June 2017 Summary

Highlights

Reclaimed office from 2013 fire damage (finally).
Restored and repainted the filing cabinets.
Purchased “Sintel” workstation with 43″ Sharp TV as monitor, and custom WASD Keyboard.
Switched from Debian/KDE to Ubuntu Studio/XFCE (17.04).
The original cheap video card I bought for it failed (some kind of overheat / memory error problem), so I had to buy the AMD/ATI Radeon card.
Finished article about Pepper & Carrot production for OpenSource.com, “Web comic adapted to animation thanks to open license” [ARCHIVE.ORG].
Got the English credits: Ariel is credited and I’ve got my name in the sponsor credits. Everything spelled correctly.
Quote on making real versions of the mission patch I designed for Hiromi & Georgiana’s flight, as a possible crowdfunding reward.

Video Summary

Pepper & Carrot: Episode 6 – The Potion Contest

The English language version of the motion comic, animated by Morevna Project:

Correspondence

More character model updates from Keneisha Perry.
Name in Pepper & Carrot credits.
Merchandising “mission patch” concept for Lunatics.
Custom keyboard for “Sintel” workstation PC.
ArlingCon presentation arrangements.

Keneisha Perry has moved on to updating the models of Tim and Josh.

Pepper & Carrot is out. Got query about correct form of name in the credits, as a backer.

Got a quote from “The Studio” to produce the fictional Soyuz mission patch for Hiromi & Georgiana’s flight.

I decided to get a mechanical keyboard for the new workstation, “Sintel”. Since customizing the keys was an option, I couldn’t resist making my own key cap designs!

Details for ArlingCon 2017 presentation in the con guide (ArlingCon was a small fandom convention in Arlington, TX, sponsored by the local public library on the UTA campus).

Art

I started doing some more art design for the “Moon Truck” that is to appear in Lunatics, episode 3. This was loosely inspired by some NASA research work on large Moon rovers. The key point is that it is a highly-articulated wheel strut that allows for conforming to rough terrain:

A render test of Tim Farmer, to check on the status of the character:

Marked up web-based user interface for ResourceSpace, which I used in a discussion with Katrina Niolet about creating a Qt-based client for TACTIC which should have some of the same features. This was to be called “KitCAT”, originally a play on reversing “TACTIC” (except for the “K”), but which I later expanded as “Kit for Creative Arts Teamwork”. This has not gone past the mock-up phase, but still seems like a decent idea if we could find the time and/or money for developing it.

New Keyboard!

This month I decided to replace my nasty old worn-out keyboard.

I loved that thing, but it had seen better days. So I ordered a nice mechanical keyboard from WASD Keyboards, which among other things, lets you custom-design your keycaps. How could I resist this temptation? So I designed it with lots of fancy icons for Blender, Ardour, and Audacity.

In retrospect, this was immensely silly. But I really enjoyed making it!

The resulting keyboard was immensely satisfying:

Photos

Office / Fire Damage

This month, I finally committed to cleaning out my office, and it’s at this point that the severity of the fire damage becomes the most obvious:

The full recovery would run into July.

File Cabinets

A major problem to solve were the file-cabinets. The paint was bubbled and peeling and there was a lot of rust on them. But I decided to recover them. So I disassembled them, and used heat guns and wire brushing to remove the old paint and rust, and then gave them a new paint job: