Robot in Red - Olympia SM-9 Redecorated!

This partially redecorated Olympia SM-9 features the Senatorial typeface, more commonly known as the Robot font.  The workbench is a serious mess.  I just noticed the eraser that came with a newly arrived compact typewriter in the background.  That and the shroud from a partly torn down Barr that needs attention.  I need a time turner.

Can you tell it has been over a week since I typed anything?  My regrets for subjecting you to many typos.

As the SM-9 so lovingly stated in robot (Senatorial) font, Claire is the artist of the family.  I can't draw, so I take photos.  Here is her latest repurposed work in progress.  For scale, look in the background of the first photo.  Yes, in certain ways, she is very much my child.

One Year Anniversary: Picture Heavy!

Today marks the first anniversary of Vintage Technology Obsessions.  Before I go any further, I want to thank all of you who regularly visit this blog.  I'd like to think that I would keep going without page views, but the truth is I like to see the number go up and the comments and conversations are greatly appreciated.

In the spirit of this blog and the Typosphere, this is a hybrid post.  I think I will use a few different typewriters.  Do you recognize the machines from their typefaces?

Yeah, typewriters are real; typographical errors and all.  The machines:  Underwood Deluxe Quiet Tab, Royal Signet, Olympia SM-7, Remington Mark II (a plastic Torpedo) and a 1932 Royal known as Keylime.  I lust after a machine with German blackletter or an Olivetti Graphika.

I've been surprised at some of the posts that have picked up the most hits; mostly from Google searches.  I'm glad that I diversified content from the beginning.  I blog because I love learning about many obscure subjects that have nothing to do with my professional life.  I also love photography and this is a fun avenue for me to share images.

Here are some of my favorite images from the last year:

This little guy was a graduation gift for a friend of the family.

Svetlana Optima is our mysterious Cold War throwback.  She was manufactured in East Germany in the early '50s and has some pretty serious trust issues.  This comes from her new ribbon day.

And now for some statistics.  Thanks to readers such as yourself, this blog passed the 16,000 pageview mark on August 11.  The top ten posts by pageview, paraphrased and in descending order, are:

ITAM Special Report: The Eight Millionth Remington

Remembering Ralph McQuarrie

Zeiss Ikon/ICA Folding Camera

Juvenile Cold War Space Fiction

Happy Typewriter Day from Keylime

The Birthday Blog Post from Space

Royal Typewriter Rescue(feature Old Red, a Royal with the Vogue typeface rescued from choppers)

A Tale of Two Cameras (the modern Sony NEX3 coupled with Olympus PEN F lenses)

Mousiest Royal Futura (a not all that fun to type on Royal with an awesome cursive typeface)

B-36 Restricted Report (Features an SM-9 keeping track of the dreaded Svetlana Optima)

And here is the subject of the top post, Remington number 8,000,000.

Just full of awesome and kind of OK to type on.  This machine receives plenty of Google search hits.

If only I could keep the bench this tidy.

Being an Art Deco icon, this machine starred in its own movie "Last Stand at the Remington".

This is an outtake from the hit movie "Last Stand at the Remington".

Yeah, totally growing up would be pretty boring.

This is the first typecast with our Senatorial Olympia SM-9.  Racoons had recently dug a hole through our roof.

This man of mystery was a hit at the 2011 Kansas City Maker Faire.

The dreaded Dollar Store "Spacebot" testing out that old saw about the pen being mightier than the sword.  However, Bill has some muscle in the form of a junk part R2-C4 unit.

I'm still bitter about losing a whole summer worth of B-grade movie reruns to the Watergate hearings.

You don't want to know.

Here's our family mascot, Trollie!  Isn't that the most creative name you've ever heard?

Gotta love southern Florida.  There was a guy shooting a monster handgun towards a 40 foot fiberglass panther on the other side of the parking lot.  Ah, the memories Trollie and I have together.

Two extremely shiny typewriters.  They don't get used nearly enough what with my weird typeface fetish.  The gold Royal goes by the name of Margo.

Thank goodness we have a good copy editor in the house!  What fate awaits this tough Royal?

Like a candle in the Windy City.  Poor Marilyn is about to lose her head.

Keylime and Old Red, the Vogue typeface Royals.  The one on the right is named Keylime.  That was redundant, but I am too lazy to reconfigure the link.

Such a happy couple.  Too bad they are about to be mauled by zombies!

"Do you hear moaning?  I swear I hear moaning."

Imaging the Transit of Venus with a pair of binoculars.

Shopping for the perfect violin for Hannah.  It was a great experience.  The bow cost more than my first car.  Sure, the car was a beater, but you get the idea.

In the violin finish lair.  This strings shop is a great maker space.

My portable typecasting machine for our summer vacation.  We came back to a very long stretch of hot and a drought that came out of nowhere.

Something shiny from the Art of the Car Concours.

This is a nice rat rod from the Kansas City Good Guys show.  The Duesenberg at the Concours was worth more than a Belgian dressage horse.  The rat rod?  Not so much, but it is awesome!

3-D printing pretty much rocks.  This is from the 2012 Kansas City Maker Faire.

Souped up kiddie cars in the Power Wheels racing series.

This is Super Awesome Sylvia and her dad, the Tech Ninja doing some live science at the 2011 Kansas City Maker Faire.

This is precisely why we need maker culture.  We are so proud of Curiosity's team!  I still have a rendering of the skycrane lowering Curiosity set as my wallpaper.  We haven't forgotten Opportunity, either.

The team, as seen on my LCD during the live streaming of the landing.  Dang, where is that sexy Mohawk Guy?

Ahhhh!!!! Not only is he adorable, the Christmas Squirrel will bring your family socks and undies.  Part 1 on "The Origins of the Christmas Squirrel" is found here.  Yes, there is a Part 2 and the story involves Nikola Tesla, Erwin Schrodinger and a certain Mr. Edison.  It was cold outside and I was on vacation.

Claire's most awesome repurposed Christmas present to me.

This is one of Claire's friends.  She is a convert to the ways of the typewriter.  We gave her an Olympia SM-9 with the Senatorial (robot) typeface.  She is a total typeface junkie and can tell you about the history and design of many typefaces.  That may be atypical for the average eleven-year-old.

Claire (aka: gingercat) and the Six Fingered Man's twin brother at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Thanks again to all of you that follow or have happened upon this crazy, mixed up blog of mine!  It's gotten a little serious in the last couple of months.  Me thinks it is time to break out some Hong Kong knock-off robots and a jumbo Machinder.  Yes, that would do nicely!

Copyright:  The Copyright is a noble beast that I, the owner of the blog known as Vintage Technology Obsessions, claims for my own.  With the exception of the images of the amazing Curiosity, all images and text are mine and are copyright 2011 and 2012.  Regular readers would not need to be reminded that, in addition to legal recourse, if someone were to pilfer my images for use without attribution or for commercial use of any form they would likely be awakened in the middle of the night by the buzz and hiss of a flying, steam powered Oliver Number 99 hovering over their bed.  Thieves, you have been suitably warned.

Curiosity, Welcome to Mars!

Great job, NASA!  You've gotten Curiosity to Mars!

First images coming..  The first image is a thumbnail of a wheel in the foreground and the horizon of Mars in the background.  The first full resolution image is the shadow of Curiosity on the face of Mars.

I watched the landing live through the NASA JPL feed and it is hard to believe how smoothly it went.  Every piece of the entry vehicle operated exactly as designed.  The communications equipment worked perfectly with only short dropouts as various portions of the entry vehicle separated.  The is a fantastic feat of engineering.  I can't wait to see the science this rover produces.

Update:  Added photos of Curiosity during its parachute descent phase taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Update 2:  The mother lode of space ephemera blogs posted a great image collection of how we have imagined travel to Mars:
http://dreamsofspace.blogspot.com/2012/08/curiousity-on-mars-august-5-2012.html

Update 3:  Added photo of Curiosity's shadow with Mt. Gale in the background.

First High Resolution Image

Here is the first high resolution image from Curiosity.  The crud is dust on a protective shield that has now been lowered.

Fresh Image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter posted by NASA August 6:  Curiosity in descent under the hyper-sonic parachute.

 
Mission Control Post Landing Confirmation:  Here are a few shots of the control room post landing taken from my LCD.

Victory and relief.

This is the guy in charge of the entry vehicle team.  He cleaned up pretty good for someone who flunked Geometry in high school.

First images.  I'm still smiling!

Landing Plus 18 hours:  Curiosity's shadow with Mt. Gale in the background.  Our rover is going to climb that bad boy sometime during its two year mission.  "Our rover" as in during the press conference last night, the mission director mentioned that it cost each American around $7.00.  I think a little national pride is worth seven bucks.

Good Luck, Curiosity!

I stared writing this blog entry 4 days, 1 hour and 53 minutes before the scheduled touchdown of the rover Curiosity on Mars.  On Wednesday, the descent vehicle switched over to an on-board computer to control the landing cycle roughly 48 hours from now.  We're dependent on the work of a talented group of makers and 500,000 lines of code.  The landing cycle has been dubbed...

The Seven Minutes of Terror!

In a nutshell, the lander has to deliver the rover on target while scrubbing a lot of velocity in a relatively thin atmosphere.  And it can't kick up too much dust that will gum up the works of this precision machine.  Up until recently, the track record for landing on Mars was spotty at best.  My spousal unit and I used to joke about Martians shooting down our spacecraft in orbit.

Flying to Mars ain't like dusting crops!  Check out this skycrane action.  So cool!

  While writing this entry, I realized that it is totally redundant.  There is a massive Wikipedia entry on the subject.  NPR has been abuzz with news and interviews (the design team manager is a really interesting guy - a classic gifted underachiever that just needed a goal).  Viewing parties are popping up all over the country for late Sunday night.  So why write this?  I suppose it's because I don't always write for an audience.  This is my online journal and I am keenly interested in the space program, robotics and exploration.  It's kind of like my meaningful version of Facebook's Timeline.

So here I am asking some questions that I won't know the answer to until Monday morning:

Will Curiosity, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, get a chance to work years past its scheduled mission end like Opportunity and Spirit?
Will it burn up in the atmosphere?
Will the supersonic parachute deploy?
Will the sky crane concept work?  What if the skycrane lands on Curiosity or if the cable doesn't release?
What if we just lose contact altogether?

I suppose I should trust the designers.  The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineered a fairly complicated system to get this machine down and operational in one piece.  Gravity is a harsh mistress, even on Mars.  Previous generations of rovers were much smaller and could be dropped inside inflated cocoons.  That's not so practical for a machine roughly the size of a small SUV!  The landing vehicle is part heat shield and part sky crane.  It is an audacious bit of engineering.  Because of the transmission time delay, Curiosity will be on the surface of Mars for fourteen minutes before its signal can reach Earth.

We space nerds can only cross our fingers and hope for the best.  In the meantime, here is a diagram of the landing cycle thanks to Wikipedia.

Behold the seven minutes of terror and more official videos at http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/videos/index.cfm?v=49

Remember, Curiosity is a mobile science laboratory.  It is not dependent on solar power given its nuclear power pack.  And it is fully equipped to find traces of life or building blocks of life on the surface of mars.  Here's a bit about the science mission:

The good news is that the Opportunity rover hasn't been forgotten.  This plucky little bot is completing day 3,111 of its planned 91 day mission and is still producing good science.  Great job, NASA!  Oh, our family hasn't forgotten Spirit, either.  Someday, all of these machines will be stops on an interplanetary sightseeing tour. 

Good luck, Curiosity!

A family portrait:  Sojourner, Opportunity/Spirit, Curiosity greet friendly Martians.

Maker Faire KC Part 1: Printing Technology

Is this IBM Selectric II cool, or what?  The maker grew bored with it and created a printer with the judicious use of programming, solenoids and cables.  This maker collective, the Cowtown Computer Congress, had a bunch of projects on display and this was a big attention getter. 

I assumed wrongly that the interface between the laptop and the typewriter was probably something Arduino.  Nope.  This guy etched his own circuit board!

Typewriter art, anyone?  I could watch something like this for hours. Did you notice how much the ribbon cartridge and ball head look like a robot?  Claire and I see robots everywhere.

To see this beast in action and a comprehensive build diary, visit http://www.robotdialogs.com/2012/06/typomatic-part-3.html  The Cowtown Computer Congress is one of many hacker spaces that has emerged over the last few years.  Makers share a space and major equipment with regular build nights and special events.  A hacker space is a big playground for adults.  Check around, there may be one in your town!

The Print Factory

My favorite entry in the traditional print department is the traveling crew from The Print Factory.  They are printmaking evangelists and show up at regional events with great lino and woodcuts ready to ink and press.  From experience, I can tell you this is just as enjoyable for adults as it is for kids.

Such pretty ink.  To see more about The Print Factory, visit http://craftandconcept.com/

Maker Bot

Maker Faire would be pretty awesome without 3-D printers, but it wouldn't be the same.  The Maker Bot crew was out in full force introducing people to the joys of home printing.  The Maker Bot Replicator now has a dual extrusion print head... and a bunch of new competition.  Their goal was to democratize the act of making and they spawned a new industry using true open source hardware and software.  The competition is coming for around $600 as a home printer, but they may not be as dedicated to open source.

Other than the metal bits and servos, these remote control Minions came off a Maker Bot.  The drawings, like everything else in Maker Bot world, are available on the Thingiverse.

Kids love watching Maker Bots in action as much as I do.  It used to be that only elite schools and businesses had access to 3-D printing for prototyping and small run items.  Not so long ago, the technology would have set you back over $10,000.  The previous version of the Maker Bot ran around $1,400 and the new Replicator runs around $1,800. 

One of the best things about 3-D printing:  makers use them to build parts to make larger and more elaborate home brew printers.  There were at least a dozen custom machines spread out around the Faire.

On the subject of democratizing 3-D printing, a number of libraries have installed Maker Bots.  Imagine a future in which you could print any widget available on the Thingiverse or something you throw together on Google Sketchup with a library card and a few cents for materials.  Do you need a replacement knob for a Hermes?  Print on demand is cool.

Check out this set of wings produced by another member of the Cowtown Computer Congress.  The gears were custom printed on a first generation machine.

Last year, the Kansas City Maker Faire filled this hall with some outside overflow.  This year, they shut down a street in front of Union Station for the Arc Attack tent, Power Wheels, vendors, exhibitors and custom cars.  That was in addition to three extra rooms inside the station. Sweet.

Thanks for reading!  Part II will feature "Fun with Electricity".

A friendly reminder about the archaic concept of copyright:  all photos are copyright Dwayne F. at vintagetechobsessions.  Please cite the source if you liberate my images.  They are not to be used for commercial purposes with or without citation.  You could wake up with an Oliver 99 hovering over your bed.  You have been warned.