Artist, graphic designer, & tech consultant in Nelson County, VA
Author:lemsy
John LeMasney (lemsy) is an artist, graphic designer, and technology creative. He is located in beautiful Nelson County, VA, but works remotely with ease. Contact him at: lemasney@gmail.com to discuss your next creative project.
I used to believe by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
I used to believe by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
I decided to illustrate a meditative thought I’ve had recently. There is a change emerging in my point of view, and I thought that I would express it in Inkscape. I added the text in two pieces, one for each line. I used Bebas Neue, one of my favorite title fonts. I tightened the kerning on an already very tightly kerned font, by breaking the text into individual letters and moving them horizontally towards each other until they had a certain flow. I spaced them on the non-repro grid on Inkscape that is set to 100 pixel squares. I added a texture in the background from an acid stained, coffee drenched sheet of ledger paper. I then re-aligned the lines of text to the blue ledger lines, and reduced the opacity of the letters to let the texture show through, as though they were printed as a ghost print in red ink. I think the text speaks to the treatment and the treatment speaks to the text.
I absolutely love Brussels sprouts, but when I express my love for them, I hear many people respond that they are their least favorite food. I believe that this has more to do with preparation than anything having to do with the cabbage family member. They are deliciously bitter, offer easy preparation, and if you like kale, kohlrabi, and cabbage, I truly believe that sprouts are equally enjoyable. If you’ve ever only had them boiled, you are not seeing them at their best. If you’ve only ever had them frozen, or out of a can, you have not tasted what they can be. So, try this instead:
Recipe: Pan or Oven Roasted Brussels Sprouts
1 Tbsp Olive Oil
2 cups fresh Brussels sprouts, halved
salt, pepper to taste
optional: curry powder to taste
Oven preparation:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees fahrenheit
Toss sprouts in the olive oil.
spread oiled, seasoned sprouts on an oven safe pan
cook for 40 minutes, or until browned.
Pan preparation:
Heat a pan with oil added on the stove top on high for 2 minutes.
Set a timer for ten minutes
Add sprouts to hot pan
Toss sprouts every minute that passes on the timer
Brussels sprouts prepared this way are sweet because they are caramelized, and the bitterness is less present. They are soft, hearty bites of joy, and I hope to have shared some of that joy with you.
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A shopping cart filled with bagged groceries located in a parking lot (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Who are you? So many ways exist to answer this question, but I suggest that one interesting way might be to look in your shopping cart. There are thousands of choices waiting in the aisles of Super Fresh, Giant, Stop and Shop, and Walgreens that it becomes inevitable that we define ourselves a bit in our choices.
When we walk away from a cart, and return to find two or three, we do a scan, looking for ourselves. Is there something here that speaks to us? Something we’d be proud of? Something we can’t do without? Would we make the same choices if they were announced over the loudspeaker as we checked out? Does it have the right kind of calories? A lack of embarrassing brands? Is it mostly processed, mostly whole foods? Is it traceable to origins that show a care for animals, for humans, for self, for health? Do you care? You might If you thought of it. Would we publish the contents of our cart on the NY times in a story on such a thing?
If you are proud of your choices, ones of health, locality, clean origins, and reason, we can be fulfilled more holistically. Leave behind the Cheetos, you can be better off without them.
I was inspired by a recent clip I saw of Ray Park practicing martial arts to do a split screen of him with perhaps his most famous role as Darth Maul in Star Wars Episode 1. The clip shows exactly how integral Park’s physical appearance and performance were in the creation of the character. I tend to do a lot of this kind of facial alignment work in the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) because it offers all the right tools for photo manipulation in the perfect price of free.
How I made the image in GIMP
I started by gathering the two images, one of Ray in makeup/character and out. They were of a similar size, and of a reasonable size for my piece. The glossy of Ray was angled, where the image of Darth Maul was horizontally aligned, and so my first task was to drop horizontal and vertical gridlines at Darth Maul’s eyes, nose, and mouth. Then I dropped the opacity of Ray’s face and used the rotation, scaling, and move tools to align his face with the gridlines. I returned opacity to 100%. I added a layer mask to Maul in full opacity, then added a selection that took up exactly half of the face and filled it with the opposite color. In the GIMP, Black and White are the degrees of opacity in layer masks. Finally, I needed to repair the angled edges of Ray’s picture that were created in rotation, so I painted with the color of his shirt and the color of the background to fix those, and used the Stamp tool to repair his hair, which had highlights and texture that would have been difficult to recreate from scratch. It’s not perfect, as the angle of the head in the two shots is slightly out of alignment, but I think the illusion works. Apologies to Ray Park and Lucasfilm (Disney, now) for the unauthorized use of their images for the purpose of education and commentary here.
I was fortunate to be asked by Sophie Brookover and Library Link NJ (visit them at http://librarylinknj.org/ for great Library resources, insight, and help, especially for New Jersey Libraries) to co-host a Facebook Forum on effective Social Media for Libraries, and in the post-show we had a discussion about other topics for future events. We discussed a few things, but one interesting topic that came about was the idea of the ways that we had worked together to plan and collaborate for the Forum. In case you want to see the record of the forum, please visit the status update where that discussion lives.
Facebook logo Español: Logotipo de Facebook Français : Logo de Facebook Tiếng Việt: Logo Facebook (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
At any rate, in planning for the event, we used five communication/collaboration channels, all interesting and useful in their own right. I’m writing this to organize my thoughts for the potential future products we talked about, and to give you some insight into our process. I talk about each of these in increasing order of communication channel richness. In other words, as we progress in this document, the capabilities for more sensory information increases.
Facebook discussion
In Facebook, each status update has a discussion attached to it. There, we can have a social gathering complete with links, pictures, video, text and other media types. If you can digitize it and produce a link to it, it’s fair game, though Facebook does a very good job of presenting the visuals right inline in the discussion. The key reason that we used it was because we wanted it to be open, sharable, publicized, fairly rich, archived for posterity, easy to use and join, and able to join people from all over. One unexpected benefit was that Sophie and I were both kind of sick with colds, coughing and sniffling, but no one had to suffer through our potentially contagious presence!
Since the forum is run on inquiry and discussion, we needed a planning document, and Google Drive provided a perfect platform for us to write our questions, rules, and reminders together both synchronously and asynchronously. Since Sophie and I both have and use our Google accounts, it was no effort or question. Plus, we got to see what each other was writing as we wrote it, discuss the changes by phone, add links, quotes, formatting, and photos. We would have lost the ability to format properly or keep easy track of the document if we used Facebook messaging or statuses, for instance, and the privacy settings of the document are quite flexible.
by-Phone
Car Telephone (Photo credit: bjosefowicz)
Because writing in text makes it very difficult to emote, and writing planning documents and discussions can easily trigger miscommunication, missed messages, and general confusion, we opted to talk by phone as we planned our Forum. Even though our voice based communication was sparse as we typed, it allowed for easy and quick clarification, justification, and suggestion with the added benefit of those temporary notes not being archived and cluttering our documents. We also had the ability to smile, laugh, end our sentences in a question tone, and show other emotions to underline our feelings as we spoke.
Google Hangouts
During the Forum itself on Facebook, Sophie and I used Google Hangouts as a rich backchannel to add all the benefits of phone communication with a video layer on top. Seeing a raised eyebrow, a smile, or a shake of the head during discussion added yet another layer of communicative understanding to our backstage work. I noted that it was a bit strange for us to use such a rich method for our backchannel of two participants while using a relatively thin channel in Facebook for the real event, when typically thin channels like Twitter are used for backchanneling while the main event is fairly rich. In this particular case, though, it was absolutely perfect. She and I were able to note changes to each other, clarify responses before typing, and give insights into the participants’ history and experience without anyone hearing our chatter in the public facing Forum.
In-Person
Before the first planning event, Sophie and I happened to both be presenting at the NJLA Adult Services forum and we got to see each other, greet each other, reinforce our in-person friendship and camaraderie, and have a rich discussion in real space. It was convenient that we both happened to be scheduled to speak and had the time to talk for a few minutes, because although this is by far the richest collaboration and communication channel it also represents the most effort. She and I probably both had to drive for 40 minutes to get there, spending time, gas, money, and planning, and if we hadn’t been going to this event anyway, we likely would not have had the opportunity to meet. In fact, while I list Sophie among my most valuable and respected colleagues, I have probably only been in the same physical space with her a handful of times. This shows the value of our other methods here, for sure.
How about you and your collaborators?
What methods do you use for communication and collaboration, and what benefits do they bring? Are you using email, Facebook messaging, Twitter DMs, or other methods to work together? What has worked best for you and what was the context of that success? What might Sophie and I have done instead of this and still get all the benefits of these various channels? List your answers, feedback and experiences in the discussion below!
Arduino Five Ten Egg Timer circuit – John LeMasney
Introduction to Arduino
Last night I gave a talk on Introduction to Arduino at Princeton Public Library as part of their technology class offerings. I thought I might recap the talk here and invite you to come and visit the next time we offer it. For more information about their free and public classes, please click here:
Getting started with Arduino is the presentation I gave, complete with links, videos, photos, and other information.
What is Arduino?
Arduino microcontroller / Arduino Uno microcontroller ATmega328 / Arduino Mega 2560 / Arduino Nano ATmega328 / Arduino Pro Mini ver.3.3V ATmega328 / Photo by Arkadiusz Sikorski https://www.arq.pl/ (Photo credit: Arkadiusz Sikorski vel ArakuS)
Arduino is an open source hardware platform for learning and prototyping electronics projects. It’s open source in that the design of the board itself is shared so that you can build your own if you are so inclined. The software and scripts used to program it are also open source. It benefits from a strong worldwide community of developers, programs, and resources, including books, videos, and classes. It is an Italian project, co-founded by Massimo Banzi and others, and is designed to help people learn easily, even from a very young age. http://www.arduino.cc is the homepage for the project. You can get an Arduino Uno, one version of many good for getting started, for around $30.
Where can you get an Arduino and Learn more?
You can buy Arduino products in many places, including online on Amazon.com, element14.com, and in brick and mortar stores like Radio Shack.
http://makezine.com is a champion of projects using Arduinos and other open platforms.
What are inputs and Outputs?
Inputs are ways for the Arduino to get information. These include sensors like motion detectors, cameras, compasses, GPS, touchscreens, buttons, and many of the same kinds of sensors typically found on a contemporary phone. You use pins on the Arduino to connect them, and use scripts, called sketches, to tell the Arduino what to do with the signals.
Outputs are ways for the Arduino to send back information or do actions. Examples include Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs), speakers, motors, and fans.
You can use inputs, outputs and sketches to scratch your own itches, often for a very low price. If you want a station that feeds your cat once every twelve hours but only if it hears a meow or when the cat comes near, you might use an arduino, an RFID (proximity) sensor, and a motor or latch to make it so that if the cat’s collar with an RFID chip in it comes close enough to the station, once in 12 hours time, the container of food has a door that opens for 3 seconds and closes again.
How do I get started with Arduino?
Cover via Amazon
There are many fantastic books, websites, videos, and communities of practice that focus on Arduino. Here’s one video that tells you how to get started with an Arduino. If you search for ‘Arduino tutorial’ on Google, YouTube, Element 14, or Adafruit.net, you’ll find many more.
How do I work with an Arduino?
The key to working with Arduino is writing sketches. You can use the Arduino program (an IDE or integrated development environment) based on an open source application called Processing to write sketches. Get it from http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Software
The most common starting example, with very simple capabilities is the Blink example. You can open the Blink example from file/examples/basics in the application.
“/* Blink
Turns on an LED on for one second, then off for one second, repeatedly.
This example code is in the public domain. */
// Pin 13 has an LED connected on most Arduino boards.
// give it a name:
int led = 13;
// the setup routine runs once when you press reset:
void setup() {
// initialize the digital pin as an output.
pinMode(led, OUTPUT);
}
// the loop routine runs over and over again forever:
void loop() {
digitalWrite(led, HIGH);
// turn the LED on (HIGH is the voltage level)
delay(1000);
// wait for a second
digitalWrite(led, LOW);
// turn the LED off by making the voltage LOW
delay(1000);
// wait for a second
}”
~ Arduino – Blink –
What kinds of things can you do with an Arduino?
Here is a fun example that shows what you can do with the Arduino, with others in the presentation linked above:
Is Arduino related to Raspberry Pi?
Arduino and the Raspberry Pi are often talked about together, but they are very different devices. The Raspberry Pi and Arduino are both open source hardware, but aside from that they have very little to do with one another. While the Raspberry Pi has pins that you can use to manage electronics, the main purpose of the Pi is to have a $35 computer that you can use to connect to a TV or monitor via HDMI or composite jack and to a keyboard and mouse with USB. The Arduino would need to be very heavily modded to allow for anything like that. The Arduino is primarily an electronics prototyping platform.
