This Could Be Love

If you've been reading this blog any length of time, you should know by now that not only do I teach others to make cool ass shit (cause I'm an art teacher, yo), I also make cool ass shit myself.  This is relevant because back in October I got a message from my friend Cori (from the Wayback in Mongolia), asking if I wanted a Cricut Maker.  Her hubby is a mechanical engineer for the company, and during a discussion of anime my name came up and since I'm the target market they offered to send me one if I was interested.

I'm definitely more crafty than tech-y, but I feel like only an idiot lets the opportunity to get new toys slip through their fingers (particularly if you have half-formed dreams of actually making money off your hobbies), so I told her yasss - onegaishimasu!  A few weeks later, a DHL guy was handing over a very large box, and I was facing the fact that until that moment, the whole thing had kind of felt like I'd dreamt it up, and I had some major housekeeping to do before I'd be able to set it up.  I left it sealed in its box as I swept the floors and rearranged my work surfaces.  Then I realized that my iPad is old AF and can't use Cricut Design Space because it won't update to iOS 10.  Luckily my school just bought a class set of iPads, and by promising I was planning to use the Maker for art club and that I would give up my firstborn child* if I broke one, I got permission to borrow one at night or on weekends as needed to get me started.  With that, I was finally ready to break open the box!

It crossed my mind to do an unboxing video for my new toy, but I don't have a cameraman and I've never really seen the point of watching someone else open up something exciting.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that it came with materials for my "first project," so once I got through the intro screens of the app I decided to try it out.

It's a cute card but relatively simple to make.  First I had to load a pen into the tool holder thing, and the Maker took it from there, drawing out the lines that you see.  The fact that they were drawn, not printed was kind of a surprise to me, and had me thinking about what all you might be able to do with a robot to do all of your drawing.  Next it used a blade to cut the cardstock down to size as well as cut out the letters, the tail of the kite, and the places where I inserted the blue.  So far, so good.

That said, the point of having one of these things - for me at least - isn't to make other people's projects, but to make my own.  I decided its first real test would be to cut a pair of glasses for one of my plushies.  Having mislaid my old pattern, I had to redraw it.  Then I had to scan it.  I could have done this at school, but it's mendoksai to use the scanner there, so I used the much more straightforward method and visited my friendly neighborhood combini - all of them have English-speaking copy machines that also print photos (or, you know, the Golden Kamuy paper sumo pdf, which was like Christmas coming early) and scan.  Eventually it made it to the school iPad I borrowed and I uploaded it to Design Space.

When I said above that I'm not very tech-y, I meant it, but as long as it's not too complicated a program, I can usually figure things out.  I think Design Space was created with users like me in mind, because it didn't take too long to figure out how to get it to cut out my glasses.  I was even able to alter the dimensions of it in the program to solve the slight proportion issue my drawing had.  The one issue I had was that I didn't have the right cutting tool for craft foam, so the cuts only went about halfway through...still far enough to be able to "punch out" the glasses.

I had my doll pattern already scanned and ready to go, so I uploaded it and tried cutting out a couple of head shapes.  That went pretty well but I wasn't too sure what to do next.  A week later I had my answer.  After cutting out the head I finally started making my Sugimoto doll, but so far he was bald.  Around two years ago I spoke to my Dark Lord and Master about business strategies** and he'd suggested making kits.  I've been toying with the idea but wasn't sure how to go about doing the hair.  This finally forced me to work on a solution.  I sketched out a pattern for Sugimoto's hair, scanned it in, uploaded it, and set the Maker to work.

At first I wasn't convinced that all the effort was worth it, and for one doll, it might not be.  That said, the pattern was a pretty complex one.  After putting the cutting mat into the maker, it went to work and was beautiful to watch.  Since one of my drawings didn't scan as well as it should have I had a chance to test how the two techniques compared.  After watching the rotary blade make quick work of the pointy bits on Sugimoto's hair I had to sit down to trace and cut the final piece.  I ended up with Sharpie all over my hands and it took probably about the same amount of time from start to finish as getting the pattern into Design Space and cutting it with the Maker.  I can see vast potential for the whole "make a kit" idea with that - I could design the basic hair shapes and customers could choose which one they wanted to make, using their own Maker to precisely cut the design.

With the end of the term and coming up on Christmas break, I didn't get any further than that, but I had plenty of ideas.  Now that I'm back from the holidays, with a new iPad of my very own, and very little motivation to leave the house hopefully I'll start putting those ideas into action.  Stay tuned.

*Joke's on them, though - I'm never having kids!
**Most people pay big bucks for the kind of advice he gives me for free.  What can I say - it's one of the perks associated with the lease on my soul.

Grub Club: Gusto

Well, ya win some, ya lose some.  This week Little Miss Catwalk experienced that firsthand with her pick of Gusto.  It's an Italian restaurant on Beatles Street.  Personally, I think it's really hard to screw up Italian - pretty much every country I've lived in has had decent Italian, unlike Mexican, which seems to be really hard for people outside North America to get right.  And Gusto was not horrible, because as I said, it is REALLY hard to screw it up...but they seemed to be trying for all they were worth.

I started with a Greek salad, because they were out of caesar, and it was just about as good a Greek as I've had here - lots of feta, not a lettuce leaf to be found, and the dressing was not overpowering.  While waiting for it, the waiter walked past with bread for another table, and I decided we needed some bread, too.  This turned out to be my best decision of the night.  The garlic butter that came with it was the stuff of dreams.  However, it was downhill from there.  Their penne arabbiata didn't live up to my standards.  It wasn't bad, but it wasn't really right, either.

Blondie and Little Miss Catwalk each ordered pizza.  This was their margherita pizza, and as you can see it has neither slices of tomato nor leaves of basil.  Blondie reckons it was a frozen pizza. 

Champ ordered the tortelloni soup.  The tortelloni looked more like buuz, although they had pork in them rather than mutton, at least.  With only a few weeks left in the school year, we have to hope for a couple more wins before we head off our separate ways.

And speaking of the end of the school year - this week has been rough, and next week may not be any better.  Next year remind me not to plan so many big projects in the last month of school.  But there are lantern ceremony pictures to blog about one of these days, so don't give up on me yet.

Also, for the record, if you ever accidentally hit some keys on your laptop with your face while watching anime in bed and can't figure out how to unlock your mousepad...not that anything like that EVER happened to me...it's ALT+F9.  You're welcome.

Caveat Emptor

This past June, I decided the time had come for me to consolidate all the junk in my purse.  I have been known to carry my 2nd generation iPod, my old Nikon Coolpix camera, and the Chuck Norris of cell phones all at the same time.  All three were pretty necessary.  I used Giancarlo (my iPod) for just about everything - music, ebooks, taking notes, checking the weather, the internet.  I've even been known to use Skype on it.  But it wasn't a phone, and I never cared enough to buy the Chinese solution to this (a gadget you clip around it that takes a sim card and turns it into a phone).  And my cheap Nokia didn't have a camera on it, which might not seem that important but when you miss taking a photo of a man dangling a turtle he'd caught in the canal from a pole for the SECOND time, simply because you didn't care enough to throw your camera in your purse, it becomes much more important.  After my Dark Lord and Master showed me the Galaxy Note last Christmas, I decided that it was the phone for me.  It was not some "trendy" phone like the iPhone, yet it could do everything the iPhone could.  And more.  It has a better camera, it has a bigger screen for reading on, and it comes with a pen for the touch screen.  I bought it after getting my June salary and fell instantly, irrevocably, in love.

And then I tried installing Barnes and Noble's Nook for Android.  Turns out I made a mistake when I purchased the UK model from the dealer in Shanghai; due to copyright issues you can only install Nook on American devices.  I've been looking for a solution to that for five months and I still haven't managed to find one.  I came really close by going through Digital Editions, but it won't recognize Samsung devices as being compatible.  So for now I am using a different e-reader, which will open other ePub books.  It's not my favorite solution, because it doesn't allow me to easily get all my books by legal means, but it's all I've got.

For the most part, I was okay with that.  I'd accepted the limitations with the understanding that I would NEVER EVER buy non-American technology again.  I don't like Kies as much as iTunes, but I can deal with it, and the other apps which have been incompatible with my Note have not been nearly as annoying.  But in September I started noticing my battery was running out too fast.  I tried ignoring it, and it seemed to go away, but then the problem returned.  And got worse.  Let me explain: over the summer I was using it full-time as my camera, taking photos seemingly non-stop, and after two days, I would still have power left in my batteries.  One week ago, the battery was draining on a daily basis - even when I never used it.

So I finally contacted Samsung.  They told me the solution - it needed the firmware upgraded.  Great, I could handle that.  So I went into Kies, and it told me that before I could update the firmware I needed to update Kies, which I dutifully did.  And when I tried to reconnect my phone, it no longer had the device drivers to do so.  I contacted Samsung again, and they told me to take it into a service center with the receipt.  I told them that while I had a UK model phone, I lived in Mongolia, and was told that I needed to take it to the country where it was purchased.  Which was one of the dumber things I'd heard in a long time.  I told them I wouldn't be back in China til April and asked if they had any other bright ideas.  Maybe that was trying their patience a little too far, because I never got a response to that message.  Which was kind of annoying.  When you spend $600 on a phone, you expect to get good customer service.  I have to say that their lack of customer service has to be my least favorite thing about my phone (maybe it's because I'm stuck looking to the guys in the UK for it - surely Koreans or Americans would be more helpful???)

Fortunately, I'm not an idiot.  I had a stroke of inspiration, and downloaded the device driver I needed, which Kies no longer had.  Liam Crayden saved the day - he was kind enough to put it on his blog - and once my computer had it I was able to connect my phone and update it.  It was appallingly simple, and made me even madder that someone in Samsung's customer service department couldn't have saved me days of worry that I would have to use my old Nokia until April and after getting it fixed try to sell it off and buy an iPhone with the profit.  I'm glad it didn't come to that, because - as you can see - my phone can kick your phone's ass up one side and down the other.