A book of images from a photo shoot at Mosman Bay in 2013. Late afternoon, with long shadows; the conditions isolate the small toadfish who swim amidst more than a century of building rubble left over from the construction of the seawall, during the reclamation of mudflats to produce a parkland. The images from this shoot are paired as colour, and high contrast black & white variants.

This 30 page book is published in DRM-Free Fixed-Layout EPUB format.

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Eddie Cartridge, and Janelle Tan – Machine Intelligence researchers and former partners.

Separated following the takeover of their mutual employer, which saw Eddie made redundant, life has lead them to radically different outcomes. Eddie is homeless, unemployed, down to his last few dollars, and living under the streets. Janelle is engaged to their former employer, living in a penthouse, and travelling to work by helicopter.

Eddie has been offered a job – subvert a Machine Intelligence for a critical window of time. The job has a payday large enough that he can escape this awful city – a middle-class-authoritarian city state, where the streets are always clean, and welfare benefits are tied to medical tracking implants which monitor sobriety, amongst other things.

The first problem, is that Eddie is not fast enough to out-react, and out-think a Machine Intelligence. He’ll need an edge, in the form of The Deathline – a neuro-accelerating hallucinogen.

The second problem, Eddie has never used The ‘Line before, and has no supply contacts for this highly illegal substance. He must reconnect with Janelle, who consumed prodigious quantities during their time together, to find out if she still has access to anyone who can supply what he needs.

For Janelle, contact with Eddie has contained a revelation which forces her to question her recent past, and to reassess her relationship with her fiancé. Will she abandon her comfortable, “perfect” life, and be reclaimed by the world of The Deathline?

The world is one in which Machine Intelligence is the supreme power, where a failed nuclear strike has fractured America into three separate nations, Europe is stricken by secessionary conflicts, and new Machine Intelligence-equipped non-geographic distributed states are beginning to emerge.

This 232 page book is published in DRM-Free Fixed-Layout EPUB format.

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The current gear modification project; to replace two of the castors on my new toolbox with levelling feet.

The problem to solve, is that the toolbox is going under a workbench, on a sloping area of floor. The toolbox can fit under the bench at one end, but not the high side. The solution is to remove two wheels, and replace them with levelling feet.

Here we have 5mm thick steel plate, cut to the same size as the baseplates of the castors, with the mounting holes traced. The way it works is pretty simple, the tube will be welded to the centre, cut to length. The thread for the foot will be cut to length. The large nut on the bottom of the thread is turned with a spanner, and it climbs the thread, pushing the leg up.

Chonky drill is chonky. I made a decision to drill out the centre of the plate, so the tube section can be welded from above, and below. It also provides a bit more depth for the leg thread, which can emerge into a void above the centre of the baseplate.

The last couple of months have been some pretty intensive nights, some of the most solid, prolonged work I’ve done for a while, resulting in:

A forum for users of card-slot expandable Macs, made relevant now that Apple has cancelled the Mac Pro as a product.

Happy birthday, absent friend. Wherever you are. 

Apparently some bot (or exploited people) network has been running fraudulent purchases through the Golgotha Graphics FastSpring store. The angle appears to be that because my books are relatively inexpensive, the purchase is small enough to not be noticed. If it’s successful, it marks a particular set of (stolen) credit card details as valid, so they can then be used for something larger.

The scale of it was pretty impressive, dozens of purchase attempts every minute, which I hadn’t known about because the system by default only notifies you when a payout is due, after a certain amount accrues.

I reported it to FastSpring, and it’s now in their hands; after all, they’re the ones with the big fraud detection network, etc.

Derby Daze Volume 1 collects the pick of the non-square format images from my 2013 roller derby shoots. This is a new re-processing of the images through a different workflow. The result is a significant shift in colour tone, distinguishing them from the original version, which is still available. This new edition also features an updated book design, which I’m standardising across all books going forward.

The goal for these photos was to treat the images in a painterly fashion, thinking in terms of abstract patterns of colour, without trying to prioritise the representational nature of the picture. The result sits somewhere in a Venn-overlap between pastel & ink-coloured charcoal drawings, Futurist motion imagery, and the friezes of a Hellenistic monument.

It only took three months, but I finally have a new, new condition toolbox.

Wonders never cease.