The Big Redo
We. Are. SO. Back.
Uploaded December 31 2024
Most of this was written as I was making stuff, however it's been edited as of today for improvement (and also pictures). It's uploaded so late since I really only had time to make things and not get them on the site.
Alright yeah, I know I said I'd get back into creating and all that stuff--and y'know I could blame it on working my first job and moving to college--BUT! I'm here now, and I'm back with a bang. One of my favorite youtubers I watch challenged his viewers to create something every day for the month of October. Noticing that I hadn't been doing the things I'd like to do, I thought it would be a good way to get back into my create-a-thing-every-2-weeks plan. After all, if I can make something every day for a month, why shouldn't I be able to do it every 2 weeks? Now, while I'm not making whole videos OF something I'm also making, I'm still making something every day. Currently I only get about 10 minutes to 2 hours of useful energy/time that I can put into creation each day, which means that I'm making small stuff. Sometimes I'll split up a certain project into multiple days, but I attempt to get about the same amount of finished product every day.
Enough of me rambling! Let's look at what I've done.
Day 1
I decided to start out by working on my website's icons (the ones in the nav area). I wanted to do something where I'd make the model in blender and render it in 24x24 resolution, but blender has been having this problem recently where it doesn't render grease pencil properly in the viewport. That makes things slower since I would have to made a render every time I want to see what I've made. Fortunately, after about an hour of fiddling with things, I found out its a problem with newer versions of blender. I had to switch back to an older version, but I still don't know how to fix the newer ones.
Anyway, I decided to make a little house for the home icon. Fixing the problem left little energy to do anything else, so I figured I'd upload the icon to my site and move on. Unfortunately my site had other plans for me. You can see it on the left there.
Day 2
I self host my website using yunohost. Normally it's a great service, things work fine. But recently there's been this problem where the log files keep expanding in size. They expand so much that it ends up filling the entire drive after a week or something. This means that I can't upload any new updates to my website since the rest of it is filled. I have to ssh into the server and then delete the log file. This might sound simple but it ended up taking 3 hours to figure out. I uploaded the home icon from the previous day and called it quits.
Day 3
I continued the icon project with the art page. This one was pretty fast but I'm still proud of it, which I think is what matters. Nothing crazy this day.
Day 4
I did a simple model of my medium format camera, I'm also quite proud of this one, but that's maybe because I love my camera so much.
Day 5
A really old project of mine is making my own mechanical keyboard, I had already designed the PCB for it, but I still hadn't figured out how I was going to mount it to a case... and what case I was going to use. So I added some M3 screw holes to the board and used FreeCAD to make the case to fit the part. I won't be ordering the PCB or making the case anytime soon (no money), but it's at least ready for me to do all that now.
Day 6
To be completely honest, I have no idea what I did this day. The issue with me not keeping track of what I've done this past month is that I'm having to rely on the file dates of the things I've made. For the most part that's worked out, but I can't find anything on this day specifically.
It's possible I made my 1st attempt at the "this site" icon this day, but I didn't render it because I really didn't like the result (no render, no file date). It's also possible I worked on my DIY force feedback steering wheel and pedals this day and I just forgot what I did. I know I did something, I just don't know what.
Day 7
I printed a mount for a chain tensioner for my diy FFB steering wheel, as well as pedals for my... pedals. The mount works great, but the spring design for the pedals ended up being terrible. It took a bit to get the pedals assembled, and having it not work was annoying so I decided that I needed SOME win for the day so I started watching Red Means Recording 3rd VCV rack tutorial video. I'm pretty sure you aren't really supposed to follow along in this one, but I did any way so it took like twice as long, meaning I only got half done.
Day 8
So far the pedals springs had been using a coil-under design, but to get the most stroke I can't cover the entire spring. That meant the spring would buckle out (not good). I cadded up a hybrid between coil-under and coil-over this day. Since the CAD felt a bit too quick I also ended up finishing the 3rd VCV rack video. I don't really like the result, so I won't share.
You might be asking about pictures of the wheel and pedal stuff. Now I could share it as I go along, but that seems like more work than making 1 full post of the finished project. So I'll be doing that instead.
Day 9
I watched Red Means Recording's 4th VCV rack video this day. I actually really like what I ended up creating (even if I followed a tutorial). If I figure out how to make a recording of it downloadable, I'll put it here.
Day 10
Made the log icon. Pretty quick and easy. Not much to say about it.
Day 11
Made the me icon. I struggled a bit on deciding what I wanted to make, and then I remembered the name of the website. Proportionally and shape-wise the boat probably doesn't make much sense, but it gets the point across that it's a boat with a lateen sail
Day 12
I have 3 rolls of film that I still haven't written about yet, and figured now would be as good as any day to do that. I had to do this day on my laptop, which was new, so I had to figure out my preferred way of writing and displaying an image simultaneously on linux. I ended up settling on geeqie to display the images, and my typical editor neovim. After that I got about half way through writing about the 1st roll.
Day 13
Finished writing about the 1st roll (which you can view here)
Day 14
I decided to make the website's code a bit cleaner, and by the time I was uploading the files the log file expansion thing happened again, so I also dealt with that.
Day 15
I began writing the intro for this page you're reading now as well as figuring out which projects happened on which days.
Day 16
I finished writing this page up until this day
Day 17
I polished up the rest of the site a bit
Day 18
Figuring it would be a good time to render out the site icons, I had to figure some things out. I prefer not to use pngs on this site since I think they're too large for the web, however you lose transparency when you only use jpgs. Because of this, I thought I could copy the colors from the nav and make them the background for the renders. However, jpg seemed to compress it badly since the colors ended up looking really bad. I figured I could use gifs instead since they have transparency, but converting the 24x24 pngs to gif made them look terrible. I landed on making the render a 120x120 png, converted it to gif, then scaling it down in the html.
Day 19
Taking inspiration from my this site side image gag, I made a tiny pixel art version of the site. This would mark my first time using aseprite, which I hope to make art in the future with.
Day 20
I didn't have much time this day, so I just organized my style.css file a bit.
Day 21
The music I listen to (currently vaporwave) and past music I've listened to (japanese fusion & city pop) aren't really on streaming services. Because of this, I legally acquire my music. I can get into more detail on how I organize my music at a different time, but! On this day I was doing my newly acquired music tag editing when I discovered that I could add a // to the album artist field to have multiple artists on one track. This was very significant since the main problem I'd been having was trying to have a collaboration album show up under both artists in foobar2000. After I found this out I went through my (at the time) 60gb of music and fixed it all.
Day 22
Started writing up the 2nd b&w roll that was developed. Got about half way.
Day 23
Finished writing up the 2nd roll.
Day 24
I started and completed writing up the 3rd roll that I got developed.
Day 25
A big goal for this website is that I'd like it to be very compatible with older browsers. Like pre-html5 compatible. This is an ongoing thing and will take a while, but I did figure out how to do images so that they'd be compatible with html4. I still haven't updated my older pages with this, but I know how now at least.
Day 26
I had just watched Fallen Angels the previous night, and I really liked the random gestures the mute guy would make. I thought it'd be fun to learn how to animate a mask using a clip of him, so I worked on legally acquiring premiere pro and after effects and watched a few tutorials.
Day 27
I actually started to work on the clip. I only got about a second of it "done" before calling it quits.
Day 28
Looking back on my previous work I realized it wasn't that consistent of a mask so I fixed up the previous day's work and did a bit more.
Day 29
I got about 2 seconds total done of 4 of the clip.
Day 30
I realized that it would be kinda weird to end on me spending 6 days on this one thing, so I shelved the green screen Fallen Angels project (I'll link the finished product when it's done) in favour of writing up to this day so that I could spend time to actually finish making something the next.
Day 31
Every now and again, I'll be watching a TV show or movie and really enjoy the aesthetic and imagery of a certain shot. Usually when this happens, I'll screenshot it so that I can remember to revisit it in the future. Something I'd been wanting to do for a while with a certain shot from Twin Peaks was to pixel sort it. It's a neat effect and this shot looked like a good enough candidate due to the black background.
Using satyarth's pixel sort command I played with the options until I found something I liked. This image isn't the exact first one I landed on, since I overwritted the same image, but let's just say it is.
I didn't really feel like this was enough to end the month on, so I figured I could try and make an animated pixel sort of the whole shot.
I tried finding other tools that could sort videos, but they didn't have the same control as the original command, so I made a simple powershell loop to do it for me. Also, jesus christ does powershell suck. I pray for the day I have a new drive and the time to have an infinitely better daily driving linux experience. Anyway, I made the first sort video to be mostly controlled and simple. You can click on the gif to look at a .mp4 version.
I got pretty excited that the script had worked the first try so I went for something that would go from no pixel sorting to lots.
I went with another nothing-to-lots of pixel sort, but I added another incremental variable. The loop above made what you're seeing here.
I think this stuff's pretty cool! I'm proud of what I made and I don't think there would've been a better way to close off the month. I have mixed feelings on the artistic integrity of the pixel sort (something about modifying other's work feels weird), but it's not like I'm selling it.
Looking back on this in December I kinda feel like I could've done more, but I remember struggling quite a bit to get stuff mostly due to time constraints and college stuff. I don't think I'd want do something like this again in the same circumstances since I'd want to do more, but it's nice to know that I was able to follow through on something like this. I'm proud of what I accomplished and I think I'm actually ready to do more stuff creatively.