Megh showed up around the time that I completed my lens adapter. It needed testing; we needed food. A morning walk together proved that all the setup was worth it.

One of the problems with current DV cameras is the lack of Depth of Field (DOF). Put very simply, if you want to have a foreground object in focus, and a background blurred, you need a large sensor and a large aperture, neither of which are available on a tiny video camera. Of course, there is a hack, and that hack is to make a 35mm lens adapter.

For lenses, I chose to use the “M42″ mount, which allows me to use some lenses that I acquired while in Russia. To make the thing work, you use the 35mm lens as it was intended to be used — projecting onto a piece of film, or in this case, ground glass. Actually, in my design, I used a diffusing film from an LCD monitor instead of ground glass, but the effect is the same. Finally, you tape the image of the projection using your small sensor and aperture, and get a much more pleasing image.

For the moment, this is just a set of three images of the device. As time permits, I may write up a tutorial and a discussion of LCD film technology.

Don’t miss my show at the Plains Art Museum. Thanks to everyone who has gone, and especially to those who have provided feedback.

Following up on my previous post on in-Corporation antenna engineering and Scandinavian cookware, two updates.

One, the PANTENNA. Far beyond mere-napkin-ring WiFi enhancement, I’ve moved on to folding foil pie pans, connecting to access points distant. I learned two important lessons in the process - first, a powered USB hub can give you serious performance gains on these little radios, especially if you overpower the device a little with an adjustable adapter. The other lesson is that it is a bad idea to leave them plugged in and overpowered for more than a few hours, as they overheat and die.

Two, a guest post from longtime fiend and logician Philosophy James, who, inspired by the PANTENNA and other efforts, produced his own wok-based antenna system. Details in his own words:

” I’ve been thinking about a wokfi set-up, but woks are usually pretty heavy and I thought I’d have to drill or weld. But then I found this 14-inch wok at a thrift store for $4 — nice price, big wok, and light weight — so I bought it; but I still thought I’d have to modify it. But it turns out that modification was unnecessary; nor do I need a tripod. The spot where you can plug a cord into it is perfect for mounting it with a screwdriver! So I pulled out my box of screwdrivers and picked out the junkiest one that was thick enough to fit the hole snugly; buried the screwdriver handle in a giant beer glass full of pocket change; and set it on my kitchen table. Now I’ve got a neighbor’s access point coming in at 54 Mbps (non-wavering), but with an eight-inch strainer it wavers between 18 and 36 Mbps, and without a reflecting device it wavers between not registering at all and coming in between 1 and 8 Mbps. Note: I removed the adaptor casing to prevent overheating and to let the antenna dangle a little farther from the chipset. Also: moving the antenna a half inch can decrease the signal quality from 54 Mbps to 24 Mbps. “

Quality work, James! Onward, Forward, Upward! Your contribution to wok-fi science has been duly noted, edited, uploaded, and laid bare for the scrutiny of future generations.

At Dobbs’ request, I donated a track from my (unreleased) album “You Are Not Dead” to a worthy cause. Follow his blogathon here - benefits go to Sweet Relief, a charity benefiting ill or disabled musicians. Please, donate.

This is a rare opportunity to hear a finished Fake track in the wild- it won’t happen again, unless someone decides to publish the album.

After long deliberation, downloadation, and backup-ation, I’ve gone and deleted the contents of fakeproject.com from the server. There’s a lot of organization and re-structuring happening behind the scenes, and leaving the content of old up there for all was inhibiting progress. Over time, I’ll make archives of everything that was ever up available; the problems come from inconsistent coding and poor file management- tons of dead links, broken images, pages leading nowhere. Hardly a professional front.

The new fakeproject.com will be back soon, with news on new tunes, new projects, and stuff to download.

I’ve had the pleasure of perusing the spoils spring cleaning week in Fargo this week- most notably, I acquired a Towa T-1000 copy machine. It’s got a blue toner cart in it, and a sheet feeder. After spending some time fixing a bad solenoid (the ferrite rod had rusted to the shell) I got the machine running. It will come in very handy when producing the limited run of my forthcoming album, You Are Not Dead: A Guide To Modern Living. There will be a limited, hand-produced run to give to people who helped with the album; after that, there will be no giveaways or sales, as I’m going to be shopping the demo around.

Today, when riding bike to work, I spotted a pulse-monitor monitor. You know, with the little green graph that jumps when you hear the beeping of your own heart. It had a little printer attached to the bottom too, with a bit of ticker tape sticking out. I’m not sure if it was there to reproduce the graph, or to pump out receipts…