My adventure making a wood block for block printing
The other day, I decided I wanted to try making my own wood block for block printing out of a photograph (I was inspired by a Kickstarter project).
I started with a photograph of the mountains I took on a hike. (In retrospect, this wasn’t the best photograph to choose, as you’ll see. Next time I’d choose a simpler photo with high contrast).
I converted it to black and white, posterized it, and inverted it, using Photoshop.
Then I took it in to Metrix Create Space in Seattle. They have a laser cutter and I knew they’d be able to make the block. They loaded the image into the LaserMate software to set up the laser cutter. We first made a small test image to make sure the whole thing was going to work.
Once we’d confirmed it would work, we made the real thing.
I took the block home and tried making some cards with it. The results are a bit mixed; the concept is great and part of the cards came out really well. But the photo is too complex, and too many of the lines just blur together with the ink, so there’s not enough detail.
Next time, I’m going to glue a rubber stamp material to the top of the wood and use the laser cutter on that instead. I’m also going to make the depth of the etching just a bit deeper – this one was set at 1mm and I want to try 2mm or possibly even 3mm.
Overall, I’m pleased with the result, and had a blast making it.
Web workers and Firefox 8
For those of you who have purchased Head First HTML5 Programming, be aware that there is a bug in Firefox 8. In this version of the browser, you cannot create a web worker from localhost, which means that the code:
var worker = new Worker("worker.js");
will fail. If you open the JavaScript console, you’ll see an error saying “Could not get domain.” This error will prevent the examples in Chapter 10 from working, since we are creating workers from localhost. So, please use a different browser! Hopefully this bug will be fixed in Firefox 9.
Mozilla is pushing out releases of Firefox at a blazing speed, so I don’t think it will take too long for this to be fixed.
Tutorial: How to create a pie chart with HTML5′s canvas
One of the best things about the HTML5 <canvas> element is that we can now do things like this:
without needing a plug in. I recently had to implement a similar type of graphic in canvas for a project I’m working on, so I thought I’d turn it into a tutorial on how to make a pie chart.
Head First HTML5 Programming
Head First HTML and CSS 
Head First Design Patterns
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