As many an avid looker of my site may know, i frequently use the constructed language of toki pona, its a language designed in 2001 with the goal to have as little amount of words as possible, to be extremely simple but not so that it limits the ideas you can share with it. in this sense i think its been wildly successful, even if its very much a niche thing and i wouldn't be surprised if more people knew klingon then toki pona^[1].

but as i have become more confident in it through both teaching others and also through using it more myself, especially in alt text, i realize it has made me way better at making alt text in any language i know!

an important skill in alt text is being able to pick out the important parts of the image and describing that in a short and sweet way that still gives enough context to understand the image. this is of course especially hard for art, as art is a complex thing and that's why some people often write image descriptions^[2] for art too. however alt text is still super important for artistic images because you need to actually explain what is in the image.

this is where toki pona comes in! in toki pona, sentences are very simplified because of a pretty strict grammatical structure. there are no run on sentences, explaining things in detail gets wordy, and with alt text you need to keep it under a paragraph! ideally not more then two lines!

for example my recent art kasi telo seli has the alt text soweli Pi li moku e kasi telo seli· ona pona a.

man what a series. only 6 episodes long but it fit so much into it. it was perfectly sized for the story.
i really loved the art direction and the slowburn of it. it was honestly quite beautiful.
it faced a lot of real life issues with the promise of something we all want in our lives, answers. 
i highly recommend it honestly, it was subtle in many ways including its art direction, but in that art direction it created something beautiful with a bunch of different techniques

sometimes i find i just need to improve my user experience in life.

or sometimes i just need to show how i would personally do something myself

I've done both of these recently!

a few days ago i wrote a quick 11ty example site to help my many friends who are learning to make sites to make sites!^[1]

and today i spent a few hours today to make a little button that will automatically save a page to rss librarian!^[2][3]

i enjoyed doing both and I'm glad that i have done so! but I also know i very much that i get hyperfixated because it's a puzzle to me and puzzles can be irresistible!

I am working on a secret project at the moment and its been going well but i have hit a lot of walls, most of them to do with tooling in the process of creating it.

Since it requires 3d modeling i have had to be learning that, and while i am happy with where i have gotten it, its not done to my standards yet. But unfortuntely i do not know the tools well enough to get it done!

I also have been struggling with the second part of the project, which involves more mechanical aspects of modeling. however my cad design software for whatever reason isn't turning the 3d model into a form that it can work with, making it impossible to do that part of it too!

i hope to figure it out soon, as it has a soft deadline, and while i could just print the 3d model, i want to execute the idea i have had in my head for this project, because i think it will result in a really fun and nice gift.

a bunch of my friends have been blogging of late and i have been wanting to do so myself too!

so that is one of my goals for this year, to blog more! to put my ramblings out there! ill probably post about shows im watching, things im doing, etc etc.

This lst few weeks my sleep schedule has been really messy, but one upside of it is i have been waking up around sunrise.

i get it, it's such a quiet time and yet it's bright outside, it's really contemplative time

that said I'd like my sleep to function please

For my daily art yesterday, i really wanted a dither pattern that looks like stars.
Unfortunately I could not find such a thing. So I made one.

How does a dither work?

A dither is essentially a map from every colour to black or white, this is done by adding the source colour and the dither pattern together, and then forcing each pixel to either be black or white. (Coloured dithers are created by doing this to each channel, Red, Green, and Blue)

As such, this pattern is actually a bunch of pixels that add up so that they max out in a certain order.

Take the 2x2 General dither pattern:

It is simply four shades of gray, equally spaced from black to white. 
The top left corner of the pattern will be the first to turn white, as it is the closest to white. then the bottom right, then the top right, and finally the bottom left. It creates a gradient like so:

It can be thought of as several combining layers, with each layer being combined with all the previous ones to produce the desired pixel.

Black here indicates transparency

Making the dither:

The method i have worked out is that, starting with a black background layer, for each stage of your dither you want, you create a layer with each pixel of the pattern filled in white.

You then need to calculate the opacity to set each layer to, I have found the best calculation is 100 divided by the number of layers, minus 1%. so (100/4)-1 is 24% in this case. Then setting each layer to that opacity level, with a black background at full

I have recently joined a hackerspace, and since i have been wanting to get more into writing, as well as recently purchased an ereader which i have been loving, i decided i wanted to manufacture a pair of clips to attach my e reader to my keyboard for writing usage!

I spent a fair few hours learning freecad, measuring both devices, and creating a cad document of a structure to hold the tablet.

The images of the sketch are of the later iteration 2, i do not have screenshots of iterations 1's sketch

I designed it with the intent to allow the design to bend slightly in order to allow a snapping motion to attach each device. with both snapping points having a slight arc doubling as better cradling the devices curves. I did later discover that i mistook a pair of lines as parallel in the design, but this didn't turn out to be a problem.

After spending some hours at home, i headed out to the hackerspace (for the first time!) and from there i started 3d printing! A massive thanks to hank who spent his time teaching me how to use the printers, and helped to solve problems!
Our first print did fail due to some lifting from the build plate, but the second print went well!

Testing iteration one, i found that the snapping was a bit too hard, and the tolerances a bit too tight on the e reader. To solve this i increased the height of the e reader in the sketch by 1mm, and increased the tolerances from 0.1mm to 0.25mm. I also added a small fillet to the edge faces to prevent elephant

today i performed two experiments on my way home from a date with my partner^[1]

the first one was my gloves, usually i use a pair of fingerless bike gloves when wheeling around, however they are made of plastics and other non renewable fabrics, so i've been wanting to find an alternative.
I found a pair of fingerless leather gloves the other week while exploring a farmers / wholesale market, they are very comfortable but i have found they are not great for wheelchair use. the first and main problem is grip, the leather gloves are surprisingly slippery and as a result i have to use more force when breaking. as well as that i found myself using my thumb more when pushing which would develop a blister if i continued too much. its more protection then nothing, but not well suited for wheelchair usage. i imagine it would be possible to make some wheelchair designed leather gloves, however at the moment i don't have those. there is also the small issue of as they are new, the fuzzy leather on the inside turns my hands black as if i have been holding charcoal.

the second experiment was my route. i took a different street home from what i usually do. my usual path is fine but it has a lot of extremely steep curb-cuts which can even be so steep as to be dangerous. this other street i have taken is much easier on the curb cuts due to many renovations of corner houses, however the overall camber of the street is much more harsh. that said a harsh camber is preferable to falling out of my

I added a tags system for my site! now i can tag posts!