Mar Williams

IR remote controlled RGB LED mood lighting

Mar — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 19:57:04 +0000

I <3 LEDs. Really, I love them. If I could afford it, my house would be solely lit by controllable RGB LEDs. I am not terribly savvy when it comes to electronics projects, but this one was cake.

Here’s where I found it: http://blog.thingm.com/2011/07/invisible-accent-light-with-blinkm-maxm-freem/

It’s Blinkm Maxm + FreeM + RGB LED Strip + Universal IR remote control. That’s it! I didn’t program anything. I didn’t even have to solder.
Lucky me, someone even designed an enclosure that I printed out on the makerbot: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:14908
Mine is slightly modified to fit the FreeM hanging off the bottom there.

And the results? Awesome.

Here’s a little video showing off changing the color/brightness.

Dick Cake

Mar — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 05:27:57 +0000

Yeah, it’s just what it sounds like. Images in this post are probably NSFW or Ithyphallophobics. More after the jump…

Jane wanted a penis cake for her birthday. I hate making cakes. Fondant is sticky, horrible stuff, but I like Jane, and penises amuse me, so of course I said yes. I started out by building a platform to erect it on… ok just that one pun and I’ll stop. I promise.

I loaded it up with cream filled buns and rice crispy treats for the shaft, and a couple cupcakes for the balls. A problem arose (not a pun this time really) with the fondant layer. It was too warm and starting sloughing off the underside of the cake.

Too bad no one wants a zombie penis cake. It would have been perfect. Um, ew.
So with a little help, I removed the dong from the structure and laid it out flat.

After a bit of food color and candles, it didn’t turn out half bad. Not the epic standing cake I had hoped for, but lesson learned about the fondant.

The best part was the next morning, hungover and groggy, being startled by a half eaten dick in my fridge.

This evening, I got sick of looking at it, so I did what any rational, well adjusted human being would do. I shoved the rest of it into an air cannon and fired it down an alley.

P.S. Thanks to Matt for snapping some photos of it at the party.

One tiny critter a day

Mar — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 20:54:51 +0000

I liked the tiny canvas so much I decided to keep going. Not sure when I’ll get tired of it, but for now, I’ll update my pics in my portfolio with a new critter each day. Enjoy!

http://sudux.com/portfolio/one-tiny-critter-a-day/

If you’d like to buy a critter, let me know! They’re $60 a piece. I have a couple left but they’re selling quick.

Tiny canvas, Tiny critter

Mar — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 21:13:21 +0000

Years ago, Pyr0 & Ed commissioned me to paint a giant green monkey. The monkey is one of my favorite pieces. I was heavily influenced by “web 2.0″ at the time, and was impressed when the bright candy coated crap translated so well to my painting. Hooray for learning some color theory! heh. So, I thought I’d give the style another go. This time, much smaller. Here’s the ol’ monkey painting for the curious:

It’s based on the “monkey above the couch” painting in Invader Zim. Yeah, this guy:

This critter painting is a gift for a friend that has a soft spot for small fuzzy rodents. But if you’d like an itty bitty print, let me know!

All hail his noodly appendage!

Mar — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 03:47:45 +0000

So, I was going to do a long post about my new makerbot. For those of you who don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, it’s an adorable 3d printer that fits on your desk. It pulls a plastic filament through a heated head and spits out melted plastic on a moving platform, laying down row after row until you’ve got a 3d object. Youtube has tons of videos of what printing looks like if you’re curious.

Instead of blogging the long, boring assembly and troubleshooting, I’ll show you my first project with it.

I found a flying spaghetti monster cookie cutter on thingiverse. The print turned out ok, but it had some gaps that food might get stuck in, so I opted to do something other than bake delicious gingerbread monsters.

How about a festive light up Spaghetti Monster? Yup!
I cannibalized a Christmas angel I found at Target for it’s juicy LED bits. and modded my little monster to fit the parts.

Cut out a little slot for the switch.

Slap some guts inside…

grabbed a cheap battery holder from radio shack

added googly eyes and a scrap of shiny vellum paper

And the results!

Christmas – I’m lovin’ it.

Mar — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 03:10:54 +0000

My Christmas tree this year.
I haven’t celebrated Christmas for a few years now. Even though my parents aren’t religious, this upsets them a bit. I guess they feel like I’m missing out. I end up getting coaxed into just a little bit of Christmas every year. So my dad calls me up today, insistent on getting me a tree. I caved and said, “Well, ok, as long as it’s a small one.”

With every intention of decorating the tree tastefully, I headed to Target… and then, the McDonalds playkit caught my eye.

I would post some statement about consumerism, America, blah blah blah… but really the plastic cheese ornament just makes me fucking giddy.

Mar — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 00:23:32 +0000

Hello little friend.

Mar — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:06:24 +0000

Jackfruit and Eel

Mar — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 14:09:59 +0000

Regret haunts me. I don’t want it to be this way, but it is, and for the most part, I cope. The best I can do is live for me and hope the next wave of nostalgia isn’t so harsh.

I had an inspired moment of “I want to get healthy” today, so I logged in to my old account at The Daily Plate. It’s livestrong.com now, but then, it’s been years since I logged in. This was just spooky. I land at my old profile showing meals I had entered to track calories:

Polish Vendor dog
Healthy black bean tacos
Peach Pico De Gallo
Soy Almond Matte Latte
Jackfruit boba smoothie
Aparagus Goat Cheese Quiche
Roastel Eel

Fun meals right? I remember a couple of those dishes specifically. Memory or rosy nostalgia, I can’t say, but I picture that time fondly. Standing in my old tiny kitchen, happily lost in exploring new foods, feeling very much at home

…and that thought is a punch in the gut.

me in my kitchen, some years ago

Ugh. This is the part where I’m supposed to be thankful for that period of time, move on, and keep swimming.
*sigh* Eventually, I guess. It can’t suck like this forever can it?

It slices, it dices, it scratches black shit off rainbow paper!

Mar — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 14:09:48 +0000

I borrowed a Cricut cutter from denhac the other day. What the hell is a Cricut cutter you ask? I didn’t know anything about this thing, but I found out how amazingly rapey the company is.

Lets pretend grandma loves scrap-booking. She wants to cut letters and shapes out of paper all day and glue them on shit. Her neighbor Betsy’s scrapbook is tight as fuck, so Grandma decides to up her game and drop $300 on a Cricut cutter.

She can’t use her own designs on it, but it comes with a nifty cartridge that has one, very festive looking font. That’s fun for a while, but Christmas is coming up and Grandma has a hard on for snowflake shapes. The craft store sells additional cartridges for $30-&70 a pop.

...What Would Jesus Charge?

While grandma is there, she might as well pick up the Disney princess cartridge, and that 101 jesus fish collection…

Anyway, you get where this is going. Grandma goes broke wasting money on bullshit fonts when there’s other craft cutters that allow custom designs.
This company also sued a couple 3rd party software companies for allowing users to cut their own designs. This means in order to use the thing with your own designs you need older software and firmware. I added a tutorial at the end of this post, because yeah, that’s some bullshit.

Here’s a few things I made machine. It is pretty damn fun once you get past the evil.

denhac logo

303

Fight the Sky

Ok, so that was all standard paper craft stuff. The real fun came when I found this at Hobby Lobby:

My inner 13 year old nerd girl totally squeed. So I grabbed a broken blade, cut it flat for scraping and hooked it up.

A little bit of paint and the results are Bill fucking Murray, in all his rainbowy, butterfly glory.

—————

Tutorial as promised. I spent some time rounding up software and fucking with it till it worked with my Cricut personal on Win 7. I’m sure someone out there will find this info very useful, so here ya go.
You’ll need to track down:

Sure Cuts A Lot 1 or 2 (3 no longer supports Cricut)
you may need a different driver than comes packaged with the software: ftdiport.inf

Now check your firmware on your Cricut. Power it on, and the firmware version will scroll across the display. Are you 1.1 or 1.3? If you are, you’re good to go! Just run Sure Cuts A Lot. DO NOT update your firmware or Sure Cuts A Lot will stop working.
Older/Later firmware? You get to do it the hard way. You will also need:

OLD Trial Version of Cricut Design Studio with Firmware version 1.1 0r 1.3 (for personal cutter)
NEW Trail version of Cricut Design Studio available on the Cricut site

I tried just running the old installer, but it didn’t work on my machine. So I switched out the firmware in to the new installer. Unpackage the installer for the OLD trial version with 7zip or similar. Navigate to the firmware folder and find the appropriate file. For cricut personal you want to grab “cricut_v1_1.enc”
Firmware versions for other models:

personal: v1.1, v1.3
expression: v2.1, v2.3
create: v1.51
cake: v2.3

OK, got the file? Good. Now you want to find the new firmware and replace it with the old firmware. Unpackage your NEW trial version and navigate to the same folder. In my case, I’m going to replace v1.34 with v1.1. Rename your old firmware file with the new firmware name and replace it.

personal: v1.34
expression: v2.34
create: v1.54
cake: v2.34

Now just run the NEW installer.
Once Cricut Design Studio is installed, click on Help > Update Cricut Firmware. Follow the instructions there to update. That’s all you need the Cricut software for. You can uninstall after that.

You should be able to cut your own SVGs and TTFs in Sure Cuts A Lot now. Tada!