Weekly Notes 2023 W24

Last Week (2023W24)

I have been sleeping more regularly, and have been sleeping on my bed rather than on a chair, I’ll call that progress. I have been going to bed by the early morning hours and waking up by 1500. I’m not particularly fond of this schedule because I have to rush through to make it to my calls on time in the evening. However, at least my sleep routine has become somewhat consistent. Although my productivity is not excellent, my mood has been relatively good.

Monday and Tuesday were productive work wise.

A few weeks ago, the strap of my Watch (BangleJS) broke, I fixed it using a generic 20mm strap.

I have been using Logseq and its Logseq Sync feature to synchronize my laptop and tablet apps. I mainly utilize Logseq for my daily logs and sleep tracking. I find Logseq to be much easier to use. Although I had previously experimented with Obsidian and other similar tools, I could never stick with them as they always felt out of place to me.

I rejoined Twitter on Tuesday primarily to follow the recent AWS outage in us-east-1. I had been off Twitter for the past several months and had been using Mastodon through hachyderm.io. However, returning to Twitter felt good, mainly because I could once again read updates from my favorites. I do like Mastodon; it has a unique community that resonates with me in terms of the people, their geekery and ethos. However, Twitter provides access to individuals whom I follow primarily for their expertise in areas of my interest, such as tech, history, gender rights and anti-caste activists, which I have been missing on Mastodon.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were mainly for work, but I wasn’t particularly productive during those days.

Since Thursday, I have been watching and reading about various photographic and printmaking processes, and I was excitedly anticipating the Kitchen Lithography event on Saturday.

On Saturday, I visited 1.Shantiroad Gallery, where Bazinega conducted a Kitchen Lithography workshop led by Aditi. Check out picturepapertext too - which has collection of different print and photographic experiments by Aditi.

Lithography is a process that allows us to print artwork on paper using a specific kind of stone. The stone is treated with chemicals to create a surface where greasy paint adheres to the artwork, enabling its transfer onto paper. This technique is known as lithography (litho meaning “stone”). Kitchen lithography is a DIY version of this process, where aluminum sheets are used instead of stones.

In Kitchen Lithography, an aluminum sheet serves as the canvas for drawing using a wax crayon. It is then treated with Cola, where phosphoric acid makes the non-drawn areas hydrophilic (hydro meaning “water” and philic meaning “loving”). The artwork is cleaned using vegetable oil and washed with water. When the artwork is still damp, oil-based ink is applied, which adheres only to the drawn areas.

And then a paper is placed over the plate, and by applying pressure, the ink is transferred onto paper, just like other printing processes.

I really enjoyed the workshop and have plans to explore other alternative print making processes and photographic processes especially Cyanotype and Dichromate processes.

I purchased a lot of Zines from Bazinega’s zine festival for our collection at Beneathatree.

On Sunday, my sister visited me at our office, and we had lunch together. In the evening, Sachin and I took Bruce to Cubbon Park. We enjoyed a long walk around the park and played with Bruce.

After returning, I took a nice nap.

I had initially planned to experiment with Cyanotype, but I was too tired to do so on Sunday evening. Instead, I ended up cleaning work desks and moving the CNC machine back into the makerspace.

I want to work towards having a consistent balance with work and sleep so that I can also spend maybe an hour or two in our Makerspace each day to wind down.

Interesting Internet:

• I have been rewatching episodes of Citation Needed by Technical difficulty randomly. I really enjoy this show. Random Wikipedia Trivia, Puns and Gags - what else does one need? Linked above is one of the episode I enjoyed a lot.

• ElectroBoom goes into details (in the usual electroboom style) of DIY Metal detector. The idea of multiplying Sine waves to convert low frequency signal into audible range - and then using that to identify different magnetic material was very fascinating. The application of Fourier Transform for approximate square wave to a single sine wave, and then using this scientific fact for simplifying circuit design was 🤯.

• Rabbit hole of printing processes on youtube led me to this beautiful video about William Blake and how he printed his books

If you made it till here, you deserve some of the Orange cuteness.