Last year, I had the good fortune of finding a Pfaff 130 on the curb. These machines are famous for their power and durability. By this, I mean that they are just as comfortable sewing through five layers of canvas as they are all five of your fingers. This is what it looks like — sorry for the crap-tography.

The machine hadn’t been loved or used in many years. Tonight, I took it apart completely, cleaned and lubricated everything, repaired the wiring, scuffed all contacts and the motor armature clean, and clamped, glued, and screwed the bottom of the case back together. Incredibly enough it almost worked when I finished putting it back together. The remaining problem was adjusting the tension of the upper and lower mechanisms.

What I’d never fully appreciated before was that the stitches you get from a maladjusted machine are plainly diagnostic. Just look at the image below, from the Pfaff 130 service manual (taken from the Yahoo Group linked at the bottom of this post, BTW).

If the top thread is piercing through the fabric, but not pulling the bottom thread in, the bobbin tension is too high.
If the bottom thread is piercing through the fabric, but not pulling the top thread in, the top tension is too high.
If both penetrate the fabric equally, the tension is correct. Awesome!
(also remember that these things can be conceptualized the other way — if one is never high enough tension, the other probably needs to have its tension reduced)

Once I got that done, which took almost two whole hours of adjusting and re-adjusting (but will be a cinch now that I have done it a few times), I loaded it up with a needle and thread and tried to sew some neoprene. After quite a number of frustrating attempts to sew this thin neoprene, I realized that the hold in the needle was too small for the Consew Heavy Duty nylon thread I was using. The symptom that tipped me off was the thread sort of unwinding itself at the eye of the needle. After loading the machine with a “leather” needle, which is heavier gauge and has a larger hole, I was able to sew this little N900 pouch with almost no effort or trouble.

Spending an evening refurbishing this machine reminded me, again, that I am a builder, fixer, maker, artist. Nothing soothes like keeping these idle hands busy.

It’s probably obvious that I love this machine. I’m not the only one, there’s a Yahoo Group that has manuals and some discussion, and of course, there’s always the mass of people chatting all over the web.

The DIY Book Scanner community has been crazy-active lately. Seems like a new scanner build happens almost daily (though I’m sure it’s less than that).

First and Second builds by Alumrich.

Possum’s simple and awesome build (lots of neat ideas).

ThatTallGuy’s ENORMOUS scanner for very tall people.

Cratylus’ Beta Build (check out the incredible pipe-based sliders. This guy makes PVC look awesome!

RogerMaris has some serious out-of-the-box thinking, imagining and testing a scanner that’s designed to also hold a book up for reading. Great work.

Darryl Smith posted two builds and a build log, one from aluminum tubes — very cool.

Tulane’s Ben Varadi has essentially completed his excellent build. Documented with dozens of pictures full of awesomeness. Some truly unique ideas in there.

Can’t remember if I’ve posted Antoha-SPB’s single-camera build, but it’s inspired a lot of other builds.

The DIY Book Scanner project as a whole continues to gain academic cred — it’s been cited in several papers, shown at 26C3, and spoken about at several universities, including NYLS. Next week, I’ll be speaking at UND in Grand Forks, North Dakota (details forthcoming). March 23rd I’ll be speaking at Harvard’s Berkman Center, and user Misty De Meo just presented her work with DIY Book Scanner technology at the OLA conference. More on Misty and the projects she works on.

I am so honored to be a part of this community. It’s incredible what people have done with this basic technology.

Sorry for the silence here lately; have been dealing with some personal issues.

Amy Dalrymple put together a really nice article about the DIY Book Scanner project, appearing in today’s Fargo Forum.

Super-cool that it coincides neatly with my appearance in DC for World’s Fair Use Day.

As Tox pointed out below, our NYE celebration occurred under odd celestial circumstances: a blue moon, which created the most gorgeous winter halo and moondogs. This is his picture:

Tox and I have a tradition: we bring in the New Year by torching the Christmas tree. This year was no exception; it was exceptional. See:

See also:

Couldn’t have had a better birthday party. Thanks. 2010 and 28 begin, on fire.

The year began on fire.

I rocked the Winter Carnivale.

Built a book scanner.

And another.

Baked bread.

Studied math in the early hours.

Published.

Made music.

Made machines. That make machines.

Drowned.

Saved books from drowning in Valley City.

Froze.

Revived You Are Not Dead with Black Pants Theater, soon to be a play in Vancouver, BC.

Entered the book scanner in a contest.

Won a laser cutter.

Used the laser cutter to make a book scanner.

Tooth infection gone bad.

Lost my apartment.

Grilled.

Burned.

Dumped.

Spoke in New York at NYLS. (image courtesy and copyright NYLS, used without permission)

Won a Kindle in a contest for laser-etched art.

Featured in Wired.

With Matti, built a light field camera.

Watched my building collapse and my hopes of easy progress with it.

Got a birthday gift I’ll never forget.

Got rear-ended about ten minutes ago. This year won’t die without a fight, but I’m a chin-up fighter.

Ups were up. Downs were way down. The balance is even, rising.

In a few hours I’ll have aged. Twenty eight, over ten thousand days and a third of the way there.

NDSU posted some official information about the collapse, though of course the back-channel email communication is far more interesting. I made an animation from their webcam images.

Note particularly the steam in the stairwell — the steam heat in the building might have flooded the building with a wet, hot cloud.

The first is January 12th, 2010 at the First Annual World Fair Use Day in Washington, DC. I will be going over our community’s work and our projects that fall under, and enhance, fair use principles. I couldn’t be more excited about this one, because after the event, we will have a DIY Book Scanner meetup, which is as far as I know the first meeting of our forum members in real life. I hope to see you there! And perhaps share a cold, fermented beverage or ten…

The second place I’ll be spreading the good DIY word is Harvard’s Berkman Center, on March 23rd. I’m not yet sure of the exact time, but I will update as I know more. The Berkman Center, founded by Charles Nesson (whom I had the pleasure meeting at D is for Digitize) is a real force for freedom and legal sensibility when it comes to the Internet. I couldn’t imagine a better place to talk about our work as a community.

Comment here or in the forums if you can make it to either of these events!

In 2007 I released a coloring book for graffiti artists.

Since that time, many, many graf artists have printed it, extended and enhanced the drawings, and dropped the results in their sketchbooks. Some have shared the results online in a private forum. You’ll have to find out where yourself. All works copyright their original owners:

Some have chosen to share their work publicly. Today, I saw this link in my referrer logs:

Copyright Tize One.

Which was drawn on this image from the coloring book:

It’s pretty gratifying to see what people are doing with this project.

Photosynth is a “Photo Tourism” application that lets you seamlessly navigate all 728 high resolution images I took of the Minard Hall collapse.

Requires Microsoft Silverlight, sorry.

Don’t miss the “Collapse of Minard Hall” post below, featuring enormous high-res panoramas of the scene.

Before:

After:

Instructables.com has announced their “Best of 2009″ winners and the DIY Book Scanner Instructable was in the top ten in the category “Most Viewed”.

Recent construction-related excavation work on Minard Hall caused the North face of the building to collapse, exposing faculty offices and engineering incompetence in one fell swoop.

Minard Hall (formerly Science Hall) has a concrete foundation which rests on a bed of smectite clay. This clay, the main ingredient in clumping kitty litter, is the “bedrock” of Fargo, North Dakota and much of the Red River Valley. You might think of Fargo as a bit of frozen cat crap shifting around an enormous bed of saturated litter. To prevent catastrophic collapse, heavy buildings in the area are usually placed on 150 foot caissons (stilts), which rest on bedrock. Because Minard rests on the clay alone, removing the surrounding dirt probably caused the clay to ooze from underneath the building. More about smectite clays from Dr. Donald Schwert, who has precisely nothing to do with this post.

Larger.
Larger still (86.9 megapixels, 11mb).

Unfortunately, this building houses my department, experiment, and student office.

In this image, the third window from the bottom right is my office.

Larger.
Larger still.

Larger.
Larger still (82 megapixels, 10mb).

Larger.
Larger still (19.5 megapixels).

This collapse represents a major setback for the institution as a whole, not to mention my progress as a graduate student. Tough times.

Matti and I just published two tutorials on Instructables.

.

The first introduces the field of Computational Photography, and motivates the project.

The second shows you how to simulate our Large Light Field Camera Array with a single camera

Enjoi.

Priya Ganapati wrote an article about the DIY Book Scanner project on Wired Gadget Lab, a column dedicated to emerging technologies.

I’m particularly pleased to see this quote from Pam Samuelson, who I had the pleasure of meeting at D is for Digitize.

“There have to be things that you get with an e-book that you don’t get by making your own copies,” says Samuelson. “It’s not such as stark challenge for copyright owners, because not many people are going to take the trouble to make their own scanner system. Most of us want the convenience of buying digital books for the Kindle, Nook or Sony Reader.”

Good article, though the quotes from me are… a bit paraphrased…

I’m posting this both to danreetz.com and futurepicture.org — future posts will not be double-posted in this manner. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed over at Futurepicture, there’s much more in store. This is, in fact, just a teaser…

FuturePicture is about the future of photography. It is about cameras with capabilities that sound like science fiction, and look like a million bucks.

So you want to influence the future of photography? Well, you gotta build a camera.

And that’s exactly what Matti and I did. Twice.

First Large Light Field Camera Array:

Second Large Light Field Camera Array:

Computational cameras have only come into being over the last two decades. Why just now? Well, cheap computation, plentiful sensors, and a hundred-fifty years of relative design stagnation explain some of it. Computational photography is a young field, still deciding what it is and what it is doing, exactly, but the undeniable common factor is that a powerful camera is involved. This “camera” could look perfectly ordinary or be completely unrecognizable, understandable only by analogy, from a fly’s eye to the photosensitive spots on nematodes. Computational photography seeks inspiration from disparate sources: biology, computer vision, optics, and statistics. The price of admission is math prowess, some computer programming power, and a camera. Or twelve.

Well, together we (Daniel Reetz and Matti Kariluoma), have that covered. We aim to take computational photography out of the lab, and into practical use. We want to make the hardware affordable and accessible, because outside the ivory towers of academia, there are creative people of all stripes who could use amd abuse this kind of photographic power.

So, what does this thing do? The primary function of this array is to capture the Light Field, a four-dimensional function that is capable of describing all rays in a scene. Surrounding you, now, and always, is a reverberating volume of light. Just as sound echoes around a room in complex ways, bouncing from every surface, so does light, creating a structured volume. Traditional, single-lens cameras project this three dimensional world of reflected light onto a two dimensional sensor, tossing out the 3D information in the process, and capturing only a faint, sheared sliver of the actual light field. By taking many captures at slightly shifted locations, it is possible to capture a crude representation of the light field. The number of slices determines the resolution of capture; our 12 captures at 7cm separation is a bare minimum. What can you do with a light field? The lowest hanging fruit is computational refocusing. By computational refocusing, we mean focusing the image AFTER it is captured.

The particular method of computational refocusing that we employ creates an enormous virtual aperture. The size of the virtual aperture determines a few things. One, the aize of the object you can “see through”. Two, the depth of the focal plane, which is currently extremely shallow, on the order of a few centimeters at most. In this image, we can see right through Poodus as he flies through the air.

Camera array construction and software will be the topic of another post; this post is just to introduce our work on the array and make public some of its output. A brief summary: we employ the latest modern rapid prototyping equipment — laser cutters, flatbed scanners, digital micrometers, and open source hardware and software — Arduino and StereoDataMaker. All the technology we develop will be released under open-source licenses to encourage, as much as possible, the development of similar camera arrays and to speed the hobbyist adoption of computational photography techniques.

A brief introduction: Daniel Reetz is an artist, camera hacker, and graduate student in the visual neurosciences. Matti Kariluoma is a CS/Math major with a focus on artificial intelligence. Together, we’re working on computational photography, and we’re going to bring our respective backgrounds to bear on it. Want to get in touch? Leave a comment here.

mdn has made hundreds of very insightful comments on Metafilter, often in unexpected places. This comment, in particular, caught my attention:

You cannot will cancer to be cured. Willpower is basically the word we use for the ability to control the movements of our bodies. You do have control over the movements of your body, and everything you do in this world is expressed through bodily movement. [emphasis mine]. You can have any passing thoughts you like, but it is up to you whether you act on them.

If you’re not sure you can control your body, practice every morning – I will pick this cup up, and now I will put it down; I will move it left, I will move it right – and I bet you can do it. Deciding what to do in the flow of your life is the exact same thing. Will I pick this phone up and dial a number? Will I turn right at that corner or keep walking straight? Will I move my mouth and aspirate so as to pronounce the word yes or no? These are simply bodily actions.

You have control if you want it. You just have to be self-aware and make choices on purpose rather than getting lost in the flood of experience and doing whatever you feel randomly inclined to do. There are certain cases where you lose control of your body (seizures, sleepwalking) or certain parts of your body you don’t control (inner organs etc) but in general what you do is your decision if you consciously wish it be, and it is merely your unconscious inclination if you give it no thought, not some sort of necessity the chemicals of your body or karma or fate or devils or mechanics dictates.

The undeniable truth is that the mind/body division laid out for so many years, by so many religions, philosophers, and stoned hippies is strictly manmade. The mind, a complex electrochemical/biological physical process, is inextricable from, dependent on, and ultimately in control of “the body”, which contains it, nourishes it, and comprises it. This complex interdependence exposes the absurd lemma we so often hear. Even the basest communication requires action; no thought leaves the mind without eye movements, tapping fingers, or unbearably complex learned vocalizations. What I find so startling is not just the sheer barnacle tenaciousness of this idea, but that people have such a difficult time accepting it in the face of our personal and cultural familiarity with chemical self-modification through alcohol, caffeine, and various illicit and prescription drugs.

I was quite pleased to see this wonderful article from Los futuros del libro, a Spanish-language blog dedicated to the future of the book, which puts the DIY Book Scanner effort into a global context. I wonder if the real site for the book scanner might be developing nations, particularly those with different, non-Western ideas about copyright. In fact, those same non-Western, possibly non-capitalist ideological and legal situations present in some developing nations might be the ideal proving ground for the idea that the scope of copyright should be sharply delimited.

This is the big problem of book scanning as we know it — the big problem is actually the big players. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc — they are so huge, and so powerful, and so cunning. And they have the capability to offer services good enough to keep the bulk of us from ever thinking about looking elsewhere. But in the continuum between the excruciatingly slow and painful flatbed scanner and the Elphel-based All-Seeing-Google-Eyes consuming all of Harvard, there are whole historical societies, volunteer organizations, youth groups, small towns, underfunded libraries and indeed, whole developing nations that need not only access to the information but an effective hardware platform to effectively maximize what little labor they have. And it’s my firm belief that this middle, which is, statistically speaking, the bulk of… everyone, the largest area under the curve, this middle is where the DIY, low-cost book scanning effort fits, makes sense, and needs legal headroom.

I am so thankful that we have such a fantastic community of brilliant, dedicated people working on this book scanning problem. True future-builders, champions of openness, problem solvers from all over the world.

For those of us that only speak English, let the machine read it to you.

Any suggestions on a country with a vast supply of 5mm birch plywood, stable electricity, and lax copyright laws?

So, Engadget held a contest to win a Kindle 2. The idea was to make artwork for the back that was totally amazing. I won the contest.

I also decided to make my design public domain. So if you want this design on your Kindle, or on anything you own, you may use it. In fact, you can do anything you want with it ever. That’s the beauty of PD.

Files here.

Now, Engadget has a page up with the winners, and it shows my Kindle being engraved in NYC at Adafruit! Hilariously, this was probably around the time I was in NYC for the D is for Digitize conference.

I received the thing a week or two ago.

And now they’ve done an episode of the Engadget show that features my Kindle! So go check out this short video, all the laser-related stuff is at the end.

It’s here on Engadget. It’s pretty awesome, and there’s a gallery of the other winners as well.