You can see her laying down markings in pencil. The marks are slightly bigger than the blocks we’ll be using. After she marks them, she uses a syringe to lay out drops of water along the lines. You can see in the photo that the water is beading. She fixes that by scoring over the lines so the water can absorb. After that, she can tear.

Once the paper is torn up she tosses them into a flat tupperware container that’s filled with water. Note that this paper actually has cotton in it, it’s not entirely wood pulp like printer paper. You soak it to get the sizing out, which is a starchy glue thing that keeps it stiff. Warm water works best for this. With that out you can use less force in order to press the paper and leave the indent, also known as the “kiss” of the block. The water also resists the oil so you get a cleaner print.

The extender looks like runny caulk

Now, she mixes the paint. Some tips: You don’t need printer’s ink, and you don’t need to use paint thinner or mineral spirits to clean up. In fact paint thinner or mineral spirits in the kitchen is a bad idea unless you want to be poisoned to death. We’re using oil based paint with an extender. It’s cheap. To clean up we’re using tough-on-grease palmolive. It’s also cheap. Also note that we’re using a dye based paint, not powder in an oil suspension. You can’t mix the two.  After that we’re using corn oil as a cheap alternative to printer’s medium. You might notice that cheap is a theme here. Mix and scrape and tweak to get the desired viscosity. Once that’s done it’s time to ink.

The next segments I’ve conveniently got available in video form! Apologies for the shakycam and poor framing. They were taken on impulse using my point and shoot camera. If we do another workshop we’ll bring a real video camera.

Lucite roller used to ink the mandelbrot block

It’s best to use a roller than can go over the entire block at once and take as much time as you need for this part. Alex takes her time here, explaining that a lucite roller works, or you can use a rubber one. She explains that attention to detail is probably the most important part. You will get some ink splatter away from the raised edges. Leave that for a photocopier-like effect. She thinks that’s cool, like an underground zine. Sponge it off if you want it to look perfect. Not for Alex, though. If she wants perfect she uses a laser printer. It looks like this is where you get creative and can decide things like if you want to ink the edges of the block so that you get a border when you’re pressing down with the barren.

Finally, we’re ready to do the actual pressing. Alex takes some paper out of the soak tank and blots it from both sides with a towel. She leaves it damp. She lays the paper on the inked block, then takes her time and presses it with the barren several times with even of a pressure. Watch the end of the first video for a better explanation of what to do.

Alex demonstrates this in the first video using a laser etched wood block. The second part we do the same thing but using a laser etched acrylic block. The last video explains cleanup.

Cleanup without the solvents involves a lot of scraping. Alex would first scrape off most of the ink onto tin foil if she wants to use it later, but this time she uses newsprint since it’s going to be thrown out. Eventually she just can’t scrape off any more and she’s left with a fine film. She pours on some corn oil. This dilutes the oil paint and lets her spread it around again. She can polishes it off using crumpled newsprint. After that, she uses grease busting dish soap to clean the remnants off.

All of this is very cheap to do. The tube of extender cost $45 and is the most expensive part. The barren was ten to fifteen dollars at any art store. The lucite roller was about twenty dollars. The tube we used here is still more than a third full and it’s been used for seven years. The oil pant you can find on sales for cheap. The spreaders come in three and six packs from hardware stores and cost only a couple bucks. Best of all, this all can be done in a kitchen, just like the video shows.

Whew. And that’s the end of the liveblog attempt. Take a look at Owen’s photo set on flickr and my gallery below. I have photos for the first few steps which Owen missed, and he’s got photos that I couldn’t take while I was recording video.

John got me interested in letterpress. I don’t think I’ve seen a letterpress book in person yet, and though I have opportunity to in the Fisher Rare Book Library, I figured it’d be more fun to make my own little booklet. I don’t have a linotype, but I do have access to a 500 dpi laser etcher. I’m sure it won’t meet John’s standards but I’ve decided to attempt to make a couple printing plates out of acrylic.

Book history buffs might immediately think of intaglio printing. While it’d be easier to etch the forms for intaglio printing, I’m a bit worried that it’ll be a lot harder in the long run. It’ll certainly mean I’ve got more work since I need to clean excess ink off the plate. I’m not sure if it works with straight-down pressure rather than a roller and, if it does, it looks like it’ll need more than your standard movable type press. I think a roller is more likely to break off parts of the acrylic than pressing right down; pieces like the circle inside an engraved “a” would be easy to snap. The worst part is it’s impossible to accurately control the depth of the cut in our laser etcher, there might be a problem with the grooves or maybe it’ll be too deep or too shallow.

Instead I’ll try to carve out the equivalent to a movable type form, burning down the majority of the acrylic. The downside here is running the laser that long. A single plate will take ages, and I worry about the heat and exhaust. There’s still a chance that the acrylic will just break when put through the press.

I’m going to make a small plate for each type of printing and give it a go before I make what’ll likely be a pair of plates for a quarto print.

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I put in a support request on the forum but got no reply. I could put in a support ticket, but I won’t bother. I’m just going to switch to dropbox.

What’s that you say? “But dropbox doesn’t have Windows Mobile support!” Well, I’m not convinced that SugarSync has it either. I installed their client and it crashed on launch. No error message, it just dies. I put in a support request and I’m told to reinstall. Okay, I use Remove programs, delete the CAB file from my downloads, clear my browser cache, redownload and reinstall. The issue persists. I reply to the ticket, and I’m told to reinstall. I use Remove programs, dig through the registry with Resco Registry Editor, delete any key that looks related, delete the CAB file, clear my cache, redownload and reinstall. The issue persists. I reply to the ticket.

What do you think I’m told in response? Yeah, reinstall.

SugarSync now has no advantages to Dropbox for me. I can see how the Magic Briefcase is useful for recovering files after a crash, but not the machine specific folders, and I might want to keep backups of folders without sharing them over all computers. I’ve already seen that their support is poor, so it’s time to try the other guys.

The CRTC held day two of their new media hearings today, with more to follow in a week. The goal is of the hearings is to figure out just what to do with this new fangled media, to discern whether incentives or regulation is required to encourage the spread of Canadian content.

They heard proposals about a levy on ISPs, and applying the same content regulations to the internet that are applied to broadcasts. The latter is ludicrous since you can’t put content quotas on the internet. The most serious recommendation is a levy, though I feel the target is misplaced. The levy could be $5 according to SOCAN, or it could be 3% according to the Canadian Conference for the Arts or Tac.TV.

I’m reminded of a report titled Changing Channels that was posted much earlier and taken into consideration by the CRTC.

Even the major U.S. television network offering the least content (CBS at 55%) offers twice as much programming as the Canadian network offering the most content (CTV at 24%). The CW (80%) offers about three times as much content as CTV, and five times more than Global TV (15%).

…

There was a clear predominance of domestic content at both U.S. and Canadian broadcaster websites, although Canadian broadcasters had much more American content than American broadcasters had Canadian content.

With the lack of availability of “professionally produced content” available I question ACTRA’s figure quoted from their Harris poll which pegs the number of Canadians who watch video online at 70%. I’d like to see the phrasing of the questionaire. I suspect that most video viewed by Canadians is ephemeral video on YouTube and alike. The rationale behind levying ISPs to pay for the production of professionally produced Canadian content is that they profit off of it, but I want to see a breakdown of how much of that video is user generated content first.

Twitter is active on the #crtc hashtag. Here’s a few choice tweets:

drewmack: @mathewi Fact CRTC not on Twitter probably a bad sign for attempt to regulate the internetz. Can we confirm they’re not using dialup? #crtc

hartleyglobe: Just a thought. Maybe instead of applying the Broadcast Act and the Telecom Act to the Internet, perhaps we need a new Internet Act? #crtc

Michael Geist has writeups of day one and day two.

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Most people I talk to hear “microblogging” and put too much emphasis on one of the two benefits of blogging. Blogging is a printing press in the home of everyone with an internet connection and it’s also a conversation.

It’s hard to say much of worth in such short confines when you look at it alone. A stream of posts from a single author would have been much more conveniently read in a small blog posting. To think of microblogging only as a publishing tool is to overlook other areas of value. The problem I see is while there’s a blogsphere, there’s no microblogsphere.

Conversations on Twitter happen in through tracking keywords and hashtags.  Back when Twitter had an official IM client I used it to track dozens of keywords and hashtags. Tracking meant that Twitter would notify me the instant one was used, and I’d be able to respond instantly through my phone or IM client. Unfortunately that was killed off.

There’s still a few easy ways to track keywords on Twitter. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of a search query and mash it up any way you want or you can use Tweetdeck.

The problem so far is that this all relates to Twitter. Right now I can think of at least two open source microblogging applications, laconi.ca and OpenMicroBlogger. Jaiku will eventually be open sourced. There’s already dozens of proprietary ones and the number of installations of open ones is slowly growing. The community is too fragmented.

The two open source applications support the open micro blogging specification which lets you subscribe to microbloggings of users of another site, similar to how users of a Jabber IM can usually add someone to their list who’s on another server. It’s not implemented on the most popular servers, but it fixes half of the problem with conversation.

What it doesn’t fix is being able to reply. Since addressing a reply is done in-band, that is inside the message itself, including the server the recipient is on robs you of scarce message space. If you don’t include the server then you run into name collissions. Am I addressing a message to lance_ on Twitter or identi.ca or Jaiku or what?

The proposed OpenMicroBlogger 0.2 spec might solve that by including a hidden out-of-band variable  to the message, similar to how Twitter did so with the specific message ID that you’re repling to.  Each time you do something like this you’re fragmenting the users into “users of clients who support that feature” versus “users of clients who don’t support that feature.”

What’s it going to take to have a microblogsphere? Communities will need top open up and support OpenMicroBlogging or similar, and some hard choices are need to be made to compromise between preserving message space and vital features.

As Minister of Industry, I am responsible for the Telecommunications Act, which sets out the objectives of Canadian telecommunications policy. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), an independent public authority, is charged with implementing these objectives in its role as regulator of the telecommunications industry.

Canadian consumers can choose their ISP in a competitive marketplace, where prices are not regulated. Indeed, the competition between telephone and cable networks, as well as satellite, wireless and other players, has
ensured that Canadians have a variety of choices, in terms of both price and quality, when selecting an ISP. Provisions in the Telecommunications Act and Competition Act ensure that the competitive marketplace operates effectively.

Under section 27 of the Telecommunications Act, the CRTC has the authority to address issues of unjust discrimination or undue preference in order to ensure that the marketplace operates fairly and effectively. If consumers feel that carriers are engaging in unjust discrimination or undue preference, complaints can be brought to the CRTC, where they are subject to a formal process. The recently created Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services (www.ccts-cprst.ca) has also strengthened consumer protection with regard to telecommunications, and was established precisely to address consumer complaints on deregulated telecommunications services, such as Internet access.

In addition to the measures available under the Telecommunications Act, the Competition Act carries the power to address anti-competitive behaviour by ISPs, including cases of abuse of dominance and misleading advertising. The Competition Bureau ensures that prices in all sectors of the economy, except those that are regulated, are set by market forces and are not the result of anti-competitive behaviour. Under the abuse of
dominance provisions in the Competition Act, it is illegal for a dominant firm to engage in the practice of anti-competitive acts resulting in a substantial lessening of competition, including disciplining or targeting competitors in order to raise prices or reduce customer choice.

As you may know, the Canadian Association of Internet Providers (CAIP) has filed a complaint with the CRTC regarding Bell’s traffic management practices. While I cannot comment on specific matters before the CRTC, please note that the Commission regulates wholesale access by independent ISPs to high-speed Internet access services from both telephone and cable companies. Under the CRTC’s regulatory framework for wholesale services, Bell is required to provide access to its DSL network to independent ISPs at regulated rates and terms of service. If the CRTC finds Bell or any other network operator to be in violation of these terms or otherwise engaging in unjust discrimination or undue preference, the CRTC has the power to address these issues under the Telecommunications Act.

Access to the Internet is a key issue for Canadians. Industry Canada is monitoring domestic and international developments to ensure that our legislative and regulatory frameworks remain effective. Should you believe carriers are engaging in unjust discrimination and undue preference, I encourage you to contact the CRTC at 1-877-249-2782 or by e-mail at info@crtc.gc.ca. Please note that, on May 15, 2008, the CRTC set out a process to address the issues raised in CAIP’s above-noted application. Further details regarding this application and the CRTC’s recently announced process to look into the matter can be found on its website at www.crtc.gc.ca.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to write, and I trust that you will find this information helpful.

Sincerely,

The Honourable Jim Prentice, P.C., Q.C., M.P.

I’m going, and I’m considering whether or not to liveblog it. I have the unfair advantage of having wifi access unlike all non-student attendees.

I’m on Bell’s $7 unlimited browsing plan. The Terms of Service clearly state that streaming audio is not allowed. It’s one of those clauses that they use to terminate accounts that go over some sliding limit of profitable bandwidth use. Since this month I had only used four megabytes and the average for killed accounts seems to be about two thousand, I decided to push my luck. I decided to forego my iPod in favour of my HTC Touch and Windows Media Player. (The Touch is notable as being the only smartphone able to get a consumer unlimited data plan in Canada.)

My stream of choice was Digitally Imported’s Trance stream. I gave it a go at home on the 96 kilobit WMA stream and was surprised to hear very choppy music with the default buffering. I benchmarked my phone at an average download of 400 kilobit over download, and now it can’t take 96 kilobit? I double checked and Windows Media Player was set for a 384 kilobit cellular connection. When using TCPMP I was able to get 96 kilobit MP3 reliably without any changes to buffer settings but I spent most of the day using WMP.

I set myself up for 40 kilobit music stream. It played on my phone just fine with the basic Windows Media Player that came with the device. Next up: Getting this music through my headphones.

This was trickier. The phone itself has no headphone jack. It does come with a gadget that splits the USB mini jack into USB jack and what they label a headphone jack. It’s not your standard 8mm jack, it’s about the same size as a USB-mini jack but asymmetric and skewed. I assume it’s some jack that’s meant for cellular headsets. There’s also a converter to something sub-8mm that I found useless. Into this splitter I plugged in a pair of earphones with the skewed adapter that came with the Touch.

At 40 kilobit I was able to walk around downtown Toronto towards campus with no skips or bumps. Instead of being pleased with this I was just disappointed that I couldn’t use my own headphones. It’s impossible to give a good judgement of sound quality here.

Even in a noisy environment I’m able to tell the difference between 40 kilobit WMA and 96 kilobit WMA when using the pair of AKG K27i headphones I use for walkabouts. And that’s not even considering the pair of Sennheiser HD555 that I use for home enjoyment of music. On the pair that came with the device I couldn’t tell between 40 kilobit and 96 kilobit in a quiet environment, and I haven’t figured out how to connect my real headphones yet.

So far the only thing I can say is it’s a pain.

The plan of defense right now appears to be writing to your MP (you can look up the appropriate mailing list based on your postal code) and the Minister of Industry Jim Prentice. There’s an easy, convenient mass mail form set up by the Council of Canadians. I’ll be writing a snail mail too.

Also, it can’t hurt to sign the neutrality.ca petition.