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Category: Announcement (Page 1 of 12)

Announcement of a change, plan, or new product.

Masks After May 11th, 2023?

February 8, 2023 / / 0 Comments

At the beginning of the Covid pandemic I remember the utterly surreal experience of walking into a bank wearing a mask. It was surreal because no one reacted, I was not immediately confronted by an armed guard, and no one called the police.

Why did it feel surreal to me? Some states and cities in the United States have had laws prohibiting the wearing of face coverings in public. It’s illegal. Some of these laws have been on the books for 150 years. In the U.S.A. I’ve always just assumed that face coverings, masks, burqhas, etc. are illegal unless I learn otherwise. Wearing a mask in a bank is just asking for trouble.

In New York, it’s been illegal since 1845 for a gathering of two or more people in public to wear face coverings. What about the Ku Klux Klan? The KKK arranges for a court to temporarily lift the ban for their demonstrations and then re-instate the ban. Halloween masks are, apparently, ignored. Face coverings have been illegal since 1949 in Alabama. California had stringent anti-mask laws going way back. These laws were struck down by the court after the State of California was sued by Iranian-Americans in 1979. DC prohibits masks in public after 10 PM. There are many other examples.

What’s going to happen when the Covid-19 Emergency Declaration ends on May 11th? We’re still losing 500 people a day to Covid.

The Lato Font

October 7, 2022 / / 0 Comments

A few years ago I needed to print a manuscript of over 300 pages on my laser printer. The choice of which typeface, size, and weight have a big effect on toner consumption and legibility. Making the type smaller, lighter, or both saves toner (or ink) and paper, but one usually pays a price in poorer legibility.

This manuscript was for editing purposes and would be pored over for many hours so it had to be reasonably legible. The type had to be large enough to annotate with a pencil.

I wanted to have my cake and eat it too so I spent considerable time looking over a myriad of fonts. Since this wouldn’t be the last time this problem would arise, I felt the investment in time and effort was worth it. If a font really solved the problem, I was willing to pay for it. I didn’t limit my search to free fonts.

I searched several sites on the web offering thousands of free and pay-for fonts, concentrating on sans-serif fonts. I wasn’t looking for artistic beauty, I was looking for legibility. After finding nothing that stood out, I eventually tired of this and stopped. Then I tried different tack. An ordinary web search for “most legible font” led directly to what I wanted.

The Lato font family is fairly new. I had never heard of it. It was specifically designed for maximum legibility. The family is comprised of many variations, each carefully hand-tuned by the font’s creators, including a “light” variation and a “hairline” variation. Lato Hairline was exactly what I was looking for. It’s very light, composed of thin lines, but isn’t faint. It remains perfectly legible to my old eyes.

Since then, the whole family has become my standard san-serif / Helvetica style font that I use for everything instead of Liberation Sans, Arial, and Calibri that I used to use. You’re looking at it right now.

If you need a versatile, highly legible sans-serif font, you might give it a try. The Lato family is free to use for any purpose. You can find it at the link below or from Google, or Adobe.

https://www.1001freefonts.com/lato.font

Disclaimer: I have no relation to the above web site, Google, Adobe, or the creators of the Lato font.

New Mask Fabrics

May 27, 2020 / / 0 Comments

As you probably know, I’m making hygienic masks — both standard type and high-performance masks that exceed N95 masks in filtration efficiency, especially on very small particles down to 10 nanometers.

Obtaining high quality fabric has been challenging for the past 2-1/2 months. I have lots of other fabrics with nice patterns but I prefer not to make masks out of flimsy material. I might eventually use those for applique designs on top of robust fabric. But the good stuff has started to arrive, finally. Hurray!

Right now I’m focusing on producing masks with patriotic USA themes for upcoming Independence Day. However, a number of long-awaited top quality fabrics have arrived. Below are some photos. If you fancy any of those below, please let me know and I’ll make masks using those fabrics first.

I haven’t named them yet, so I’ll just number them for the time being. A mask or ruler is included in the photos for scale.

Number 1

Number 2

Number 3

Number 4

Number 5

Number 6

Number 7

Number 8

Number 9

Number 10

Number 11

Number 12

Number 13

High-Performance Masks

May 14, 2020 / / 2 Comments
Example high-performance mask
High-Performance Mask

High-performance masks are made to a specification that significantly exceeds the filtration efficiency of industry standard N95 masks. They deliver twice the filtration efficiency, and on particles down to 10 nanometers, which exceeds NIOSH N95 requirements by a factor of ten. All masks are equipped with a robust non-springy nose wire that can be shaped to seal to your face and nose.

If you want a reusable mask that looks nice and outperforms industry standard masks, you have found it here. They look the same as the standard masks but weigh slightly more because they contain three layers.

How do these masks work? In April of 2020, six researchers decided to collect samples of numerous fabrics used to make reusable masks and measure their filtration efficiency with the same equipment used to test industry standard masks like the N95. Since the topic here is viruses, the researchers enhanced the testing setup with a particle generator producing particles down to just 10 nanometers in size, making the test exceptionally demanding. (A Covid-19 virus ranges from 80 to 100 nanometers in size.)

Cotton, flannel, silk, and other materials were tested at 1, 2, and 4 layers, and then in various combinations. The researchers expected a cotton/silk combination to perform the best because of the electrostatic interaction between the two materials. Cotton/silk showed 92 percent efficiency. Howver, the researchers discovered that cotton plus 90/10 chiffon performed even better, reaching 97 to 98 percent efficiency.

This work appears in a peer reviewed scientific paper published by the American Chemical Society here:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.0c03252

High-performance masks are made with an outer layer of high thread count cotton, an inner layer of 90/10 chiffon, and a comfortable inner layer of cotton muslin like the standard masks.

NOTE: August 2, 2023 I stopped making masks because demand dropped off. If or when another epidemic appears I will resume producing them.

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