My long overdue project to make a new laptop sleeve is finally complete. It was time to replace my old one that saw me through film school, undergrad, and grad school. The edges had frayed, and the corners of my computer had begun to peek out. I spent an entire Friday with Fin and Mist cutting, ironing, and sewing over lots of tea and watermelon. I learned a lot, and I am quite satisfied with the overall result.
On to the next chapter!
I am gushing over my ‘new’ Sony Mavica FD7 camera that I recently got off Facebook Marketplace. It is one of the earlier digital cameras from Sony’s discontinued Mavica (Magnetic Video Camera) line that saves digital images on 3.5” 1.4 MiB 2HD floppy diskettes in DOS FAT12 format. AFAIK, the FD7 was released in 1997 with the FD5 model where the former boasts 10x optical zoom, while the later has a fixed focal length.
The camera produces .JPG images in 640x480 resolution with its 0.38 megapixel 1/4” CCD sensor. In terms of optics, it has a focal length range of 4.2 - 42mm, which is impressive for a camera of its size. The diskettes hold up to 40 .JPG images in its ‘normal’ setting and 20 images in its ‘fine’ setting. Each image takes up to 10 seconds to be recorded on the media and the process is accompanied by the sounds of the diskette’s whirring. Fun and amusing piece of technology.
Rclone is a powerful command-line tool to sync files and directories to and from various cloud storage services (Azure, B2, S3, Google Cloud, etc.). It is also a great solution to download files off from Google Drive, which can be an incredibly frustrating experience when doing it manually through a web browser.
It has been a lifesaver syncing my school’s Google Drive to my local machine for backup. Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides are handled pretty well; Google Docs are downloaded as Microsoft Word, Sheets in Microsoft Excel, and Slides in Microsoft Powerpoint, while retaining the document’s original formatting. So far so good. However, it is unable to process items like Google Forms.
Rclone is available on Linux, MacOS, and Windows.
rclone copy -P remote-name: "directory" "destination"
rclone copy --drive-shared-with-me remote-name:"directory" "destination"
Orphans Film Symposium 2024 is around the corner and I had the wonderful opportunity to assist Professor Dan Streible to create a landing site for the symposium.
The initial idea was to create a new page on the existing OFS website, but it would limit us to its current theme. Hence, creating a separate site altogether seemed like a more appropriate option.
NYU uses a customized WordPress ecosystem for its web publishing. It does not have the full suite of WordPress features hence we had to pick from NYU’s offerings of stock themes. While the landing site is suppose to be simple, doing it with stock themes made it more difficult. The ‘Twenty Twenty’ theme was the closest to what we want and with a little CSS magic, we could remove unwanted elements that came with the theme.
I have been meaning to go back into t-shirt printing after rediscovering cyanotype at my last summer internship.
I thought of stamps and decided to print one from Palestine as I’ve been deeply concerned about the violence in Gaza.
This stamp was issued in 1927 when Palestine was under civil administration of the British Mandate of Palestine. It depicts the dome of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, which is widely considered Islam’s third-holiest shrine. It was built between 691-692 CE and re-built between 1022-1023. Today, it is one of the world’s oldest surviving works of Islamic architecture.
Israel controls all access to Al-Aqsa today and is reviewing possible curbs on access over the upcoming Ramadan fasting month. This compounds the clampdown it has placed on Palestinians in Gaza and beyond.
All suffering must end immediately. On that end, I hope to one day send a postcard from Al-Aqsa.