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Merch Store – A Shopify frontend w/ order fulfillment by Penny Arcade: micro-blog.brianward.us/projects/
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Artbook – Basically it was Facebook for the Runic art team: micro-blog.brianward.us/projects/
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Web presence refresh for Runic Games: micro-blog.brianward.us/projects/
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I finally got around to adding a projects page to my website. Check it out here: micro-blog.brianward.us/projects/
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One of my backburner projects has been partly fulfilled. That was to have a simple weather base station outside of the house that takes local readings (temp & humidity). It sends its data via RF to a clock. I intercept that signal and decode it. Less reliance on internet weather data is better!
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The CW trainer I ordered arrived today. I’ve been waiting to be able to use my key for a week! Video: youtu.be/X8vwP45Bq…
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Don’t buy a Baofeng UV-5R. Get a Quansheng UV-K6 and put EGZUMER on it. You’ll be so much happier. What a fun radio to take on the go! I checked into PSRG’s noon net from the waterfront today with this stealth Nagoya NA-810 antenna. I’m told I was heard loud and clear.
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Got the HF antenna working tonight! How cool is that?
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This ham radio thing is fun! My VHF antenna is literally propped against my office door right now, but it works! Three PSRG repeater nodes picked me up full strength, and one more in Lake Forest Park partially did. Crazy! Had a few QSOs, but haven’t done a simplex QSO yet. That’s a rite of passage.
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Just did a quick signal check. With my 5-watt Baofeng UV-R5, I do get picked up by the PSRG repeaters. So that’s something! I was worried I wasn’t going to see anything at all from here in Leschi.
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As of this morning, I’m officially a ham radio operator! KM7AOT monitoring.
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Go Protest Now! A free tiling protest sign maker.
I can’t stand by and do nothing while our republic is replaced with a fascist dictatorship. As I wrote earlier this week, it hit me rather traumatically that I need to stop waiting to do something about the helplessness I feel right now, and I need to start DOING SOMETHING about it.
That first came in the form of doing lone protesting earlier this week, which is a thing that was incredibly uncomfortable for me to psyche myself up to do, but as I mentioned, I’ve come to understand that it’s actually our most potent personal political power, possibly more than voting. When you stand somewhere alone on a public sidewalk, quietly holding a sign, you command the attention of your neighbors. Your message is unambiguous and it is impossible to justify its suppression without drawing immediate attention.
As I went through the process of making my sign, it occurred to me that sign-making probably ought to be easier to accomplish in general. Sure I could have used markers to write something out, but I have terrible handwriting. We live in the computer age anyway. Except I didn’t have access to a giant sign printer. Unless I wanted to go find one at maybe like an office supply store? Frankly, I didn’t want to go down that path.
So I decided to use my own home printer. This would require me to create a bunch of tiles out of 8.5"x11" paper and cut and assemble them together on the 22"x28" poster board I had already picked up a week earlier. Designing the sign and tiling it was doable with software I already had, but it wasn’t exactly super dead simple to figure out how to do either. I can figure out how to use these programs. Not everybody can.
You shouldn’t need to use Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Acrobat to make a large tiled sign. Maybe such things can be done in applications like Microsoft Word? But again, that’s just yet another program others might not have easy access to and need to figure out. There should be a dead simple and free process for digitally making signs like this that doesn’t even require access to a computer or downloading apps. Many younger folks use phones only for everything, and tend to eschew desktop computing altogether.
In a republic, the barrier to entry for exercising the right to protest should be zero. That’s why I made Go Protest Now! It’s entirely free to use, works on desktop and mobile in any web browser, and there is no monetization strategy here and no data mining I’m doing. DreamHost (my site hosting provider) does track site hits, but I’m certainly not doing anything on my own.
Hopefully, you’ll find this to be a useful tool. You can get a sense of what its workflow is like in this other post I wrote up about it. The most important thing isn’t what kind of sign you have, but that you get out there and let your neighbors know what’s going on. Whether it’s through protesting, or talking to friends, neighbors, and strangers. People need to know about the current situation so that they can join in and help us to stop it.
There is an urgent need to take action now. Good luck to all of us! ✊
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My new tiling protest sign creator now sorta works on mobile. It’s brand new and a little bit buggy though. Give it a try and lemme know how it works for you. Video included to show workflow. You can get to it at go-protest.us
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First pass of a WIP tiling protest sign creator, called Go Protest Now!
It does NOT work on mobile yet: www.brianward.us/go-protes…
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WIP making a thing tonight…
Protest sign creation should require NO SPECIAL SOFTWARE, and should let people TILE regular 8.5x11 printed pages into giant posters with ease. I see people holding little tiny printed out pages in some of these protest photos.
This SHOULD be easier for people to do.
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