In LA

I think my pumpkin from last year was more inspired, but this one’s an original. Rachel did well though:

Rachel’s pirate Jack-o-lantern

Her pumpkin comes with a line of dialogue carved into its side.

I was sitting on the step taking a phone call, and was startled to spot this awesome, huge praying mantis on the wall beside me. I switched to speakerphone and shot a photo during the call. Sometimes the best camera is the one you’ve got at the time.

Y’all Yoda’d-out yet? Hope not, because Yoda!

Yoda Lite at 0.06mm layer height. The fringing on his left ear and the hole at the top of the head were also present on the 0.1mm print. One day when I’ve got another extruder printing support material these problems will go away. It’s impressive to me that overhangs like the left ear actually print in the first place.

Now that I’ve replaced the power supply and wound the spool of filament so that it feeds reliably, I can actually trust the Printrbot+ to run without nearly so much babysitting as before. It’s a semi-reliable appliance that ran fine all weekend, printing various objects and tests. Last week I was very satisfied to have gotten good prints at .2mm layer height, but then my brother-in-law mentioned that Ultimakers (arguably the best of the reprap-derived 3D printers) are often used to make nice prints at .1mm layer height. That sounded like a very worthy goal.

After a bunch of testing and tweaking (lowered the “XY jerk” setting in the marlin firmware, lowered the hot end temp to 222ºC, raised the bed temp to 110ºC, increased filament retraction to 1.5mm) I got the bot printing .1mm layers with 180mm/sec perimeters, and proceeded to print a full-scale Yoda Lite as a test –this time completely hollow to save time and plastic. I was shocked to see in this print facial details that were not at all visible in the .2mm layer-height version. Night and day. He has eyes, and eyelids, with wrinkles! It almost looked like there was skin surface. 0.1mm layers are so small they begin to disappear.

But if it could print at 0.1mm, what about lower? How about the arbitrarily-chosen height of 0.06mm? Apparently yes, it’s possible. It worked. The layers are so barely-there that other very fine layers that run vertically and wrap around the contours of the object have become visible –I think they may be evidence of the limits of the resolution of the x and y axes.

0.1mm layer height. Click any image in this post to see it at full resolution (caveat: some of these are very big and may take a while to load).

0.06mm layer height. Yoda’s robes look smoother to me than they do in the .1mm photo.

I’d given away the 0.1mm Yoda to a cousin and can’t compare the two directly, but I had taken a couple of very similar photos, and after adjusting their levels to bring out the detail the .1mm and .06mm version look pretty similar. Click either photo to view at full resolution. I should probably just print another .1mm Yoda so I can compare them with my own eyes and see whether it’s worth printing at below .1mm layer height.

In any case, there are plenty of areas of improvement in all of these prints, but I’m very happy with the progress of my bot’s print quality. Fun.

Yoda Lite at 0.1mm layer height, edge-lit to show more detail in the layers than is noticeable at a casual glance. The ears always seem to be a problem with this model since there’s no support material and they stick out at a jaunty angle.

I was just paging through a bunch of photos I shot with my iPhone while in China and came across photos I’d shot of a menu that featured some amazing English translations. I present to you a collection entitled “Customer get angry”:

I really wish I’d asked if I could buy one of these menus, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Although I think many of these translations are hilarious, it is worth noting that I don’t think badly of whoever put it together –it was extremely courteous of them. Very very few English speakers ever pop into the small town of Hengdian, let alone drop into Ai Qi Coffee. So kudos to that establishment for trying (and largely succeeding) to accomodate the occasional English-speaker.
Customer not really angry.

1. Again, those not accustomed to China might also find "Super cows feet pizza" to be noteworthy [↩]
2. I suspect a scientific name crept into their woeful Chinese-English dictionary [↩]

By popular demand¹, and to give me a reference so I can remember my settings when I inevitably lose them, I present my Steadicam Merlin recipe for the Canon T2i with attached² Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 lens. It’s the exact setup I used to shoot this little video of a sidewalk butcher shop in China.

These images show the combination of weights used, the span angle setting, the hole in the mounting plate to which the camera was attached (hole N), that the gezornenplatz screw was in place, and the position of the mount plate.

Full setup

middle weight and span setting	end weights	mounting plate
mount plate position

1. i.e., a single message sent to me on Vimeo [↩]
2. as opposed to unattached? [↩]

Sometimes Chinese parents show how they really feel about their child with a carefully-chosen bumper sticker.¹

What’s a “Tiger Mom”? If you have to ask, that’s good. You’ve obviously been studying math or practicing piano for hours and hours, keeping clear of the internet. I take back what I said about you being garbage.

When I saw this sticker I laughed aloud², then reflected on the fact that if my parents had sported this on their Toyota station wagon when I was growing up, I’d probably have been a better student. Fear of unknown unknowns³ is a great motivator.

OK, so the bumper sticker has nothing really to do with the “Tiger Mom” meme, but that phrase is all over the net and the whole concept alternately interests me and cracks me up. My theory is that any truth to Mrs. Chua’s newly-named stereotype has little to do with being Asian⁴, and much to do with the fact that it wasn’t easy for people to immigrate to the US from China in the 1960s-80s and the process disproportionately selected for the hard-scrambling type. Many of those immigrants later decided⁵ to imbue in their kids the same drive that served them in getting through that filter. It’s just like the Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue“, but with the parental focus being toughness mental rather than physical.

But no need to be so serious; The best Tiger Mom jokes I’ve come across so far are the article “New Parenting Book Sparks Outrage” from The Onion, and Jen Kwok’s “Tiger Mom Rap!”.

1. Yes, I smudged out the license number, just in case China’s “Human Flesh Search Engines” are on the lookout for people with unharmonious bumper stickers. [↩]
2. …then I stopped laughing and wondered whether the driver could have purchased this sticker as a deliberate joke, which would still be funny but less so. Unlikely given that the median level of English literacy among locals of this area in nil. [↩]
3. Rumsfeld, Donald, “I never promised you a WMD”, Press Briefing (Winter 2002 Edition), GWB (ed.), URL = <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns>. [↩]
4. …except for the Orientalist-tinge to the naming of the meme. [↩]
5. …or had less choice in the matter than that, since people may often just use the same parental behaviors that were modeled for them when young, or maybe their nature trumps nurture and the filter selected for genetically-driven type-A peeps. [↩]

The most stylish (yet very shy around foreigners with iPhones) girl on the subway. Her very fashionable parents saw me try to take her photo and approved, and then her Dad took my phone away and proved himself with this photo the better photographer of this particular subject.

A sparkly owl coat, seen on the streets of Songjiang, Shanghai, China. If you’re ever curious if a given photo was shot in Shanghai, just look for guys carrying their girlfriends’ designer purses –it appears to be the local custom.

My new sweater proclaims that I am "having a Fine Time with your Friends" and exhorts all that "You Must be a Eiffel Knit Life". Word.

A “Betty Boop” store.


The Table Tennis section of East Nanjing Road’s big Li-Ning store.


Pleasant Goat wishes you all a jittery, happy, new year.

I moved back to the US of A three years ago, so it’s time to retire my old Beijing-themed header images. I’ll miss the photo of the bicycle-based park barbers and the photo of the bicycle-based couch mover and even the photos of a younger version of myself in front of a red wall, but it’s time for a set that’s new and more relevant to Los Angeles.

So here are the header images I threw together yesterday, along with brief explanations:

In Los Angeles it is important to drive everywhere, regardless the distance. Yes, you could walk 3 blocks to your destination, but then you’d miss out on the many routes suggested by your car’s factory-installed GPS system.

An average sunset in the hills of LA’s "Studio City" district.

The pets of a film editor I know share an "American Gothic" moment. Part of the "A day in the life of Burbank" collection.

Disneyland isn’t exactly LA, but it’s close. This picturesque scene is part of the Grand Canyon diorama, one of the many sights to behold while enjoying Disneyland’s charming and ancient train ride.

Due to the extreme horizontal aspect ratio, it’s a challenge to edit images for the header. But it’s fun. The header image displayed per visit is chosen randomly. Once I’ve installed more images, you’ll likely see a different image each visit.