Fuck Microsoft
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Disclaimer
Even though the artwork is titled “Fuck Microsoft”, I want to make it clear that I do not actually hate Microsoft or the people working on the Windows operating system. The artwork is merely a reflection on some of my frustration regarding the design decisions made for the automatic update system that Windows uses.Table of Contents
Motivation
I was in the middle of working on a gift for a friend of mine when the Windows operating system I was using had other plans. The gift was supposed to be an artwork made up of different illustrations, including a portrait of said person. I made the portrait using my Line Portrait Generator. The portrait consisted of exactly 93,095 straight lines. It would take my CNC-plotter just over 16 hours to draw all those lines.
I set up my plotter on a Saturday afternoon so it could draw the portrait onto a canvas while I slept. I expected to wake up to a finished portrait of my friend. But when I got out of bed the next morning and eagerly walked over to my plotter, I found a portrait consisting only of a neck and a chin. The plotter had stopped just at the bottom lip. The cooling fans were still spinning as it was eagerly waiting for further commands. My computer, which was connected to the plotter through a USB cable, was supposed to send those commands. I glazed over to it and its screen was just showing the Windows log-in screen.
It took me a second to put the pieces together, but then I knew what must have happened. Windows decided that the middle of the night, where nobody with a sane mind would use the computer 😅, would be a good time to restart and install an update. I checked the Windows Event Viewer and confirmed that my computer had installed an update in the night, it was supposed to continuously send commands to my plotter. When it restarted, it also shut down the software controlling the machine.
One of the first things that actually came to my mind was the “Fuck Microsoft!” meme from the second season of Space Force 😂. However, right after that thought, I had the idea to turn this failed portrait and my frustration into a special artwork. So I sat down at my computer, started Adobe Illustrator, and created the project file “Fuck Microsoft.ai”.
The Artwork
The artwork consists of the unfinished portrait which is extended by an illustration of the Windows log-in screen together with its nowadays iconic statement “Don’t turn off your PC. This will take a while.” and a special number for the percentage 😉.
Technical Details
How I Control my Plotter
Most of you who have experienced with consumer grade CNC-machines probably know that you do not need to connect a computer to a CNC-machine to run it. Most consumer machines, such as 3D-printers, work by inserting an SD-card into the machine that contains a G-code program. A G-code program is just a sequence of instructions that the machine executes. However, most industrial grade CNC-machines are usually connected to a computer on which a control software is running that sends the G-code commands. This gives the user more control over the machine.
My plotter is also of the latter type and has a control board that can be connected to a computer via a USB-Cable. For the control software, I am using the open-source software Candle. One of the downsides of this can be seen in this project. If the computer that is running the control software malfunctions, the CNC-machine will stop. When the machine and the control software unexpectably stops, it can be very hard and often impossible to restart the current job, since you do not know which command was the last command to be sent off to the machine.
Filling Shapes with a Plotter
An interesting challenge that came up with this project is the problem of filling shapes with colors while only using lines. A traditional plotter like the one I built can only move a pen around to draw lines. However, to recreate the iconic blue update screen with its white text, we need to fill the canvas with blue pigment and leave out spaces for the letters to appear white. My first idea was to write a small script that would generate many parallel lines with very little spacing between them to simulate filling in a shape. However, I found out that someone else already did the work and developed an open source Inkscape extension called KM-Laser. I ended up using that software to generate the blue filling. The image below shows a test file I generated with this extension and different line spacings.
