10.14.10 - Oh look, only ONE MONTH AND ONE YEAR since my last update here. That's just absurd, I won't disagree. BUT WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW is that I've been up to all kinds of crazy things in that time!

• I've shot almost entirely film. I don't know where the obsession came about again, but it's been terrific, and I'm enjoying the hell out of it. BUT THEN...
• I stopped shooting almost altogether. I've been concentrating more on the mod end of things, such as fine-tuning the Joycam project. BECAUSE OF THAT PURSUIT...
• I bought a Makerbot. A Makerbot is an at-home, computer-operated desktop printer. But it doesn't make prints of photos or documents, it prints in plastic. This is referred to as RAPID PROTOTYPING, and it's an amazing thing that bozos like me can do at home. You design something in a CAD program, in virtual 3D. You feed it into a program that carves it into tiny layers (like TRON!), and then spits it out into elaborate, confusing code. Another program sends these codes to the printer, and it spits out a physical object of your design! SO FOR THE LAST 6 MONTHS...
• I've been fighting with the Makerbot! We have successes, we have failures, but we have PROGRESS, which is the most important part. You have to keep in mind that you assemble the Makerbot yourself, which means if you did it wrong, you can blow it up, which I have done. Many times. WHICH MEANS...
• I've learned a TON of things about a ton of things, including electronics, soldering, design, mechanical design, sketching (yay for drawing), machine-operation (thanks Dad), and a dozen other things I can't think of at this moment. THIS MEANS THAT...
• I'm spending more time on the robot designing and refining parts of things that will eventually be produced in small numbers for converted Joycams. This makes the over $1000 investment in the robot completely worth it, outside of the fact that I've learned so much about so much, and continue to do so.

On top of all of this Makerbot nonsense, I've built or modified a few small things, but it's all in expectation of that biggest elusive project: the Joycams. This week has yielded another interesting thought. In this article from The Economist, they elaborate on the perspectives of two fellows using Kickstarter.com to fund a new project. Kickstarter is a fundraising website. Some friends of mine utilized something similar to fund a webisode pilot video project, to great success. So, these gentlemen posed an interest in collecting $10,000 to produce a very tiny plastic module that would permit a few different functions for the iPhone4. This isn't unreasonable, and the idea is that someone who invests will get a hookup of some kind, like one of the devices they're making.

So in less than a week, they had over $70K promised investment. That's a lot more than they were looking for. This begs the question, and I'm not saying my idea is close to as important or as popular, would it be worth posting the Joycam, or perhaps the other 600-type conversion project up to a service like this? If I'm one person interested in these kinds of things, surely other people must be.

That's the news from Lake Wobegon. I'm going to do something different soon, I don't know what. But I'm going to document the molestation of my Makerbot, affectionately named Brokenbot, and how I've adjusted it. And maybe the site, this site that I love and pay for and don't update, should be mooshed into a blog. I don't like blogs, but golly they look handy. More to come soon, let's get a move on. HYAH!!!!

12.14.08 - Thanks in no small part to the ugly ice storm that took my power away, I have some Image Samples from the FD60! As a bonus, I added a comment app to the page, so if you have questions or remarks about the conversion project, let em rip! Click to see the test shots!