how that relates to the speed of communications, but it seems critical. From computers in general, I’m guessing 1 Mhz means 1 million computations per second, but what it does to what is just beyond me. I know that I need to slow down somewhere, but not certain if I can do this in software or need to add crystals to the breadboard as per the description here and at the bottom of this page?

Default baud-rate for the Arduino IDE is 115200, which supposedly is okeydokey for a 16 Mhz chip, so perhaps I should just divide that into 16 and that might work? Can you see before your inner eye the magic chicken I’m waving above my workbench? I’m basically down to numerology here.

Regardless of how much I enjoy sailing the seas of doing new shit, whatever leaky vessel I’m in is currently waterlogged and I’m beginning to eye alternative options. As in getting a pre-programmed ATMega. It seems a shame to give in, having sacrificed brain cells and pulled hairs on the altar of geekdom, but perhaps I ought to choose my battles more wisely and forfeit this one to the processor. It does sting to be bested by an inert piece of plastic and metal on my kitchen table, but what the hell, if I can’t get it solved this week I’ll just buy a replacement. And program this chip with a brick. So it goes. Back into the fray, Smashy smashy.

I’ve successfully drilled and soldered both the Gen7 v1.2 motherboard and optostops.

Redundancy is king so I made nine optostops, two of which seem broken — they light up regardless if you apply current. People in the forums helped me troubleshoot, but having confirmed that the sensors work (i.e. infinite resistance when the optos are blocked) I can’t find anything wrong with them.

What is more worrisome is that I haven’t yet tested the motherboard for shorts and whatnot; If I can mess up a 15-solder board, surely a 400-solder one is going to explode. This might be exiting; If my apartment burns down in the process, I’m crying force majeure and buying it finished, like most people seem to.

What is remaining is everything else. I need to get all the metal parts — nuts bolts and washers — and don’t really know where to order them here in Sweden. I’m tempted to order from McMaster-Carr only because they have such a well designed site it makes me all weepy.

Hopefully, I’ll get my hands on the printed parts along with an extruder — Wade’s geared extruder — later this week when we’re going to play around with a MakerBot at KKV Elektronen, printing the boards with components at some point; It’ll be great to finally get a look at a 3D printer in action, and get a hang of the software to run it.

Speaking of which, I have to load the bootloader onto the ATMega 644-20 PU, and hope to use an old Arduino I have laying around somewhere. Sounds simple, but this would also require me to get a power supply for the rig. (12V pushing 15Amps should do it. The machine only requires 5Amps, but the heated bed requires an additional 8Amps, so there you go.) The power supply needs to be hooked up to the board, as does the Arduino, so I need to figure out what cables to use and make those, after which I get to hook computer to Arduino and let it do it’s programming magic.

The optostops need to have flags made for them, preferably out of soda cans, so that the stops can be engaged for calibration and safety. I need a couple of 5mm wide belts to drive the extruder and bed, and I can either buy them directly or split them myself from more standard widths. Having chosen to go with Wades extruder, I need to manufacture or buy a hot-end, the part of the printer where the plastic poops out, as well as the hot-bed onto which the pooping will happen. So tonight is “ordering shit online” night. That, and crying into a bottle.

So far, this has been a crash course in electronics, and the fact that I haven’t yet been electrocuted or blown a fuse is encouraging. I can almost feel my neural pathways adapt to all these Ohms, Amps and whatnots, and it’s nice to learn something new again.

Perhaps it’s the colder weather or perhaps the glass fibers I’ve inhaled are tickling my hypothalamus, but today I woke up early with the minimum of suicidal thoughts and have gotten a lot of stuff done. And it’s not even noon!

Most importantly, I’ve gotten around to ordering all the electronic component and connectors needed to finish the Gen7 1.2 motherboard and optostops. When envisioning the project, I was determined to bond with ELFA, to find a weary comrade at the store who would regale me with tales of how she set fires on things in her first project as well, and I would offhandedly follow the advice and recommendations for what to buy. Then I realised that ELFA is up to three times as expensive as some of the net stores, so screw that.

Last night I was up with a bottle of wine and a Dremel, trying to drill really fucking teensy holes in the PCBs. I was wearing a mask most of the time, but some of the glass fiber is bound to end up in my brain. Considering I’m doing this in the kitchen, let’s call it additional roughage. The drilling went well, and I managed to substitute the smallest drill bit with the conical diamond bit. I thought I would need a press drill for precision, seeing as the smallest holes are half a millimeter or so, but as long as you limit yourself to two glasses of wine you’re good. At three glasses you become a bit cavalier re:precision.

The parts I ordered were mostly from Reichelt with some remaining stuff from RS Components. Reichelt has a nice webstore with pretty pictures and all, but their customer service is either shy or enjoys receiving multiple emails with similar questions. Most businessess, I imagine, upon receiving an email asking “can I pay with Mastercard or do I pay on delivery?” would answer both parts of the sentence, not limiting themselves to “You cannot pay with Mastercard.” Playing coy might be a good way of wooing the shy guy with a beret, but I’m trying to pay for your services so no need to beat around the bush here.

Before I got to the stage of drilling holes and ordering parts, let me tell you the story of how I learned of which parts to order. I believe it’s telling of how quickly one gets mired in tracking down information when you know as little as I do on a topic.

In order to make the PCB I had to find a list of the required parts to mount on the PCB. I couldn’t find anyone who could tell me what parts are required. I couldn’t find a written list of parts, but there were instructions somewhere on the wiki telling me to open up a file of a certain type, changing a setting in an application, and then export a BOM — Bill Of Materials. No hint of what the file name is nor what application is required, but OK.

So I go onto the #reprap IRC channel and ask my stupid questions and get very little response. Someone recommends that I check out gEDA PCB, an open source application for creating PCBs and schematics, because EAGLE might not be able to open the file I need to open, whichever file that is. GEDA is actually mentioned on the wiki, but there’s no information as to what it is or where to get it, so I thought it was a filetype at first.

I check out gEDAs homepage, which tells me that I need to compile the application from source. Ok, so poke about a bit then realise that gEDA requires FINK to install, which in turn requires installing FINK and dependencies via the Terminal, which I’m shamefaced to admit I suck at using. FINK requires the Xcode developer tools, so I leave that to download for half an hour and then have the Devtools install running in the background while I try to get a feel for the RepRap IRC community.

Among the running chatter of people troubleshooting their machines, there was some discussion about the first case of 3D fabbing copyright infringement, when someone recreated a prop from a Paramount movie and they got on his case. It’s surely a sign of things to come, but as long as there are open source 3D apps and DIY printers, I don’t see how you could stem the tide of personal infringement. It’s a short read and worth checking out:

→ Torrentfreak, enigmax: Paramount Cease and Desist Targets 3D Printer ‘Pirate’

Anyway, with the Xcode developer tools installed, I notice that FINK isn’t available as a binary for 10.6, so I download a tarball and follow the instructions for compiling FINK using the Bash Terminal. Compiling FINK has actually been the most straightforward thing I’ve done so far, as the installation was really friendly and considerate; Like a well lubed proctologist with good blood circulation.

It took me a moment to realise that I need to enable unstable packages in FINK, after which gEDA installed fine while I fell back on default selections when asked about plugins and whatnot. I’m not sure if I screwed something up in the process, cause gEDA took two hours to compile even though I had engaged all eight cores.

With gEDA installed, I find the PCB app in ~/sw/bin/pcb and open up the Gen7Board.pcb file from the app. And lo and behold, there’s a “BOM” alternative under “Export…” which gives me a list of components and their place on the board. All in a text-file which you have to manually open cause it has no filetype extension. Looking over the list of parts, I’m still confused since some of the parts are labelled “unknown” which is somewhat ominous. In the chat, Traumflag himself shows up (The guy who created and maintains Gen7 1.2) and I ask my silly questions again.

Turns out, there’s a complete parts list on the wiki, and he promptly sends me a link.

Now. When you’re as green as I am on a subject, it can be difficult for an outside observer to distinguish me from a lazy bum, but I swear I’ve gone up and down that fucking wiki and not found any links to a parts list for the Gen7 1.2 board. Apparently, Google can’t find any pages linking to it either (as of July 1st at least) so perhaps there aren’t any. I don’t know how it’s possible not to link internally somewhere on a wiki, but at least it made me feel less stupid, albeit still frustrated.

In grassroots open source project such as the RepRap community, writing documentation is boring and little value seems attributed to it and consequently little work is done on it; On the other hand, it’s really simple to get in touch with whomever designed the part you need help with, and people are often kind and willing to lend a hand.

So, with a followup email from Traumflag, I had a complete list of parts. And since the wiki contained direct store links to the components, I took the sensible approach and ordered the goddamn parts already. Though Reichelt slapped on some banking fee, the parts were most certainly cheaper than ELFA; And even if I could have tried to source cheaper components, that would have taken me a couple more days, which I rather spend solving the next problem down the road. Which I predict there will be aplenty.

For the betterment of humanity, or at least the part of it interested in rapid prototyping, I’ll try to document the process of building my RepRap. So far, I have etched a shabby PCB — it’s the Gen7 v1.2 board — and I’ve tested it for shorts. It’s not the prettiest board I’ve seen and I’ll make a backup, but hopefully it’ll survive my cutting and drilling.

I’ve ordered a soldering station, having poured over reviews of different models and asking any person who has ever had a passing acquaintance with anything more advanced than a toaster, and ended up getting the Weller WHS40. I’m picking it up on Monday from ELFA, along with some solder, and will set it all up in the kitchen. Hopefully there won’t be enough fumes to kill any plants and/or people.

The instructions on the RepRap project wiki are confused and make me miserable. Many pages are not maintained properly and often seem to contradict each other. Using a wiki as documentation repository is all well and fine, but it’s not very pedagogical and frustratingly difficult to find even the PCB layout for the boards, as each new design is explained by the people working on it using whatever nomenclature — or lack thereof — they fancy. I don’t expect this process to be easy, but can for the life of me not understand why you would spend thousands of hours developing an awesome project intended to be a disruptive technology, and then fuck up the instructions. I found some excellent assembly tutorials though, which should be of great help once I’m building the actual rig.

I had a horrible time finding ready-to-print PCB layout schemes, so I backtracked the process and am trying out PCB CAD software. I haven’t been mired in learning new software in a while, so this will be interesting. Learning stuff while doing other stuff is a feature not a bug, so this might be an interesting way of learning more about electronics and CAD. As it is, I’m learning all skills necessary for the project on-the-go. I did some soldering in grade school, and I know how not to blow up my multimeter, and that’s about it as for my skillz. If I manage to build this thing — and get it to run — I suspect that most any primate should be able to.

The first PCB software I’m trying out is Eagle from Cadsoft
The build instructions for the Gen7 1.2 board are here: reprap.org/wiki/Motherboard_1_2
Layouts for the PCB are here: github.com/Traumflug and a ready to print PDF in Gen7Board Layout.pdf

Sara and Tura woke me up this morning with a cake and a song, possibly related to my birthday. You know how it feels being woken up by a five-year old stomping on balloons? Fucking adorable, that’s how. The chocolate cake was excellent and so sweet it’ll cause diabetes in fish downstream of the sewage treatment plant.

For once I wasn’t too stressed out about my birthday, and proceeded to have a nice day with Sara at the demonstration against building high-rises on our allotment gardens (annoying GP TV autostart link) after which we drove Anna and Jan to the airport. They were running a tad bit late, and Jan informed me on the peculiarities of Gula Faran en route, seeing as I’d be driving it back. It’s funny that; In driving school I was never taught that if the outside temperature is higher than 30°C the brakes might not take and not to “rev more than 3500 rpm on fifth or it’ll downshift to fourth. Or maybe third.”

I’m not good with travel-induced stress, having missed important flights and trains and hating myself for it, and I was glad of not being at the other end of Jans phone when people already at the airport were calling and wondering where the hell we were. “We’re there!” is such a patent lie in that situation: If we were, you wouldn’t be having that phone call, now would you? My reaction might hark back to being a kid, waiting for my parents to come home from shopping, looking at the clock and dreading it would pass the time when they said they were going to be back. Not that the fears are the same, but time is a recurring theme, is what I’m getting at.

Back home, with only slightly ominous rattling as accompaniment, we had dinner and I manhandled Saras Nintendo. Super Mario Bros is still fun, although the platformer feels so much more limited than I remember it. The breadth and story I imbued it with as a kid isn’t there, replaced by an eagerness to complete the levels and find speed runs and easter eggs. Compared with how boring it feels on an emulator with keyboard, having the joypads indent my palms is all that is required to want to jump over more blocks. I am now looking for a NES.

The site for the lying project is now up and available on www.houseminor.org. You ought to check it out because it’s exactly the kind of thing you’d like! I’ve changed the mission statement a bit from the first post, but the main idea is still the same, as well as the goal: To print a magazine containing no facts whatsoever. I’ll document the progress here on the blog, but www.houseminor.org is the main resource for the project, so look to that.

It’s easy to get ahead of oneself, and even though it feels as if the hard part of the project is behind me, the actual task of collecting, editing and printing the magazine might prove to be more work than I’ve imagined. Also, I have to convince you to tell me a story, and I would have a hard time convincing a starving man to eat, let alone do something like this. Regardless, I’m looking forward to seeing what might come of it, and more importantly how other collaborative projects could be organised. I want to work with others but haven’t really found the setting or approach to doing it — but if you’d trust me with your time and effort I’ll do my best not to disappoint you. I have outlines for at least five more issues — on other topics, of course — and am open for ideas and suggestions. We can make really awesome ephemera here, people.

Of course, it all starts with this one issue, so this is what I’d like you to do: Tell me the story of how Mateusz saved your life. You can put any spin on it you’d like, as long as the central premise is the same. You don’t have to tell it in English, and you don’t have to have it perfectly memorised; You’re telling a story, and we’ll polish it before we’re done.

Call the project voicemail through Skype (user Mateusz_Saves) or on Swedish landline (+46 (0)31 799 90 97). If you prefer to send a finished recording or a text, use the address mateuszsaves@monocultured.com.

Thanks to Sara H, Anna G and Petter B for assistance and criticism.

The things I’ve enjoyed most since I’ve left are just mundane things that allow me congenial interactions with people. Paying for the bus. Talking to the person you’re sitting next too. Buying a sandwich. Excusing yourself when you pass someone on an escalator. Helping people. I helped a woman get her pram off the bus this morning, and she probably walked away thinking ‘what a nice young man’ without realising I’ve just spent two years locked inside cesspool of human indignity for threatening a room full of people with a firearm.

→ Teamliquid.net, Amnesia: 2 Years In Prison – A Man’s Story

For both games, two 6 gram weights was almost too much, yet with only one weight in the R.A.T. 7 gaming mouse, it felt a little whippy and I had to dial down the DPI a notch from 4000 DPI range to about 3500 DPI. If there had been a 2 or three gram weight option, it would have been perfect and I probably would have been able to boost the DPI settings even higher than 4000. In any event, my hand was not fatigued in the least by the end of either gaming marathon sessions, this is something which happens all too often for me and some mice I literally have to take a break or risk hand cramps.

→ Everthing USB, Anthony Garland: Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. 7 Gaming Mouse Review

The lesson, basically, is that a company won’t do well in the developing world simply by hawking cheap, out-of-date hardware after it’s become obsolete in places like America. Companies like Nokia, LG and Samsung spend a lot of time and money developing new phones that you and I might consider old-fashioned or odd, and with good reason: Emerging markets are huge. The 8th, 9th and 10th largest phone seller in the world, by volume, are companies you’ve never heard of—ZTE, G-Five and Huawei—which have made heaps of money selling millions of customers their first phones.

→ Gizmodo, John Herrman: The most popular phone in the world

Not long ago, foods like kiwis and sushi weren’t widely known or available. It is quite likely that in 2020 we will look back in surprise at the era when our menus didn’t include locusts, beetle larvae, dragonfly larvae, crickets and other insect delights.

→ Wall Street Journal, Marcel Dicke & Arnold van Huis: The six-legged meat of the future

By the next morning—day six—the three were well aware that they’d made a terrible mistake. But what could they do? They sat on the benches, facing each other. They had no watch. Nothing to read. No pen or paper. They tried to distract themselves with conversation, but they had little to say. “It started to get quiet,” says Etueni. “All I was thinking about was water and juice.”

→ GQ, Michael Finkel: Here be monsters

So why have we ended up here? Why Sucker Punch? Well: Movies have to make money. And risks don’t sell. After the ’90s came the backlash; Strong Women survived, but they no longer got the attention they once did. In the absence of a widespread enthusiasm for Girly Power, misogyny—as always—crept back in.

→ The Atlantic, Sady Doyle: ‘Sucker Punch’ and the Decline of Strong Woman Action Heroines

Though her name and her pigtails infantilize Babydoll, inside her dreamworld, everything is sexually charged; her skirts get shorter and her hair gets longer. Just one of the many clues that we are not actually inside the mind of a young girl, but inside Zack Snyder’s spank bank!

→ Jezebel, Dodai Stewart: Why Sucker Punch Really, Truly Sucks

Snyder’s ideas about women may be weird, and messed up, and objectifying (and I don’t think they always are, but that’s another discussion), but at the end of the day, he wants them in his lens. When he got the chance to tell an original story, he chose to tell one about women.

→ Alyssa Rosenberg: Frances Farmer will have her revenge on Seattle: On “Sucker Punch”

But there’s more than just playing with the building blocks of nerd culture going on here. That would be fun, but Snyder is interested in something trickier, more complex and possibly just outside of his grasp – he wants to explore the role of women in culture, the impact of the male gaze and the concept of sexualized self-empowerment. That’s a big topic for a supposedly dumb action film.

→ Badass digest, Devin Faraci: SUCKER PUNCH Is Thrilling, Smart… And Deeply Flawed

If when asked, “Tell me about your character,” all that can be said is, “She is abused,” you have not told me anything about who she is. You are allowing the violence to define her and rather than showing someone rising against oppression, you are basically just perpetuating it by erasing her and leaving only what has been done in its place.

→ Cave City Sink: This movie made me feel bad to be alive: A review of Sucker Punch

That which is outside the norm only becomes revolutionary if enough important people are threatened by it, or if in itself it changes something. Since art doesn’t really do “real” these days, the former criteria is most often in evidence when discussing the rebellish of art. So if no-one cares about your molasses performance, it’s not necessarily bad, only non-threatening. So before we ask what art is in this day and age — and how it might become revolutionary — we ought to know whose definition we’re working with.

There’s no difference between an art thing and any other thing, only your added value of labour remains. And since traditional labour, with behaviours and signs particular to the artwork, has given way to labour which looks remarkably similar regardless of what you do (At a desk, before a conveyor belt, fiddling with bits and bytes) how do you value your labour as an artist? There is only performance left, regardless of what you do; Art objects left as droppings are useful only as proof of a presence — as long as an animal shits, at least we know it’s alive, sort of. Whenever you pull the squeegee across silkscreen you create value, often regardless of the outcome as long as you’re able to properly frame what you’ve done and why.

In an e-flux editorial, we read about the art world:

In essence, these attempts mistook the art establishment for being in the business of producing an aura of authenticity, when in fact the real commodity has always been this attention itself, the care and custodianship bestowed upon objects by this system.

Sven Lütticken continues, in the same issue of e-flux in Art and Thingness, Part One: Breton’s Ball and Duchamp’s Carrot with tracing our relationship to the art object from modernism to today:

While many surrealist objects emphasize that they “function symbolically,” the readymades do not. In this, ironically, they foreshadow in their own way the future of the commodity, in an archaic guise: they announce the profusion of goods that are bought for their coded distinctiveness in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the 1970s this becoming-sign of the object would lead Jean Baudrillard to diagnose fundamental changes in capitalism by supplementing the categories of use value and exchange value with his concept of sign value. […] This triumph of fetishism—of commodity fetishism as an active agent—results in object-signs that suppress most traces of their history, of their trajectories. Their lives seem to be lived in a realm of pure semiosis.

The article is a roundabout way of saying that branding is all there is, and that the value of the art brand is decided by a very small segment of the total market. An art value oligarchy.

The readymade bears no semblance of value from the original object. The conceptual work only bears the symbolic value of the material used. The post-modern infuses the banal with value, regardless of what the object is. In this last instance, when there’s nothing interesting left to say about the objects of art, only being an artist has value, and that is a buyers market where the threshold for newcomers is non-existent (Higher art education is a leaky levee, stemming the tide of people with ambition and time on their hands.)

So let’s just have fun. Lets exist on the margin between accepted society and the art world, and let’s not ask permission but rather forgiveness with our fingers crossed behind our backs. If we’re lucky we might just upset the right people.

The other week, I travelled with Sara to Copenhagen for a couple days, and boy is that city annoying when you don’t have a bike. I mean, the distances! The flattyness! The being-run-over-by-bikeiness! Other than that it’s rather pleasant, although the allure of moving there for a bit has diminished over the last couple of times I’ve been there, for some reason.

We stayed with photographer and all-round interesting person Kajsa Gullberg, which was terribly nice of her. Waking up to the smell of newly baked cinnamon buns was awesome, and would have been even more awesome if they’d been vegan; it was the pastry equivalent of cock-teasing. I did get to try oatmeal made with ginger though, which was really good.

I was a bit miffed when I couldn’t get vegan cake even in Christiania, bastion of alternative lifestyles that it is, when both Kajsa and Sara were stuffing their faces with banankage. The baker, probably knowing pretty well the tastes of his largely baked crowd, said he didn’t do vegan cakes “cause they’re crap” and I was this close to whipping out my phone and go all like Instructables Chocolate Cake, bitch! but thought better of it since the muscle-relaxed people behind me seemed rather eager to eat cake nom nom nom.

The city subway is all automatic, allowing you to sit in front and watch the tracks whizz by. Très cool. As an added bonus, any picture you take while in motion will come out as a wormhole tunnel / space anus combination, which looks fascinating.

Almost ten years ago I visited Gothenburg to cover the demonstrations against the EU ministers meeting. On the heels of that, in the fall of the same year, I visited Copenhagen during a workshop with Tone O Nielsen, this time as a participant in demonstrations and walks through the city. I didn’t pay attention to where I was at the time, my retention of street names being piss-poor at the best of times, but when we crossed a bridge and Kajsa mentioned that the building just across the wall was a prison, I realised that this was the place where I had marched with the black bloc, trying to push past the police to get to the people detained the previous night.

The push was half-hearted, and except the attempts at breaking up the demo by the police and their constant harassment, I remember freezing. The walk wasn’t all that long, but we were snaking our way through the city for the better part of four hours, and it was awfully cold. Once we reached Nørreport — iirc — there was collective release of pent up tension, and I felt exalted and happy. It’d odd how much you are affected by something as intangible as the collected stress and resolve of the people around you.

I’m getting the hang of this whole “gardening” thing. It mostly consists of moving a whole lot of earth a very short distance — usually just inverting the vertical position of a “shovelful” — and exterminating everything which grows there, supplanting the thriving and natural state of things with a chastised vassal fief, creating orderly rows of ambitious homogeny and thrift. A colonialism of dirt, one might say. I’m currently looking for a pith helmet and should anyone volunteer as my “man servant” or “boy,” I promise to be a lenient master and offer perks, such as an abundance of radishes.

You know how it is. One day when you’re cleaning up the terrible mess which is your apartment you find all the bills, reminders and last notices you were meaning to get to, and you yelp a little. Or like earlier today, when I couldn’t find my other glove — I had to leave in a hurry to get the voting done — and felt stupid for not having lost a single glove all winter, and waiting until spring before managing it.

Then again, I later found the glove further down in my man-purse, so perhaps the example isn’t valid. An example which is valid, is my realisation the other day that I have fuck-all to do all summer. Being self-employed, this means I got fuck-all income. So, I set myself to task with filling the weeks ahead with dilligent work and ambition, trying to see if any of my almost-competencies can be harnessed for cash and/or grants.

So far, I’ve managed to code a webpage for the Mateusz Saves project (I’ll post it here as soon as it stops blowing squid balls) and today we had an etching workshop at KKV. I managed to etch my first PCB ever, which was somewhat similar to doing my first photographic print, only more corrosive and smelling of chloride gas.

The purpose of todays exercise was to establish a standard process of making PCBs, and with just a few adjustments — and enthusiastic support for building a bubble tank from some quarters — it seems as if we succeeded. Watching paper dissolve from an ironed-on piece of copper and glass fibers might not be the most exciting thing to do, but it sure feels productive in a sciency-sort-of-way. The stuff we tried printing was the control board for a RepRap, which co-incidentally is what I need for the SUMU residency later this fall. I’m thinking of setting up a table in the kitchen and have the RepRap there, come odours or noxious fumes, allowing for the possibility of the following dialogue:

— Y’know, you really ought to get small holders for these chopsticks.
— Oh, why don’t you describe them to me and I’ll FUCKING PRINT THEM FOR YOU!

Because that is what every adult with a 3D printer dreams of saying, right?

Most of my projects are solo acts. Attribute that to my inability to work with other people or poor personal hygiene if you will, but I do occasionally try to mix things up, as with Guilty Guilty Guilty a couple of years ago, and again with To whomever more recently. I’ve been mulling over another idea the past months, and right now I can’t do much more without involving other people, so please consider this a casting call for your participation!

I want people to briefly tell the story of how Mateusz saved their life. These stories, three to five minuts long, accompanied by pictures and documentary material, will be printed in a tabloid magazine dedicated to the subject. The publication will be bilingual, so the original language in which the story is told doesn’t really matter, as long as I can get some help translating it into English (or Swedish, and I’ll do the English).

If you know of someone who is good at coming up with stories, I’d appreciate it if you would convince them to participate. I think that the stories will be better if you tell them of this assignment in your own words, rather than have them read my description. They are allowed to be anonymous or use an fake name, and if they don’t want to have their face published, that can be worked around.

I’d like you to take their picture and record the audio of their story, using a cellphone or whatever is at hand. It is the story which is important, and technical quality is secondary.

The resulting magazine will be printed by a commercial tabloid printer, in a limited print run. The prints will be numbered and signed, and if it’s feasible I’ll handprint parts of it as well. Everyone who is included in the tabloid, or has helped making it, will get a copy.

While living in Karlstad I ran a weekly hour-long radio show named Siberia. In one of the episodes I had convinced a friend to pose as a member of a local criminal organization. It was all made as if I was clandestinely recording our conversation, and he was frightfully good. He was so convincing, and was so good at improvising answers to my questions, that I had to break the recording a couple of times cause he was too intense. The experience of having a convincing story told to me which I 100% knew wasn’t true, is still vivid in my mind, and this project is a further experiment along these lines. Using myself is the only way I can be certain that the stories are made up — barring advanced somnambulism on my part — and thinking of Mateusz in third person will make it easier to edit into something coherent.

I’m fascinated by people who — knowing or unknowing — are spinning convincing narratives. Those people make for good story tellers and liars, two moral sides of the same coin, and I’m profusely jealous of their ability. And having people so gifted speak on the same subject, I’m curious in how convincing the manufactured mass delusion would be.

The reason I want people who are not my immediate friends to do this is because with one or two exceptions, they are only slightly better liars than I am, and would make for effect instead of story if they were presented with this. Also, their story might relate to me instead of Mateusz, which would be no good at all. The stories don’t have to be positive, but they do have to be about Mateusz saving their life.

Knowingly being deceived is part of civilised society. As a social function, it is a polite convention which allows us to get by in everyday life. But once we start to acknowledge these known unknowns and act upon them, we can get stuck trying to find our way to something more “real.” By buying into a compelling narrative we can escape the digestive tract of scepticism the natural way: Having pulled ourselves out the ass we can start to believe what we say.

There’s a PDF you can download with some instructions and photos below, but you are not obliged to use it in any way. It’s intended as a help for prompting whoever is telling the story; Although, it’s my experience that those good at making up stories need very little prompting. Download the PDF by clicking here: Mateusz_saves.pdf

Thanks for your attention and I hope you’ll consider participating!

I’ve lived in Gothenburg for almost as many years as I’ve wanted to visit the star observatory in the park, and not until yesterday did I actually go. Bus 60 took me and Sara to the top of the hill, and after a while Olle and Helga joined us at the small building which houses four telescopes and dioramas left over from other, probably upgraded, museums.

At the observatory, a gawky guide shuffled us around telescopes swaying in the wind, requiring constant adjustment to remain fixed on the Pleiades or twinkly Sirius. The stars look nothing like in the movies, and even less like the colour-composite images NASA releases. Turns out that when you’re looking closely at bright dots, what you see is slightly larger bright dots, and even more dots around those. It’s dots all the way, so to say, which was the sentiment of one vocal woman, who exclaimed “you have got to be bloody shitting me, I can see as much in my binoculars at home!” It was a tense moment, and with the exception for a brat who just wouldn’t shut the hell up — his parents resigned to his annoying existence — twenty or so people held their breath, expecting the woman to lay into the poor, bumbling, guide. She was somewhat placated by seeing the Andromeda galaxy.

At the end of it all, we got to see some constellations and their constituent stars, and even got to see a blurry Saturn with a blurry ring. According to the other guide — the jovial one with the nose ring — this popping of ones Saturn cherry is a big moment in any stargazers career, and we did our best to feel properly awed. It was very nice to see it for real, and next time I’ll be in a city with a bigger telescope I’ll do my best to sneak a peek at the other planets. Not buying my own telescope yet though.

In any other city I wouldn’t hesitate to move about, but here in Warsaw I have old habits and they are difficult to break. My expensive Apple phone finally became useful with some creative use of offline maps and the GPS, and me and Tomasz managed to bus about with a minimum of confusion and lost time. Tomorrow we’re heading to a barn and then to a commentator for an interview; we’re actually watching the guy on TV right now, and I’m trying to come up with a lighting strategy. Somehow, it’s far simpler to tell other people how to take pictures than to improvise yourself, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out.

The Internets did lie to me as for the weather – I was told, in no uncertain terms, that there’d be 8 degrees and sunny today, but I really should have packed something besides my optimistic jacket. Also, I ought to be a better brother to my brother and get him a present, seeing as it’s his birthday today. (Which reminds me that I missed Matildas birthday three days ago. Oh well, I guess we’re even now)

Fridges are ultimate todo-lists, I’ve discovered. I’m going to Poland for a couple of days with my brother. I haven’t been for a while except for funerals, so it’s a good change of pace tagging along to something which is less depressing. I don’t know how I’ll fit all the orders for Zubrowka, but I’ll manage somehow. I might be difficult to get hold of, but SMS ought to work as usual. If there are requests, I might upload video and stuff! How about that!

While others stare in awe at Assange’s many otherworldly aspects — his hairstyle, his neatness, too-precise speech, his post-national life out of a laptop bag — I can recognize him as pure triple-A outsider geek. Man, I know a thousand modern weirdos like that, and every single one of them seems to be on my Twitter stream screaming support for Assange because they can recognize him as a brother and a class ally. They are in holy awe of him because, for the first time, their mostly-imaginary and lastingly resentful underclass has landed a serious blow in a public arena. Julian Assange has hacked a superpower.

→ Webstock, Bruce Sterling: The Blast Shack

July 18, 2010—California Highway Patrol officers arrest Byron Williams, 45, after a shootout on I-580 in which more than 60 rounds are fired. Officers had pulled Williams over in his pick-up for speeding and weaving in and out of traffic when he opened fire on them with a handgun and a long gun. Williams, a convicted felon, is shot several times, but survives because he is wearing body armor. Williams, a convicted felon, reveals that he was on his way to San Francisco to “start a revolution” by killing employees of the ACLU and Tides Foundation. Williams’ mother says her son was angry at “Left-wing politicians” and upset by “the way Congress was railroading through all these Left-wing agenda items.”

→ Coalition to stop gun violence: Insurrectionism Timeline

Though I never doubted that I would execute a launch order without question, other misgivings occasionally surfaced. We arrested a group of Catholic nuns staging a peaceful protest on one of our launch facilities a few years back. For a missileer who is a practicing Catholic, such a situation brings up questions: If women who have committed themselves to the Word of God feel so strongly about the immorality of nuclear weapons that they’re willing to be confined for their convictions, what kind of Christian am I to sit at the launch switch? How do you resolve a conflict between duty to your God and duty to your country? Who wins, faith or flag?

Danger Room, John Noonan: In nuclear silos, death wears a snuggie

Now Joe and I are good feminists, like our hero, and we believe in rapprochement between the sexes, and do everything we can to encourage it; we’re sweet-natured and respectful of women and big fun on dates (which is irrelevant, since neither of us will ever have another date after Dec. 8). We don’t actually believe that men are irredeemable, and we especially don’t like to contemplate the possibility that there is some sort of surly misogynistic brute deep down inside us, lurking behind all those layers of wit, charm, and sophistication. But that’s exactly what this little thought experiment required. In some weird gender-inverted way it was like being Andrea Dworkin for six weeks. Six long weeks.

→ The Sideshow, Avedon Carol: Interview with Sam Hamm about scripting The Screwfly Solution

Last fall I got a grant in order to take some time off, buy some equipment, read a book and hopefully produce some new art. Perhaps not surprisingly, I’ve done fuck-all since I got that grant except working on non-art related things. What the grant money did get me — in addition to a very nice knife, new running shoes and tights, an unending supply of freshly squeezed juice and some new in-ear-headphones — is some peace of mind and a bourgeois disposition. Just cause I’m not flat out broke, I suddenly felt that getting a stockbroker account was a “sound idea” and it feels as though I’m spiraling into a bad habit which will end up with me crashing at the end anyway, when I’m back to hand-to-mouth.

The new apartment is nice enough but I keep putting off inviting people. I don’t know if it’s cause I’ve still not gotten around to getting a proper lamp in the hall, where the rechargeable flashlight is getting electronically incontinent, or if I’m in a reclusive state of mind of late. I have an adjustable table which goes up and down at the touch of a button, and standing at it I can watch the ferries pass my window, which is nice and occasionally disconcerting, creating an illusion of the whole building moving. I would have liked to have learned the names of the ships by now but they don’t seem to stick. Perhaps I need a diagram.

Earlier today, my barber Hasse told me of a friend of his who, having spent his life and career on land, decided to fulfill his dream and signed on to a ship at the age of 57. He had dreamed of going to sea for all his life, and when he finally badgered the shipping line to give him a chance he concluded after the three month stint that it sucked balls. The moral being that you set some goals for yourself in life, and even if those don’t become fulfilled at least you did some fun stuff along the way, made some good friends and didn’t start a genocide or something similarly awful. As morals go, it’s not that bad.