Fight the Chip

When I say “The Chip” I’m referring to an RFID chip (radio-frequency identification) that many people want implanted in hands of humans for security purposes. This tiny grain of rice sized implant would get surgically implanted into your hand or somewhere and it would contain data about your identification, social security number and such. Anybody with a reader can then point it at you and receive the information on the chip and put that information into a database. At first this might seem convenient. If you were employed at a company, the company could install readers in the building and check when you entered and exited the building, how long you were at your desk, how many times you went to the bathroom, etc. The benefits and drawbacks of a technology like this implemented into humans is pretty obvious, and most technological advancements have their plusses and minuses, but the basic problem I have with insane security measures like this is that once you give them the power, its almost impossible to get it back. And if you think that it’s not going to happen, it’s already happening. We’re in the middle of it now.

A lot of people are against “the chip” though, and that may not be the only way big brother tracks you. RFID chips are also in millions of products including clothing. You probably have many RFID chips in your house without knowing it. They also have a special ink that can be colorless, but read by RFID readers and tracked that way. If I was going to make a shirt about RFID tracking, I like the little bean chip for a graphic better than the others, at least to start with.

So I used my own hand again, and just stuck it on the flatbed scanner.

A scan of my hand.

Then after a simple desaturate, invert, and find edges, you can see we are well on our way…

The same and, after some Photoshop button pushery.

Then its just a matter of touch up. If I wanted to only print on black shirts I’d be all set, but I wanted to print on other dark colored shirts, then a little more is needed. If you copy the touched up black and white file into a channel, then create a new blank layer, load the new channel as a selection then fill with white, you’ll have the white outlines of the hand with a transparent background. Was that too fast?

1. Copy black and white layer to a new blank channel (make sure the white in the layer is what you want to keep). That’s as simple as select all, copy, paste.
2. Create a new blank layer.
3. Load the new channel as a selection. That’s usually under the “Select” menu at the top, then click “Load Selection” and select the channel you want. That will give you some ant trails around the white parts of the channel you just filled in.
4. Then fill the ant trails with white or whatever color you want.
5. Save as a png with alpha

The finished design.