Custom Keds Create sensation, lag

Would you pay $65 or more for a pair of Keds? What if they looked like these?




I've been doing t-shirts and other products at various sites for years now, and I've never seen a swarm like the one Zazzle has had. They aren't talking about it, but if you try to do a shoe at peak hours - patience is your friend! Furthermore, every single pair is being reviewed by humans. Expect delays, and have pity on those poor humans, who are probably dreaming about being trampled by bad designs...

I don't often mention process here - this isn't generally that sort of blog. But it's my blog and I get to mention my little perseverations, especially when they have caused conspicuous gaps in posting.

Well, I needed an excuse, really. Trying to get a coherent political or ethical post out of my feeds for the last few days has been like putting lipstick on an inflatable pig. (Note to Self: T-SHIRT!!!!)

Well, then; time to do chores. This blog doesn't monetize itself! :P And that is how I literally stumbled across the new shoes. If zazzle sent out a notice about them going live, I missed it. By the time I got there, there were already hundreds, if not thousands of designs and several, if not dozens of entirely new stores.

And most - and I'm gritting my teeth saying this - are seriously competitive with MY designs!



I abhor false modesty; I'm good. I'm professional grade good. But I'm not in the same league as professionals who do nothing else - and it's clear that this product has attracted a good selection of truly hardcore graphic artists and designers. The results are stunning and I'm going to have to ramp up my game just to get noticed!

Image credits:

Chuchill's Tommy Gun
by webcarve

Hills Shoe - Wearable Artwork by Seaclans
by Seachild001

Design your own custom shoes on zazzle.com

Pinhole Lenses: More than Meets the Eye; Less than I'd Hoped.

You may have seen ads for glasses with pinhole lenses. You probably think they rank right up there with the "x-ray specs" found in the back of old comic books. Nope. These suckers work.

I was approached by the webmaster of pinhole-glasses direct who flattered my ability to describe things. Well, flattery works to a point, but not to the point that I'll review a product blind. However, as a person who has nearly been blind and has always had some sort of optical prosthesis, I found the whole idea of pinhole lenses inherently interesting.

Anyway, I took a look at the sight (pun intended); was instantly beskepticled (ibid) and told them that I'd need a pair to check out and would not promise a positive review. One small thing gave me hope and pause.

Please Note: Pinhole glasses are meant to be used only for stationary viewing. It is dangerous to use them when you are moving as it affects peripheral vision of the eyes.

When there are warnings attached to something, it strongly implies that whatever it is, it succeeds in doing something.

Anyway, they came, I tried them and they work, kinda, sorta. Well enough that the concept is well worth exploring, not so well that I could use them to entirely replace my glasses. They do work better the longer you wear them, and for people with mild prescriptions, I think they are well worth trying out. If nothing else, they are an lusciously cool accessory; kind of Fellini Goes Punk and they are obscenely comfortable.

For hand crafters, I'd suggest buying three or more and hand-painting them.

The first thing these people need to do is market what they have as a fashion accessory. Coat the lenses in various colors. Have a rainbow of frames. And then, get in contact with the technical people at Zazzle.com to see about creating a product that's ideal for printing on. Here's a quick concept sketch.

There are any number of places where specialty-printed wraparounds would be popular. Sports events, for one. But consider how cool it would be to have shades that match your shoes and bag. Totally boutique! And right now, it's becoming possible to stock a boutique with art-printed originals. I think the existing material really lends itself to that application; it has a stiffness and conformability that should make it possible to create a single-piece printable product. It will probably require a simple frame, but that should be straightforward.

I wrote large parts of this review while wearing them. I'm extremely astigmatic and have artificial fixed focus lenses in my eyes after developing cataracts. Well, these do actually correct my astigmatism, and I can see the downside to moving your head - your vision blurs suddenly. I found that my brain compensated very quickly, both for the oddly spotty (literally) vision (referred to on the site as "the honeycomb effect") and the drastic reduction in the total amount of light. (Not a downside here in Nevada, I should add.)

I've never really had peripheral vision that I can recall until I did get my new lenses installed. I used to be so extremely near-sighted that the world was a blur without my coke bottles, and my brain is used to relying on peripheral vision for motion detection alone. Your mileage may vary on this point, but AS a point, it could be easily addressed by making a wraparound style.

I think it may also enhance the brain's ability to detect motion - I think it would be a great idea to get some data on this; if so, these might be of use in sport protection goggles.

I did try wearing them over my bifocals and found that suddenly my entire field of vision was available with full sharpness - indeed, sharper (if dimmer) than my corrected vision alone, and without the annoying search for a "sweet spot." It's very difficult to tell exactly, how well it would work with the pinhole layer actually integrated with a prescription lens - but my intuition and crude experimentation says that it's well worth finding out.

From the site:

Pinhole Glasses are special tools

In Pinhole glasses, holes of 1-1.5mm are spaced regularly using laser technology.

Yeah, that would probably be better. These pinholes are molded sheet plastic and I suspect that it's a stock sheet that is not really designed for the task. Nonetheless, it certainly does work. And the fact that the holes are actually conical in cross section may be a feature. It may not be. More data is required, and I've no way to go further along these lines.

Standard boilerplate continues, likely cribbed from some wiki. It's also clear that the English version of the site is written by someone who is quite sure they write fluent English.

Alas, no.

They may not be suitable for use in some instances.

Wearing pinholes affect your peripheral vision. They should not be used when you are driving or while moving about. It reduces the amount of light entering your eyes. Therefore, it cannot be used in environments having dim light. Wearing pinhole glasses does not prevent harmful UV rays from entering the eyes. So, do not use them to view the sun. It is also not useful for people measured as requiring lens of more than 6 diopters. Other eye problems like diffraction will prevent them from experiencing any significant benefits upon wearing pinholes.

It is always advisable for young people to avoid using any visual aid. Working on their eye muscles can improve their vision considerably.

As I said, the entire site comes across as a scam; this is not aided by their promotion of expensive "acupressure goggles."

As it happens, I'm not at all skeptical about acupressure; what I am skeptical about is the ability to automate an intuitive art, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

To say that the links to supporting science for these products is sketchy is charitable. But leaving the accupressure goggles aside completely, there is a great deal of science, history and experience behind the use of pinhole lenses and the application of some real optical science to the matter would result in a better site and a far, far better product.

Guys; Go thou forth and find ye an optician and an optical physicist!

Meanwhile a set of these plus a workbook on the optical effect is well worth marketing to science classes - with various editions for college, middle schools and lower grades. It's possible to directly observe the physical principles at work far more clearly than by other means.

I'd suggest connecting with education writers and publishers. That could nicely fund further R&D - or indeed, produce the same results for free from fascinated bespectacled minds.

I wish I understood the physics better myself, but I have a few questions based on what little I do understand, and I hope someone will contribute answers.

Would smaller holes in a tighter array work? Because it they would work, they would work better. I did a quick experiment using a flyswatter that has square holes much more closely spaced. It worked, but not as well. However, it worked in such a way that it was easier to bring a line of text into focus.

Does the plastic have to be opaque? Because if the plastic were sun-glass lenses, that would definitely improve the experience.

Would a thin film with ideal sized holes (laser drilled, perhaps) work if applied to ordinary clear or tinted lenses? Could the film be printed instead of drilled?

And would it make sense to consider creating pinhole/slit arrays specifically for individuals?

The advantage would be that you might be able to literally PRINT lenses, or use any number of inexpensive Computer Aided Machining tools to produce something that would work well enough at a very, very low cost per unit - and this could make a huge difference in the third world. Heck, it would be pretty darn cool right here. But this needs to be stated strongly: What exists right now is good enough to make a huge difference in the third world.

Finally, if you took a hologram of an ideal constructed pinhole matrix and lens combination and put it in a frame - would that work? I seem to recall something to the effect that hologram lenses were used in satellite cameras, to save weight, and I've always wanted my glasses to be as light as physically possible.

pinhole glasses - http://www.pinhole-glasses-direct.com/

pinhole glasses - http://www.pinhole-glasses-direct.com/order.html

pinhole glasses - http://www.pinhole-glasses-direct.com/faq.html

pinhole eyeglasses - http://www.pinhole-glasses-direct.com/alternativeprescriptioneyeglasses.html

Damn Conservative Environmentalists

The Sudbury Dryad's Last Repose by webcarve

Large format printing By zazzle

Aside from the silly splatting (we know damn well what D#@*$% means, so it's like pasties on a set of 38DD's), this question needs to be asked by all of us.

God's Politics - Jim Wallis : D#@*$% Environmentalists! (by Brian McLaren)
"A friend of mine recalls a dinner-table conversation one day when she was a schoolgirl. Her dad had come home unusually frustrated from his job as a city planner. 'D#@*$% environmentalists!' he said over dinner. 'Dad, I thought you were an environmentalist,' she said. 'Why are you so upset?'

'All day long,' he answered, 'environmentalists come to me with problems and complaints, and business people come to me with ideas and projects. Why can't the environmentalists be proactive and come to the table with some creative ideas to make things better, instead of just trying to get in the way of things they don't want to see happen?'"

McLaren has his own answer - which somehow morphs into faith-based initiatives. Well, Ok - there's no rule that says that you need one huge answer for every large problem. So, with a hat tip to Brian and Jim Wallace, I shall diverge at this point.

For myself, while I am a person of faith, in situations like this I don't see faith as being significant.

Faith is the answer when you are not sure of the facts, the implementation of the facts, or do not have the critical facilities to get from what you see to what you should do about it. In the latter case, you need to put your faith in people who can and have proven that they know what they are talking about, and can explain it with diagrams, models and math.

I've long held that Conservation is the ultimate Conservatism. So is environmentalism. "Fix it up, Use it up, Make it Do" is a virtue I grew up with. One of my personal bugaboos is the overwhelming avalanche of plastic crap that cannot be fixed up, used up or made to do. Hell, most often it doesn't even quite do when brand new.

And as I grew up in the Pacific Northwest in the midst of way more "environment" than most folks do, I grew up thinking of it as both a rich resource and my personal preferred environment.

While I value softwood lumber, I hate clear cuts - for the same reason you would hate someone bulldozing three houses across the street for the copper plumbing and leaving all the residue behind. That would be unethical, even had they paid for the property rights that would permit them to do that and even if there were no laws and regulations requiring cleanup. Indeed, those laws and regulations exist in recognition of the ethical requirements and serve as a sort of enforcible morality that applies in such a case.

As a good rule of thumb, if it's ugly and it smells bad, it's probably the result of some form of unethical behavior. Oh, and aside from that, it's wasteful of resources and therefore more expensive and less profitable than it could otherwise be.

When ethics and impact are divorced from the equation, you get both opportunism and NIMBYism. And frankly, much of what passes for environmentalism is some variety of Not In My Backyard. Spotted Owls be damned.

And then there's another point - one that seems to evade people on both sides of any of these debates where taking sides makes a solid resolution impractical or entirely impossible.

Every participant in an ecosystem has an impact; that impact must balance with it's contribution, or the ecosystem will tend to adapt and drive that participant to extinction. And we, our cities and all our glorious and terrible achievements are within the context of a large ecosystem called The Earth, which would get along just fine without us.

These are not matters of faith or ideological conviction, they are matters of fact and the factual, predictable consequences of acting counter to the interests of the ecosystem as a whole.

The only question then is how to go about doing that while preserving, and indeed, improving the parts of the environment we live in while not degrading the parts that other beings require. But none of this precludes change. Without change over time, an ecosystem is dead. We are part of it, unavoidably a dominant force within it, and when we find ourselves choking on our own filth in a silent wasteland, we should be able to come to the obvious conclusion - that we have screwed up and need to change our ways.

Why? Because it's ugly and it stinks.

I want this Custom-Printable Stein for the Holidays!

Attention, Cafepress and or Zazzle:

I WANT to have this beer stein! I found it on the crobike.de promotional items site - which is like a wish-list for print-on-demand folks such as I.

If this is what I think it is, it's not cheap-ass slipware, it's a stein you can clink while belting out a drinking song and sloshing homebrew suds. And I would love to start a store dedicated to the home brewer... Hm.

I'll get right on that, actually. It fits with my general libertarian bias toward the important role the so-called vices play in matters of personal liberty. But while I can make customizable labels and even slipware steins - there are none such as these heavy ceramic beauties to be had.

And that's a shame. Because my art would kick butt on this product. Besides, I want one just for me. It's just the right size for my morning coffee.

Oh, if you are of more conservative tastes, there are many more reasonable choices from ceramic to glass to insulated stainless steel travel mugs.

But I want this bad boy for my morning beans.

Here are a couple more examples they would like me to feature, from a selection of literally thousands of items.

In the process of researching this post, I went so far as to connect directly with one major vendor, and they could not have been more helpful and accommodating, with all sorts of tools on their site to save you both time and money. And yes, they do offer rapid turn-around in many cases; in many cases you can have your item within five business days.

Meanwhile, getting to my patron's intent in commissioning this post; if you have a business and need promotional items, these folks can connect you with imprintable products from all over the globe. For some reason, this whole industry has fascinated me for decades, possibly because by dad wanted me to collect stamps and coins. I always wanted to MAKE the stamps and coins - or at least, collectable items.

So, if you happen to be on a political campaign staff - there are literally hundreds of items that can be engraved, embossed, stamped and printed that will make those major donors light up - and open their wallets!