Seichy\'s Missing Bit

Leica CL

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Last year I got back into analog photography. As more and more of my devices seem to randomly turn on me, dumber devices have become surprisingly comforting. I've acquired a lot of analog cameras in the past year, as I try to find one that gets me. I wanna talk about these devices, and this Leica Cl is one of them.

The Leica CL is a 35mm compact rangefinder camera with interchangeable lenses in the Leica M-mount. It was developed in collaboration with Minolta who manufactured it. It first appeared in April 1973 and was released in the Japanese market in November 1973 as the Leitz Minolta CL. Both the Leica CL and Leitz Minolta CL were manufactured in a new Minolta factory in Osaka.

– Wikipedia

I am a sucker for old devices and ones with a good story behind them doubly so. The Leica CL is pretty close to being the perfect camera for me, it's a really compact and light camera, with terrific lens options and a great ecosystem around it. I particularly value its size, as it makes it a great everyday camera, I usually use a compact flash with it, it's a pretty great package and pretty comparable to my favorite digital camera, the Fuji X100v.

It can use most M-mount lenses and was originally sold with the Leitz Summicron-C 40mm f:2 and the Leitz Elmar-C 90mm f:4. Both are really compact lenses with great build quality. I haven't used the 90mm much, I really like the 40mm lens and well, I am a creature of habit.

I got quite lucky and got a full set, with both of it's original lenses in like-new condition for 900 euros. A fair price, I believe.

Here's a couple of my favorite pictures from the past couple of months, all taken with the Summicron-c 40mm F2:

Additional Documents

Restoring my Adana H.S. 2 6 x 4 Letterpress

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've been meaning to get a small Adana Letterpress forever. I saw one a couple of years ago, and I could never get over it. Because of that, I've had an eBay search setup for years, waiting for the day the perfect specimen showed up. It finally did.

The Adana Agency was founded in 1922 by Donald Aspinwall in Twickenham. I find it extremely fascinating how it always seemed to be directed towards the hobby printer. The machines are reliable and easy to maintain. They have no bearings, most moving parts are metal on metal with only oil to ease their movement. They are still fairly popular and there's a decent amount of information online on how to take care of them. In 1987 the company was purchased by Caslon who still provides some parts for these machines today.

I got myself a small 6×4 model. The High Speed 2, as it seemed to be called, is a nicely sized machine. It is perfect for postcards and other small prints, it's also a tiny, lightweight machine which is perfect for my tiny, lightweight apartment.

It was in good shape, had some corrosion, but all pieces seemed to move and most importantly, be there. I wanted to get it done over a weekend, so I had to plan accordingly.

I started work early on Saturday, disassembling the entire machine and sorting the pieces that were rusty and the ones that were only dirty. This took quite long, a lot of nuts were rusty enough that removing them was challenging. I used a lot of bike chain oil (I like using it in lieu of penetrating oil) and waited, eventually most of them gave in and could be unscrewed. Luckily, the nuts that couldn't be removed didn't really prevent the rest of the machine from being disassembled. By the end of the day, I had all my pieces ready for cleaning.

On Sunday, everything that was rusty went into a bucket with Evaporust. I was doing most of this in my living room, so Evaporust was the only real rust-removing solution I'd be able to use safely. Everything was left in the solution and I checked it every 30 minutes, removing the pieces as they became rust-free. I didn't want to leave anything longer than what was absolutely needed because I worried about things like springs become brittle.

By the end of the day I had cleaned everything and I left all pieces out to air dry. I couldn't finish the project on time, so I had to do a couple of final things on Monday before final assembly. All moving parts that had rust removed received a spray of WD-40. This should prevent them from rusting right away. They would get some bike chain oil once the machine was assembled as well. I built a small plywood platform to mount the machine on, once it was fully assembled.

Assembly was nice and quick, most pieces only fit in one way, and it's not hard to figure out¹. Once done I oiled all moving parts and filled in the small oil ports that cover the machine. I did this a couple of times until everything felt well oiled and no squeaks remained.

I proceeded to mount it on the board I had prepared, oil everything again and 3d printed a couple of holders for rollers and the ink disk. Finally, I was ready for a test run.

I don't have type. I also don't think I want to have type. I would love to have type, but I am generally speaking, scared of lead. If I managed to find non-lead alternative to type I'll use that. In the meantime, I am experimenting with 3D printing, my first attempt went well enough, and I think with a couple of small improvements it'll be good enough for the kind of things I want to print.

That's a lie. Oddly enough, I did put the roller arms backwards the first time, making it so everything looked like it worked but without a spinning ink disk. This took a bit to figure out, it wasn't until I checked everything again that I caught it. ↩

Bookbinding Adhesives

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I've been doing a lot more bookbinding lately. I've done a lot of it throughout the years and recently decided to dive a bit deeper.

As part of this dive I've tried looking a bit deeper into the adhesives I use. I use Bookplast 22 most of the time. It's sold on my local bookbinding supply store, dries quickly and flexible. It is based of Methylisothiazolinone, which I've never heard of before. I think PVA is probably more commonly used though.

I've ruined a couple of notebooks because the glue I use dries too quickly. The common solution I've seen referenced is to use paste, which I am not a fan of. I've also started experimenting with methylcellulose, which seems like a common paste replacement. It's easy to make at home and unlike paste doesn't go bad (I haven't had any go bad yet anyways). It is extremely weak though, and sadly it only seems to work really well between papers.

Finally, the better alternative seems to be a mixture between the glue and methylcellulose. A 60 / 40 mixture is what's usually recommended, it gives you the strength of glue with the longer cure time.

I did a quick test where I pasted paper, bookbinding cloth and cardstock to greyboard, bookbinding cloth and cardstock to see how each behaved. I ripped it off after about 2 hours of cure time.

Here are the results:

Conclusion

I think mix is the way to go when I need to be precise, it dries basically just as strongly as glue while still giving me some freedom to move the pieces around if I don't get them perfectly straight. For everything else, there's glue. I want to try my hand at restoration and I think methylcellulose will have a place in my toolkit then.

We moved to Spain

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

2024 has been wild. Towards the end of 2023 we decided to move to Spain. I've always loved Spain and it's the country I've travelled the most to. We made the decision randomly one night and so the scramble started.

The first step was finding a lawyer and gathering documents. We knew we didn't need the added stress of DIYing it. We scheduled a couple of calls for the following week and were sold on the second one. They guided us through the process and we gathered all of the documents over the following month. The highlight was probably having to get married to get a marriage act. This was towards the end of October and we were only getting started.

We couldn't leave without our cats. Having four of them only made it more tedious. To import them into the EU we needed a clean rabies test from a certified lab. The closest lab was in the US and getting the results would take a month. The result isn't even valid until 3 months after the blood is extracted so that push our timeline to January at the earliest. We still needed to start the visa application process and pack up our apartment so we needed to get a lot going.

Angela left for Spain on the second week of November to get the application started and to get a new apartment. In the meantime I stayed back and started packing the apartment and getting the cats ready for the move.

Angela got a positive reply on the last week of December as I was almost done packing. With the papers now in order I had to figure out how to get the cats to Spain. Only one cat is allowed per passenger on the cabin so I had to get 3 friends to come with me to deliver the cats.

We left the third week of January, everyone got to Spain safely.

Project Log: MidiFaders - ESP-32 MIDI-BLE Faders

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A while back I built a BLE MIDI controller. I was never too happy with it and had been meaning to take another stab at it.

My plan is pretty simple, I want a 4 or 5 faders in a small battery-powered box. I recently came across a TTGO display board. It brings most of what I need onboard, bluetooth, a screen, a couple of buttons, battery management and, best of all, a usb-c port.

I knew exactly what I wanted, so I went to my parts cabinet and grabbed some faders, and measured how many I could fit easily on that board.

Electrical Design

The electronics were pretty straightforward. I just needed all of my faders to be connected:

I rapidly routed a board, and proceeded to mill it.

Milling a PCB

I have a small desktop CNC I use for milling PCBs at home. I don't use it nearly as often as I'd like but I love having it available. It's much better than protoboard and way more fun.

I had a lot of issues milling this PCB though. It turns out most of the software I am used to using in Ubuntu flat out doesn't work on a Mac M1. So I had to find solutions to some of those issues.

The biggest problem was FlatCam. FlatCam is awesome and I love it but it seems barely maintained and running it is getting harder every day. I decided to try out alternatives. It turns out there really aren't any.

I ended up settling with Copper. This is a website provided by carbide3d that allows you to upload your layers and get a set of gcode files. You only get minimal options so I don't think I'd use it for anything but a one-sided PCB but it seemed acceptable.

With my set of gcode files I felt ready to mill my PCB. Thankfully bCNC still runs flawlessly on a Pi so that part of my workflow remained intact. Here's a quick rundown on how I usually do it (I'll probably write a separate post to go into it in more detail).

I start by prepping a PCB blank. I clean it will alcohol and a scotch pad and set it on the bed using double-sided tape.

Next, I probe the PCB and set my working space.

I the autolevel but don't click autolevel. If you've used bCNC before you know this breaks stuff.

After cleaning it up, we can do soldering. This is generally the easy part. I leave as much space as possible around my traces, as much as 1mm if there's space. Soldering comes down to a lot of flux and as much solder as it takes. I'll usually coat parts of the PCB with the excess solder, this is probably useless but I feel like it makes for a better connection on these homemade PCBs.

I'll do a quick fit check with all parts and then start soldering.

It ended up looking pretty good.

Firmware~

So the firmware for these things is usually the hard part. My idea was extremely simple. Each fader should send, via bluetooth midi, a cc on a channel. These should be modifiable from within the device. The UI would have to be something I came up with as I went. I used the excellent arduino_midi_library with a bluetooth transport and everything went surprisingly smoothly.

In a couple of days I had implemented all menus, battery management, bluetooth and settings. Of the features I wanted to add, I am only missing presets and a web app to load these in. Overall I am extremely happy with how performant and easy to use it is.

Case

The case took a couple of iterations to get right. I hadn't done any 3d printing in a while so I was a bit rusty.

After shifting around the design a bit I came up with something that was both easy to print and very functional.

The End ~

I am very happy with the final result. It came out really clean, easy to use and highly functional. Setting up new devices is fast and easy and since it's compliant it connects seamlessly with other MIDI-BLE devices, like the widi masters.

Making Softcases for Small Electronics and Cables

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Wraps are my favorite way of storing small electronics. Whenever I get a new one I'll probably make one really quickly to store it and it's accessories.

It's a fairly straightforward process. Start with a piece of cloth. I really like this one, where it's like felt on one side and like linen on the other. It makes it so the interior is really nice and soft.

I'll start by measuring the device I'll be wrapping. Once I've got the measurements I'll lay my cloth on the floor and draw a rough rectangle. It'll be a bit wider than needed and about four times the length of the device. This will let me wrap it comfortably a couple of times.

I'll then cut this rectangle off.

I'll then fold a third of this cloth on top of itself and sew it. I got a free sewing machine a while back (all it took was a couple of 3d printed replacement parts to get it working but that's a story for another day) which I use for this.

Once that's done I'll flip it inside-out and sew any open borders to give it a cleaner look.

I'll also sew a elastic on the open side so I can close it up.

I am not great a sewing.

I'll then place the device inside, wrap it up and figure out where to put a button so that it closes up cleanly.

Buttons are hard. I'll do as many passes as possible because I really suck at place them. Just doing a lot of passes will usually yield a nice looking result.

It's all about confidence. Once it's all done, you can insert the device in and wrap it, using the elastic as a latch.

DIY Midi Cable for the OP-Z and ZM-1

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I've been using an old Rockband Keytar as a midi controller for the longest time. I usually take advantage of the OP-Z's ability to be a MIDI host to use the keytar via a midi to usb adapter. This is fairly cumbersome as I have to use big cables and a USB-A to USB-C adapter.

Last year I got myself a ZM-1 module for the OP-Z which allows me to connect MIDI devices via a 3.5mm jack. These are fairly easy to put together and I had all the spare parts I needed hanging around already so I decided to make a couple.

All you need is a MIDI jack, and 3.5mm jack and some cable. I used a midi jack that already had it's cable attached. I took this from a previous midi project so that cut the soldering in half.

I couldn't find documentation stating weather this cable is meant to be type a or b or something else. So I tried wiring it as a type-A (a being the "standard" from what I know). This didn't work, it turns out is actually type-B. Here's the diagram:

Some soldering later and the cable is mostly ready:

I used some heatshrink as strain-relief. I was also lacking the piece of plastic that screws to the 3.5mm jack so I wrapped it in some extra heatshrink to give it some strength. Here's the final cable:

Here's what my keytar setup looks like now:

It works flawlessly and makes for a fun little weekend project.

Project Log: Some Sort of Guitar

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I was lucky enough to be gifted an old, broken guitar.

It was in pretty rough shape. The bridge had been bolted to the body so when it started lifting it broke through the top.

I felt that it wasn't really worth restoring it and that I'd rather try building something new on top of it. I was thinking that just adding a pickup would make it a bit more interesting.

I started by removing half of the top. Since I don't care too much about the quality, I was able to remove the lower half quite easily with a utility knife.

I used this lower half to create a template to create a new lower half.

I used this template to cut a thin sheet of plywood to replace that piece. It's a bit oversized but I will be sanding it down to size.

The new plywood was a bit thicker than the rest of the top so I had to plane the outer wall down so that both parts would be somewhat flush together.

January 22nd

Here's the not-so-fun part. I started prepping the guitar for painting. I am thinking I want to paint the entire thing in a solid color, a dark one should make the entire thing easier to match.

I started with the body. I needed to make sure all edges were as neat as possible. There's an upper bound to how good I think I can get it to look so I am trying to cover the basics at least.

I didn't have a chisel on hand so I had to use a utility knife. It made the process rather slow but I got it done.

After cleaning the edges, I sanded the body.

Next I had to do the neck and fittings. I started by removing the old fittings, I don't intend to buy new ones so I'll have to clean these.

Luckily disassembly is pretty straightforward.

Next I prepped the neck. Some light sanding...

and some light scrapping...

and it was ready to be painted.

We applied a primer, to hopefully even everything out a bit.

Now it only needs a second coat of primer and we'll apply it's final color.

January 24

In the meantime, I've gone ahead and cleaned up it's original hardware. I left it all submerged in a cup with 1 part of distilled white vinegar and 1 part water overnight.

The next day I had a go at it with a scotch pad and some steel wool under running water.

After letting it dry and having it reassembled, it all looked great.

Installing Gitea on Dokku

Sun, 07 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I've been meaning to backup my GitHub repos somewhere for a while. I recently discovered that Gitea can mirror them and will keep them updated. I am running Dokku on my dedicated server and pretty much run everything I can think of there. Gitea was a bit tricky to install so here are some notes.

You start by creating the app:

; dokku app:create gitea

Once that's done, we can initialize it from the docker image:

; dokku git:from-image gitea gitea/gitea:latest

This is a good time to set the correct domain name and mount the Gitea directories.

; dokku domains:add gitea git.example.org
; dokku storage:ensure-directory gitea
; dokku storage:mount gitea /var/lib/dokku/data/storage/gitea:/data

We can rebuild the app now:

; dokku ps:rebuild gitea

Dokku will get some ports wrong sometimes, we should check those:

; dokku proxy:report gitea
=====> gitea proxy information
       Proxy enabled:                 true
       Proxy port map:                http:22:22 http:3000:3000
       Proxy type:                    nginx

Those look somewhat wrong, lets fix them:

; dokku proxy:ports-remove gitea http:3000:3000 http:22:22
; dokku proxy:ports-add gitea http:80:3000

We can enable LetsEncrypt now:

; dokku letsencrypt:enable gitea

That's pretty much it! Seems a lot simpler once I've written it down. If you want to change the config file you can go ahead and edit it + restart the app:

; sudo vim /var/lib/dokku/data/storage/gitea/gitea/conf/app.ini
; dokku ps:restart gitea

Cheers!

The Pandemic

Fri, 05 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As the end¹ of the Pandemic approaches, I wanted to write a blog post to remind myself of these past 18 months and how we spent our time in exile. There isn't really a point to this blog post in general it's mostly a slice of my life and a lot of disconnected thoughts.

I originally started writing this post in August 8th, 2021. It took me a year to get around to finishing it but here it is. Better late than never I guess!

Before The Pandemic

My exile started a bit before the pandemic got to Honduras. Towards the end of the previous year (2019) I had a cancer scare. It turned out to be nothing but I developed a lot of anxiety around my health because of it. I had become overly weary of anything health related and hearing of this SARS-like disease that was showing up everywhere didn't help. By that time everyone was a bit tired of my shenanigans and when I asked everyone around me to prepare for it I (understandably) was not taken very seriously.

Honduras is poor and I knew it wouldn't take much for it's system to collapse. If even rich countries seem to be struggling it wouldn't really take much for the same to happen here. I told my mother that if she wanted to visit she'd have to do so before the first case was reported in Honduras. Once that happened I'd pretty much lock myself up and isolate for however long it took. She came to visit a couple of weeks before the first case, just in-case. It sounded like masks and hand sanitizer would be the first thing to fly off the shelves so I purchased some preemptively. I figured I was being overly dramatic but better safe than sorry. Having basic things I could hold to would make my anxiety easier to control I figured.

As the pandemic seemed to get closer I told everyone my plans of staying indoors until it was under control, that it might be a bit long but hopefully not more than a couple of months. The 8th of March, we had Arleth over for brunch, we talked about the upcoming pandemic over coffee.

On 10th of March, 2020 the first two cases of covid were reported in Honduras my lock down would begin two days later. The following day I dismissed the house staff, had them take the day off and go purchase groceries and supplies. I assured them that they would still receive their salaries and that they would have job once this was over.

The first month

Once the first cases were reported everything started moving too fast. By Sunday every supermarket was swamped with people and supplies started dwindling. I felt a bit validated knowing I had prepared myself with a couple months worth of food. That sense of validation didn't really last long.

For the first couple of weeks everything was under strict lockdown and looked like Honduras wouldn't spiral too bad. Wishful thinking.

The 20th we had a nice break with the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It came in at the best time, the boredom was settling in and everyone with a switch was playing it. It felt like a community event, everyone was alone, playing together. It carried us over a month or two.

By the end of march the food was a little less varied so it seemed like the right time to resupply. It looked like all supermarkets were booked for deliveries for a month or so in advanced so we had to get creative. For non-perishable we used a small supermarket that specialized in organic goods. It's variety wasn't great and it was really expensive but it allowed us to get some basics and some not-so-basics while the regular supermarkets got their act together.

Mid April everything got a lot better. We found a local catering company that being unable to cater, had started selling vegetables, dairy and eggs. Getting fresh vegetables for the first time after almost two months gave me back my will to live.

The following 4 months

As the pandemic raged on I realized I was not doing too great. I had become a bit of a hypochondriac and had developed some anxiety. I had been stuck in my apartment for a while now so it seemed justified. One day I decided I wanted to get into therapy. I found a nice Colombian psychologist that would treat me online. It worked out great and after a month or two I felt better and was told I could stop going.

Whenever I am bored I get started on new hobbies. I had a ton of paint around the apartment so I started painting. I would experiment quite a bit with acrylics, I didn't like how glossy they were but it grew on me. I eventually started drawing over them with markers and developed a bit of a "style". I would paint quite a bit over the next couple of months.

As the sense of normalcy grew and I had more time off I started playing Call of Duty with Carlos and Carla. It happened almost by accident but we started playing a couple of hours every day. It was great fun, they've been my best friends for the longest time and being able to spend time with them, even if only online, felt awesome.

Eventually I fell back to my oldest habit, overworking. I decided I wanted to be more productive and get more done. I had been toying with an idea to help local companies get their products online. Honduras is really far behind on this sort of thing and during the pandemic it really showed. I've had an Estonian e-residency for a while so I used that to incorporate a business and started working on the app. I would let it sit to focus on my day job soon after.

Up to this point we had been using a small refrigerator I bought back when I first moved in. It was fine at the beginning but since getting delivery was hard it made more sense to order more food and store it than try to order when needed. We got a new fridge which was a pretty large QOL upgrade at the time. Sounds weird but it really cheered us up.

At this point my anxiety had improved so I decided to let myself drink coffee again. It's always been a large part of my life so it felt like that'd help me go back "normal". I decided to make a hobby off it (it technically already was) and got myself a espresso machine. I named it Pino.

I eventually start working on my small side project, a site to simplify selling online, elmarket.

The rest of 2020

Very little happened the rest of the year:

We raised moths.

We would raise more moths the following year at around the same time of the year.

Customs eventually reopened so we bought some extra art supplies. I got a new camera (Which I called Prismo). I painted some more. My sister suggested we run a book club, we read one book, tiny fire everywhere, I hated it and decided to stop book clubbing.

I took a couple of weeks off in December to try to chill for a bit.

A New Year

On my first day back after the Christmas break we were told at Azlo that our CEO was leaving. The following day they announced we would be shutting down. Our parent company had been sold off and no one really wanted to keep operating Azlo.

Since I was still stuck home I immediately started interviewing and looking for a new gig. I found a really nice job at Blueonion Labs. They were doing really cool things that closely matched the reconciliation stuff I was doing at Azlo. I would start the week after my birthday. I decided to ignore it that year, it didn't seem fair to count it.

We got a roomba shortly after, it was surprisingly helpful, we were spending quite a bit of time cleaning and just having it run everyday made it way easier.

I started working at Blueonion Labs.

We found Pitt, the chunkiest boy. We originally offered him to Edward for adoption but he didn't want to adopt him. After a couple of days, even though we thought we had enough cats, we ended up falling in love with him.

We finally got our first vaccine shot in August. It was nice, it felt like maybe it was coming to an end.

A bit later my grandfather died from Covid. My uncle followed a couple of weeks later.

I left my job. I was feeling a bit burnt out and depressed.

Towards the end of September we were fully immunized and decided it was time to start moving on. We started planning a trip, it'd be the third time leaving the house in 18 months. The other two were for vaccinations.

Shortly before leaving we found Gomita, the newest member of our family. We had no intentions of adopting another cat at the point but she needed a ton of help and it didn't seem fair to pin her off on someone else. So we kept her. No regrets.

We left for Europe in October and spent a couple of weeks over there. I had to go to Estonia to open a bank account for the company I had founded the year before but we spent the rest of time relaxing and doing normally touristy stuff (mostly eating).

We are about 4 weeks away from being fully immunized which is as far as I know, the closest thing to an end there can be for the time being. ↩