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Often during my work I get the opportunity to scan photos and artwork from anywhere between 50 and 150 years ago. Occasionally some of that material is a stereo photograph, which is pretty cool to look at. The cameras are also neat to look at.

Read up on stereo photography at Wikipedia and take a look at some unique stereo cameras at oobject.com.

In this sea of mass-produced trinkets, you can tell when you come across something hand made. There is just something about it, a warmth, almost a glow, that emanates from a hand crafted item. The craftsman really pours his love and passion into his creation and it is readily recognizable.

Your watches really echo this antiqueness…

I didn’t have skills before, so my watches looked old fashioned. Also, I use brass and leather as basic materials. The older brass gets, the darker it becomes, making the watches look antique. Technically, brass is easy to shape, melt and meld. It’s durable and it doesn’t rust easily. I personally like brass and keep using it.

Read the rest of the interview at PingMag and check out the rest of Suekichi’s watches!

Endless. Immediate. Forgive. New. Fresh. Memories. Renewed. Clean. Cold. Constant. Hope. Discovery. Questions. Overpowering. Cacophony. White. Horizon. Possibilities. Turn away. Give. Exposed. Fast. Present.

Ancient majesty. Mossy. Removed from time. Endless. Lost. Dense. Towering. Incomprehensible. Foreboding. Welcoming. Vast. Dwarfing. Old. Wise. Oracle. Still. Mystery. Silent. Slow. Deafening. Growth. Decay. Past. Reflection. Solitude. Romance. Deep. Envelop. Understanding. Take. Safety. Forget. Hidden.

Super pepper grinder?

Overcomplicated music box?

No, these are mechanical calculators! Very intricate, beautiful to look at. Check out the rest of the pictures at DarkRoastedBlend.

When I say “Mt. Fuji”, most people in the west think of Katsushika Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa. Few actually know about the other 45 images that accompany that iconic print in a series called “36 Views of Mount Fuji“. (the collection is titled 36 instead of 46 because 10 additional prints were added to the collection due to its immense popularity, bringing the total up to 46)

Click on over and look at all of the prints. They’re all very striking and beautiful to enjoy. I feel a special affinity towards print 18: Ejiri in the Suruga Province because it gets so very windy out where I live!

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About a month ago I was switching a ViewSonic vx2025wm from my PC to a Mac a few times when I was doing some troubleshooting. The next time I turned it on it stayed blank, declaring “no signal.” I swapped cables, tried multiple machines, but the DVI port was dead.

Work bought me a new monitor for $400, but today I found out that it’s a bug in the DVI port and that it’s not actually broken. I am upset at the unnecessary expense! How does a bug like this get through Quality-Assurance? How does a DVI port “forget” that it’s on??

Many people throughout the years have kept diaries (they’re usually called blogs now lol). Usually the author wants to keep the writings and thoughts away from prying eyes. Sometimes the diary is hidden, sometimes it is locked, and sometimes the author creates his own coded notation that makes sense only to him. The BBC has an article up about a few famous examples of coded diaries, from Charles Westley to Beatrix Potter.

Donald Hill was in the RAF, attached to the Far East command in Kai Tak, Hong Kong, during World War II. The Japanese attacked on 8 December 1941 and after surrendering, he was put into a prisoner of war camp.

The diary he made was hidden as a maths table. He would have been killed if he had been found writing it. The entries talked about what it was like to be attacked and then to be a prisoner of war.

The diary only came to light after Hill’s death in 1985, when his wife Pamela was desperate to learn of a time that he had not discussed with her. After historians had attempted to decode it, in 1996 it was given to Philip Ashton, a mathematician at Surrey University.

He was amazed at the complexity of the code, and six months were spent experimenting with a variety of trial and error techniques until he remembered reading the full names of the two lovers, Donald and Pamela, at the bottom of the page.

By putting these names over the grid, a pattern emerged and the diary was transcribed.

Thank goodness nowadays encoding can be as easy as applying a PGP or GPG cryptographic key, but this is fascinating to me.

PingMag MAKE takes a look at a fourth-generation blacksmithing family in Omura City, Nagasaki Prefecture and their line of kitchen knives aptly titled “Knives For Men”.

You call your knives “Knives for Men.” That’s a rather unique name. How did you come to call them that?

It’s really hard to make a knife that is a new product. Actually, there are only two different types of knife: debabocho (kitchen cleaver for fish) and nakiri bocho (knife for vegetables). Just two types. They’re all the same basic shape. So I met a lot of people who talked to me about what they thought I should do, and they said “Why not develop a new kind of knife?” and “If you make this part shaped like this, it’ll look stylish” and things like that. The people I spoke to were from other industries, they weren’t knife makers. But those people are the ones who have the freest ideas.

So everyone’s words became a starting point for you, then.

That’s right. I decided to try and use everyone’s knowledge and my own techniques to make something. That’s why it might cost a bit more, but this knife uses a lot of genuine swordsmith’s techniques and they’re made with great care.

You got your mother to teach you how to cook! What a lovely family.

I really hate how the old way that families used to relate is dying out these days. That’s why I don’t hesitate to ask my mother to teach me things, and really one reason for my “Man’s Knives” are because I want fathers to lead by example, to show their children that they are comfortable in the kitchen. That’s why I do this. And that’s why I want to make a blade that can cut well.

Do you have any opinions about where the modern Japanese family is going these days?

Everyone is so busy these days, and there isn’t much conversation between family members, don’t you think? The family as a group is slipping away. My family is the same. My kids have after-school classes, and we only have dinner all together about once a week. Those are the times we live in. There’s nothing to be done about it. But we’ve got to value that one day we have per week, and if Dad can show off his talents in the kitchen on that day, that’s pretty good, isn’t it? I can’t cook very well, but I really enjoy cutting up fish with a sharp knife. I’d like my children to have that image of myself as their father.

I really liked the above part of the interview. I think of Japan’s societal structure as an indicator of where the US is headed in the next 10-15 years. We are sliding quickly towards a “salaryman” society, where one is married to the company you work for rather than your spouse, and you only really see your family on the weekends. Everyone is so busy trying to be “productive”, whatever that means, and actually achieving little. Or at least achieving little that really matters. While he is trying to use what time he has with his family to the fullist, Tanakasan unfortunately has a defeatist attitude of “this is just the way it is” instead of at the very least hoping that it would change - an attitude that is very much at work in ths US here.

Check out Tanaka Kama Kogyo’s line of knives here. I wish I could order some! :)

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