Kevin Warnock

TechShop Building, San Francisco, California, December 6, 2010

I’m writing this from the brand new branch of the do-it-yourself TechShop membership workshop. It opened less than two hours ago. There are people here working. Someone is already cutting what appear to be Christmas tree decorations on the laser cutter. There are people working on the powerful Hewlett Packard workstations. Only the top floor is open to members, and only part of the upstairs is really complete. But still, TechShop is open, and it’s really cool. The location is great – Howard Street at 5th Street. The building has high ceilings. It does look like it could be freezing here in the winter, as I don’t see any evidence of heat. That plagued NoiseBridge last winter. I suspect TechShop will install heaters since they sure appear to be well funded. All the equipment here is brand new. The Ikea couch I am sitting on right now is brand new. Yes, that’s a new floor standing Jet mill in the front left of the picture below on the first floor. I’ve always wanted one of those for my garage!

Top floor of TechShop, opening day, San Francisco, California, December 6, 2010

Top floor of TechShop, San Francisco, California, looking toward Howard Street, December 6, 2010

Unfinished first floor of TechShop, San Francisco, California, December 6, 2010

I am a photographer.

I started taking pictures seriously when I was in 7th grade. In college, I switched my attention to the view camera, an Omega 45F which used sheets of film four inches by five inches in size.

I like to photograph people, but people move around a lot. This makes it difficult to focus precisely, especially using a view camera, since there is a lag from when you focus to when you can take the picture, since the film has to be inserted a sheet at a time, which takes a few seconds. As a result, it’s safer to use a small lens aperture, which increases the depth of field. But a small aperture requires more light, which requires larger flash equipment which costs more money. A small aperture also makes more parts of the picture sharp, not just the main subject. But with photographs of people, it’s often an advantage for the background to be out of focus, to direct the eye of the viewer towards the person.

As a result, for the best effect, it’s ideal to not use a small aperture to assure the person is in focus. But it’s really difficult to focus accurately at a large aperture. The famed late photographer Richard Avedon for many years did the cover shots for Vogue Magazine. He used a view camera that held sheets of film eight by ten inches in size. These cameras have a very shallow depth of field, and precise focusing is called for. His focusing was so precise that the tip of the nose and the ears of the model would be out of focus. Not enough to be objectionable, but enough to enhance.

I now shoot with a modern digital SLR camera, the Canon 5D Mark II. This is the best camera I have ever used. It shoots stills and video. Most of the shots and videos on this blog were taken with this camera.

What I wish is that Canon would update the firmware of the 5D Mark II so that when I press the shutter, the camera takes 3 or 5 pictures in quick succession, adjusting the lens focus automatically between exposures, starting with what the camera’s best guess is for the best focus. Then I would have the camera take 1 or 2 shots on either side of the camera’s best guess. Ideally, the degree of focus shift should be adjustable by the photographer, depending on the situation. When taking portraits with a telephoto lens wide open, perhaps a 3% and 6% shift fore and aft of the camera’s best guess would make it more likely one of the 5 shots would be perfectly sharp. When this camera is focussed perfectly, you can make 20 x 30″ enlargements that just shine.

Since Canon has not offered this feature, to my knowledge, I manually bracket my shots by hand, in manual focus mode. This is tedious, and not really that repeatable, as while I try to rotate the focus knob perhaps a milimeter between shots, who knows how well I do this from picture to picture. But even with the uncertainty of bracketing focus by hand, the results are worth the trouble. I can now confidently fully blur the background but have a tack sharp subject. This has improved the quality of my photographs of people dramatically.

Modern DSLR lenses contain swift motors, and modern DSLR cameras contain swift shutter cocking mechanisms. Combined, I am confident a camera could shoot a 5 frame focus bracket set in under 1 second. Yes, the subject may move or blink during this flurry of exposures. But the rewards of getting really tack sharp pictures shot wide open are worth the occasional missed frame. I find I often shoot over 1,000 shots per session due to my manual focus bracketing, and even then I can’t fill up my 32 gigabyte memory card once.

The incentive for camera manufacturers is selling more cameras, since if every shot takes 5 shutter releases, cameras will wear out sooner and need to be replaced. I believe Olympus already offers focus bracketing on a consumer level camera . But, to my knowledge, no camera on the quality level of the Canon 5D Mark II from any manufacturer offers the feature I propose here. I hope this feature becomes available on all autofocus cameras.

There exist products to do focus bracketing for macro photography, including software that will combine many photographs into one super sharp photo that would not be possible to take in one exposure. Here are two links to such products: Stack Shot electronically controlled focus rail, Helicon Focus imaging combining software. These products don’t appear to address my wants for wide aperture people photographs, but while doing research for this blog post I discovered these technologies and I think they are very important for macro photographers, so I am linking to them here. Here is a picture of the control panel for the Stack Shot electronic focus rail system linked to above.

Stack Shot Controller for automatic macro focus bracketing

While reading Digg or Reddit this morning, I came across the most persuasive video I’ve yet seen on YouTube. This apparently is a television commercial urging viewers not to drink or use drugs and then drive. The production values are astonishingly great, and this video must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce… it’s that good.

I think this video should be shown in schools and where alcohol is served or sold. It brought tears to my eyes and I thought about it several times throughout the day. This is a difficult, even gruesome video to watch, but it’s just so well done it’s really a must see.

Anti-impaired driving TV commercial

I am writing this post from TechShop in Menlo Park, California. TechShop is a membership do it yourself shop. They have a wide array of tools so costly and large one could not own them and keep them at home, unless one had a really large house and was prepared to devote most of it to a workshop.

TechShop Menlo Park, California USA

I am really excited right now, as TechShop will soon open a branch location in San Francisco, just a block from the Moscone Center convention center. This location is easy to get to from my house as the Muni Metro stops at Montgomery Street, just a few blocks from the new TechShop.

I joined TechShop today as a full member of the as yet unopened San Francisco branch. One of the perks is that one can use the Menlo Park shop free of charge until the San Francisco branch opens, which could happen any week now. It’s supposed to open this month, but apparently the more realistic opening time is next month.

I got a thorough and exhaustive tour of the Menlo Park TechShop from a very enthusiastic employee named Mel. I told him about my desire to one day build extremely green homes from ocean shipping containers, and he got it immediately. He advised getting started as soon as possible as he said the media will love this idea, and there is an upcoming TV show to be shot at TechShop next year that would probably like to cover a project like this provided it’s beyond the idea phase.

I’ve been thinking about Green Homes, my code name for the project, particularly feverishly this month. Many of the intriguing ideas I’ve worked up in my head for my bus conversion apply to shipping container based green housing as well. I really want to help make the world a better place, and I’ve become a huge fan of the movement away from so-called McMansions towards more realistic sized homes.

I’ve struggled with how I would promote such a business and make sales. I have decided that among the best ways to spread the word would be to make a prototype home and take it on tour, the way Jay Shafer of Tumbleweed Houses does with his small conventionally constructed houses. Shipping containers are heavy, so I can’t tow one with my car. But, thankfully, I have a bus conversion that can tow a large trailer. I checked today and it appears there are hitch mounting points in place, as I saw connection points to let the vehicle be towed from the back. These anchor points are massive.

A shipping container home will be heavy, as a 20 foot container empty weighs nearly 5,000 pounds. By the time I add granite counters and tile floors the weight could be up around 10,000 pounds. Even for a bus conversion this is heavy, but there’s a cool product that I read about first just last evening. It’s called Tuff Tow. Tuff Tow is a pair of wheels you install into the trailer up front by the hitch. These wheels are freeway capable, and are on a swivel mount. These wheels can support up to 2,000 pounds. The idea is that the large majority of the tongue weight of the trailer is offloaded onto the Tuff Tow device, and only a few hundred pounds is placed on the actual vehicle hitch. This means my bus conversion would only have to deal with pulling the container, and not with potentially huge vertical axis forces, which would be especially high going over bumps and dips in the road at speed. The Tuff Tow costs $1,700 but it will make towing a heavy green home painless for the tow vehicle, and it will mean I can detach the home from the tow vehicle without jacks, I believe.

Tuff Tow device to reduce trailer tongue weight loads

I can envision myself driving around North America showing a self contained green home, giving speeches, participating in panel discussions, educating politicians, inspiring students and generally being an advocate for more efficient living. I think I would be a good television guest, and that I could direct my sales skills towards persuading people to change their aspirations for an ever larger home. While a bus conversion might seem to be a counter productive tow vehicle due its huge size, my conversion gets 11 miles per gallon as it’s a 4 cylinder, not an 6 or 8 cylinder like most bus conversions. A bus is long and heavy, which makes for safer towing of a heavy trailer. But the real benefit to using the conversion is that I can avoid the heavy footprint and cost of staying in a hotel while on tour, as I can stay up front in the conversion. If I tried to stay in hotels with a shipping container home hitched to a 15 mpg pickup truck, I don’t know where I would park the combo, as I doubt many hotels would want me to take up five parking places to rent one room. The bus conversion is also a great demonstration of small and efficient living, so visitors would be able to see two compact homes at once, which I think increases the public relations value of any tour.

While I don’t yet know if it’s possible, my current plan is to weld trailer axles directly to the shipping containers, fabricate  the A shaped hitch, install a Tuff Tow unit up front and tow the container without attaching it to a trailer, as the container would itself be a very durable self contained trailer. I’ve not seen such a trailer before, so this might well be one of the key early inventions of mine in my quest to become a green home entrepreneurial leader.

From what I’ve seen and picked up from the several hours I’ve now been at TechShop, I am hopeful that by my membership here that I will be able to make quick progress towards making my first green home, using many of the amazing tools and resources they have here.

As I wrote here some time back, one of the projects I would like to work on is to develop low cost environmentally responsible housing by recycling into dwellings the millions of empty ocean shipping containers clogging storage yards around the world. I’ve been using the name Green Homes in my head as I think about this project.

I decided to snap up http://GreenHom.es since it’s available. This .es domain uses the same trick I used with my bus conversion domain ILoveBus.es.

If you have an interest in green housing and like the idea of repurposing used ocean shipping containers, please get in touch with me, as I would like to talk to people about my ideas.

My wife loves Disneyland Resort. I think we’ve been there eight times in the last five years. By contrast, before I met her I went to Disneyland perhaps once every five years.

I posted Disneyland news earlier this year. What’s new since then is a new water display show Disneyland calls World of Color.

When I hear ‘World of Color’ I think of World of Good, the fair trade social impact company started by my friends Priya Haji, Siddharth Sanghvi and David Guendelman, now part of EBay and Charity USA. I was the first outside investor in World of Good, so it’s near to my heart.

What Disneyland has put together with World of Color is simply the most impressive water display I’ve ever seen. It is more impressive than the fountains in front of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.

I brought my Canon 5D Mark II to the show and shot video of the entire show. My camera got soaked by the water spray, and the lens got so wet at times the video is a bit degraded. But the overall result is good, and it’s probably one of the better videos out there since the Canon can shoot very wide angle since I used a 16-35mm zoom lens for this video. There are lots of Disney movie references in the show, most that I didn’t get since I’ve seen so few Disney movies.

Kevin's wife Monika models as a patient in the 2010 Stanford Neurosurgery Magazine

My wife Monika appears on page 25 in the current Stanford Neurosurgery Brochure for 2010. She plays a patient in the picture, but she works in the department, and they asked her to model for the photographer.

This brochure is a work of art, printed on paper so thick it’s almost card stock. The varnish on the pages is so shiny you can see yourself in the reflection. I don’t know what these cost to print, but it must be $10 or more per copy. It’s the nicest brochure I’ve ever seen for any business or practice. I think my wife looks beautiful.

An interesting piece of information is that one of the doctors pictured is Griff Harsh, husband of California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman. Monika and I got to meet Meg at her home during a Neurosurgery Department dinner. I didn’t know it was Meg when I shook her hand, but when Monika and I got in the car I said that woman who had shown us how to exit the large house looked a lot like Meg Whitman. It turns out it was Meg Whitman.

One of the great things Intel Capital does for its Portfolio Companies is hold Software Services Days. The idea is to get a set of companies in a big room with lots of Intel executives, and have the companies demo what they’re working on, both to each other and to various Intel people. In my role as Chair of gOffice.com, I set up a demo station to show our patented online typesetting system that under the covers is powered by TeX with the ConTeXt macro package. You can see the gOffice (Silveroffice is written on the table sign, as gOffice is the brand while Silveroffice, Inc. is the company name) iMac in the center of the video at 11 seconds into it.

This event was held at Intel Corporation headquarters in Santa Clara, California in the Robert Noyce Building. Arvind Sodhani, President of Intel Capital, spoke, as did Paul Otellini, President and CEO of Intel Corporation. I’m honored that gOffice was recognized by Intel Capital and included in its portfolio of companies. Intel Capital puts on first rate events for its companies, in particular its annual CEO Summit that I’ve had the privilege of attending the last two years.

I learned a new word today: Aquaponics

Aquaponics is a way to grow vegetables with very little water in very little space in a very short amount of time.

The key element that makes this possible is that the vegetables are grown in harmony with a tank of edible fish. The fish tank water is used to flood the vegetable growing containers multiple times per day. The growing containers then drain slowly back into the fish tank. The plants take up the rich nutrients in the fish tank water, and they grow really well and really quickly as a result. The process also cleanses and aerates the water, so the fish are happy they have clean water to live in.

No outside inputs are needed besides water to top off the system for the water lost to evaporation, and fish food to feed the fish. The fish tank density is high, at about a pound of fish to each gallon of water. The fish grow quickly as well in this system.

I found a website dedicated to home aquaponics installations at BackyardAquaponics. There is also a magazine called Backyard Aquaponics Magazine. Their first issue is free as a PDF file here.

I never knew that you could farm your own fish at home, and in large enough quantities that you would be eating fish pretty often with a medium sized system.

I’ve now added this to my long list of projects I’d like to pursue.

Kevin's BMW 525i in front of Golden Gate Bridge

My 2001 BMW 525i is up for sale on Craigslist. Here are some pictures I took of it yesterday by the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California. I paid my mechanic to do a pre-sale inspection, and it needs brake pads, a $5 seal and a new lens for the driver’s side front parking light. The car has 89,890 miles on it and is in very nice shape. It runs very well, and cosmetically I would rate it very good. The tires are Michelin, and appear to have 80% of their tread life remaining. The full size spare has never been used as far as I can tell. The car is in my garage at my home, and is available for viewing. I have the service records since I bought the car, and I always take it in to be serviced at a specialist shop that works only on German cars and comes well regarded on Yelp.com.

This is the best car I have ever owned, and I will be sorry to see it go. My wife wants a new car.

With regard to price, I am asking $8,995, to reflect the outstanding condition of this car.

Kevin's BMW 525i in San Francisco Presidio

Interior of Kevin's BMW 525i

Interior of Kevin's BMW from passenger door

Interior of Kevin's BMW 525i from rear driver's side door

Engine compartment of Kevin's BMW 525i

Trunk of Kevin's BMW 525i

Spare tire for BMW 525i

VIN plate for Kevin's BMW 525i

Odometer for Kevin's BMW 525i

Exterior rear view mirror for BMW 525i

Interior door latch for BMW 525i

Sunroof for BMW 525i

Brake and gas pedals for BMW 525i

BMW 525i audio system

BMW 525i close-up with Golden Gate Bridge in the distance

Kevin Warnock's gOffice license plate