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katef.bsky.social
Kate
@katef.bsky.social
4.8K followers 650 following 5.9K posts
she/her
If I unfollowed you, it's because you keep posting things without alt text
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katef.bsky.social
things are going well
this is not a picture that evokes "things are going well". this is woodwork, beaded panels around a window, with 130 years of paint. some parts have been partially removed, sloughing off reluctantly, as if a small landslide exposing ground that hasn't seen daylight for centuries. under this paint, the wood coated with a thick, goopey varnish. it's crystalised in the heat, it's smeared as sludge against the surface and into the details. the paint has mostly come away from the varnish, but the varnish reads "hassle". it's evident the woodwork is patched up from various different woods; i can identify at least (i think) cherry, maybe ash, and probably some kind of pine replacing a section in later years. this is going to be much work, and the result will be poor regardless
February 6, 2026 at 12:34 AM
katef.bsky.social
now i gotta learn how to make stained glass
view from the hallway, the woodwork frame looks much clearer from this side. it's a moulded profile, which is fitting for the era of the building. this is a transom window alright, but the glass is missing. it would've been some kinda pretty glass originally
February 1, 2026 at 10:45 PM
katef.bsky.social
one layer of plaster removed, a hammer hangs on top of the door below. we got a mostly rectangular hole, and the back of plasterboard on the other side both layers of plaster removed! again this was *so* much, calling them "plaster" doesn't do it justice. there was concrete in here. but the hole looks good and square now, thanks to the woodwork frame inside. now it's clear that this used to be a transom window
February 1, 2026 at 10:42 PM
katef.bsky.social
i forgot to bring my jigsaw
i have pulled away some of the plasterboard. a row of drill holes runs along an untouched edge, in a not particularly straight line. i am trying my best to avoid accidentally drilling into the woodwork inside
February 1, 2026 at 10:30 PM
katef.bsky.social
inside hole
we're inside the hole in the wall. there is a pretty good space here! it's all surprisingly clean and tidy, but more importantly there is woodwork! it's old. and it's in good condition looking across further inside the wall, the woodwork extends into a box shape
February 1, 2026 at 10:28 PM
katef.bsky.social
wherein i cut a hole in a perfectly good wall
"before" shot, this is a small section of untouched wall above a doorframe. it's all neat and tidy, nothing remarkable here. why would you cut this up?? here i have score a small almost square shape into a random looking section of the wall, nothing has been removed yet okay this is with the plasterboard removed, and we can see there's a void inside the wall. we'll look at what's inside in a moment
February 1, 2026 at 10:22 PM
katef.bsky.social
except for this one wire. which is "in" the wall. don't move, nobody will see you! HER MOVEMENT IS BASED ON VISION,
view inside a cupboard: running around the doorframe, an extremely suspicious looking mains cable that has been papered over somehow, and then plastered over that, and then painted. we can make out the shape of the cable brackets running in a line under all the plaster and stuff. the painting is extremely shoddy work. this cable is live, it's cool
February 1, 2026 at 2:10 PM
katef.bsky.social
glad to see water hardness is bisexual
water test strips. they're colourful af! these each test for various chemicals; alkalinity, carbonate, hardness, nitrate, iron, lead, chromium, mercury, etc. each of these tests has its own spectrum for results, some range in saturation only, some in hue between two or three colours, some in value only. collectively they look like a bunch of pride flags, although not specifically any particular ones. although hardness is blue-to-purple, which is close to the bi flag colours. and iron + cyanuric acid in combination are just about the community lesbian flag colours
January 21, 2026 at 10:14 PM
katef.bsky.social
The quoted regex rendered to a minimal DFA by libfsm's re(1) tool, and displayed using Graphviz. With the minimal DFA, we can see that the string "Media viewer" is present, each state has an outgoing edge to an accepting "sink" state. This regex matches every string except for that.
January 20, 2026 at 11:41 PM
katef.bsky.social
same, but i've never quite managed to make human styles that seem to work. or animals that are more realistic. or sometimes i just sort of give up and skip the eyes entirely. but also i cheat on not accurately drawing out a template first, so maybe that's where i should figure out what to do
Cut paper art, layers of coloured card. Our intrepid heroes, Moomin and Snorkmaiden, venture cautiously towards us by lamplight. Their eyes wide, surrounded in a pool of light. Behind them, their own shadows form the outlines of more primal creatures, large and looming, reaching down into the edges of their circle of light. We're unsure if the shadows are really just shadows. Moomintroll swimming down into the sea. The picture is made of cut paper; there are swirls and shapes in the darkness. A shaft of light illuminates our hero. Plants watch on, curious. A fox, cut from many layers of thin card. each is spaced a little way apart, and here they're caught at the side by intense sunlight, so each layer gives a glow in reflection onto the adjacent layer. the edges themselves are *just* too bright to really see, and the effect is as if our fox is not just on fire, but made of fire. nearby, the coarse texture of the card is plainly visible, picked out with fibres and grain in the glancing light.
January 13, 2026 at 9:08 PM
katef.bsky.social
this module was built up from a kit by my friend @weeble.bsky.social, which we did mostly as an excuse to get out of my freezing cold apartment. here she is doing a good job of soldering stuff together
close up mid way through soldering one of the boards for this module, held in a small working vice while a joint gets made. there's a whisp of flux vapour from the joint being soldered, and several more to do yet assembly of the front panel, here annette is screwing on a jack nut. the panel says MOM JEANS, which is the name of the module. there are four pots for modulation, their knobs haven't been installed yet. and one pot for pitch. and a whole bunch of jacks for CV in and audio out
January 10, 2026 at 11:37 PM
katef.bsky.social
new exciting things to modulate
January 10, 2026 at 10:42 PM
katef.bsky.social
i made a notation system for gravitrax marble runs, so i can write down multi-layer designs without needing to describe the process of building step by step
a hex grid printed on paper, over which i have cordoned off three areas in sharpie, two are labelled A and B, and stack on top of the third larger area. various tiles have numbers (indicating the stack of supporting height thingies for that tile), and a simple schematic indication of which piece goes on that tile. rails are indicated between tiles, and that's it. minimum information required for expressing the constructed track
January 5, 2026 at 6:11 PM
katef.bsky.social
with tighter timing :3
January 2, 2026 at 7:18 PM
katef.bsky.social
my mum got physics for christmas
January 1, 2026 at 11:02 PM
katef.bsky.social
"sorry we'll be late, i routed the entire pcb upside down and only realised when i got to the edge connector"
a dense, almost entirely routed pcb in kicad, with several ends of traces emerging from the routed area. we're zoomed in on an edge connector, curved ratsnest lines indicated what should connect to each of the connector's pins; these overlap and splay out to the ends of nearby traces in exactly the opposite order
December 19, 2025 at 10:51 PM
katef.bsky.social
patch notes
Eurorack modular stuff, is a mess of wires as usual. This is a relatively simple patch, I was reorganising modules and half of them aren't plugged in. What's in use here is just Noise Engineering Manis Iteritas, and an electric Piano (not visible) into Xaoc Sarajewo. Both into Zagzreb. Modulation mostly from WMD Modbox, plus some attenuated audio rate modulation into Manis.
December 11, 2025 at 12:01 AM
katef.bsky.social
No one's left. Everything's gone. Kharak is burning...
kicad 3D rendering of a wip pcb that I'm currently routing. it's a long thin card with connectors down one side, designed to slot adjacently to a backplane. i've positioned it in 3d vertically. It's a bit like a stick of ram, but with two edges chamfered, giving the shape of the ship from homeworld. there is a fleet of unplaced passive chip components deployed in several small groups. the general shape and connector positions also remind me of the ship somehow, they're giving engines. this is a simple multi-channel analogue mixer, the channels all come in on a larger connector, and there's digital addressing and control over VCA levels on a smaller connector
December 10, 2025 at 5:21 AM
katef.bsky.social
dead
life expectancy for men/women vs. household income percentile. both have a strong positive correlation, roughly linear with a rapid drop-off below 5% income percentile. at 35% income percentile, the life expectancy for men is about 80 years. I have indicated this with a hand-connected line in orange.
December 4, 2025 at 1:08 PM
katef.bsky.social
IF I FITS I SITS
sign: Welcome to Potters Bar. here is a railway platform, a couple of guys in safety vests look on, discussing the situation. the situation is that a train has arrived rotated 45 degrees about its direction of travel. it's sort of like when people do that stunt with driving a car on two wheels. the train looks perfectly pleased with itself for doing this. there is debris everywhere
November 30, 2025 at 11:42 AM
katef.bsky.social
cgp grey eat your heart out
a frame from the video; we're inside a british slam-door intercity train. a door is open; the wind howls. beside us, there is a stick figure rendering of a ... person with the body of the british rail double-arrow logo. they have the regular number of limbs, and they have two heads. they are looking towards the open door. the logo (not one of the heads) is saying "Balls". presumably in an accent from somewhere near lutterworth
November 30, 2025 at 11:29 AM
katef.bsky.social
ladies
an attempt at producing the lesbian community flag using the quoted palette selector tool. the tool shows it as columns, with various knobs and controls for the colour space, and spread of colours and different relationships within the space. it's pretty close to the flag! the orange isn't quite vivid enough. but it's very satisfying that i just moved some sliders around an there's the entire flag
November 30, 2025 at 12:22 AM
katef.bsky.social
WAKE UP
hahgahglahghughlahaha MAKEUP
hsduaasjhuhagaghaghaj SHAKEUP
whywuguhguhlduhahtable WANTEDTO
grugorbrurbrugoglogug WANEDTO
haufhufhalauhfuha WANTETO
100% popey boy pope leo X I V on the mic, singing to a packed room
November 23, 2025 at 2:06 PM
katef.bsky.social
i fed my pitch sequence into a saw mod instead of into the oscillator frequency
November 22, 2025 at 11:26 PM
katef.bsky.social
new tshirt, fuck yea
@sarahmackattack.bsky.social
yours truly wearing a BIOLOGY IS BIGGER THAN BINARIES tshirt. there is a bee, some stylised honeycomb, a flower, and a clownfish. all set in bold block text, solid pink and white on black. did you know clownfish change gender? awesome stuff
November 22, 2025 at 7:24 PM