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Fairly successful Christmas shopping today. Got a brand new PSOne for �19.95 in John Lewis, who were also selling my Samsung laser printer for �99.95, which is more than double what I paid for it. That made me feel gooood. So I can play Wip3out, Toy Story 2 and be unbearably smug all at the same time.

I ended up in the Lego store. I passed by rows of great looking kits, even eschewed diving into the pick and mix (look at all those clear bricks! I could have an entire tub just of transparent bricks!), and pitched up at the checkout. I felt embarassed.

“This is the dullest thing in the entire shop,” I said, handing over a large grey base board (�7).

“But essential!” beamed the assistant, who’d probably seen me eyeing the Lego Millennium Falcon, and the reeling with laughter at the price tag (�100).

I got thinking about the neat bit of classic Mac software I saw yesterday at my son’s primary school, that let you build Lego models on the computer. When I got home I thought I’d have a quick Google to try to find it – I didn’t, but I found something very similar, and free.

Henry’s teacher had been telling me she doesn’t like Mac OS X much, and with so much Classic software running on their iMacs, I can see why. But I forgot to tell her about the cool free stuff you can get for OS X, like Audacity, TuxPaint, and now Mac Brick CAD.

Mac Brick CAD is freeware that allows you to make virtual Lego models, view, save and share them in LDraw format. You’ll never run out of bricks again. The bricks are free!

If you don’t like the fairly crude rendering of Mac Brick CAD, you can do
shinier, classier rendering in POV-Ray for Mac, like this image here. Oh, and POV-Ray is free as well.

Find out more about LDraw and Mac Brick CAD at the LDraw web site – just make sure you download the LDraw package first, or you won’t have any bricks to play with at all. There’s a whole world of virtual open-source Lego out there that I knew nothing about, and oodles of software for lots of platforms – including classic Macs. My only beef so far is that it doesn’t seem to support transparent bricks, which I’ve always had a strange thing about.

Now, I wonder how long it would take me to knock up a Millennium Falcon…

Having finally heaved my wretched Epson Stylus Color 740 printer into the bin (very satisfying, that), I lived quite happilly printerless for a while… but finally needed one for bits and bobs.

I looked at inkjets, and found the ink is still expensive. I looked at networkable printers, with ethernet and even WiFi. Cool, but expensive. I’m on a budget.

I was tempted to get a cheap black and white laser printer, but was torn between the HP Laserjet 1010 that Comet had for �80, and a Samsung ML-1510 that Comet were doing for an amazing �50 – less than the toner cartridges cost!

The HP1010 has great reviews, but for every web site that said it worked with Mac OS X, I found one that said it didn’t. Even HP’s own web site contradicts itself on this.

In the end, price won out – and the fact that the Samsung’s box says “Works with Windows, Mac and Linux”, Samsung have Mac OS X drivers on their web site, and I couldn’t find anyone bitching about it on any Mac forums.

And it works a treat. Having garnered good reviews when it was �150, I can report it’s also well worth �50. It’s crap for photos, but the text is great – and anyway, who buys a B&W laser printer for photos anyway. The printer is pretty small (bigger than the HP1010, though) and not only works with OS 10.3 (Panther), but also works with OS 8.6, which means it works with my ancient RevA Bondi Blue iMac. (I downloaded the latest drivers from the US Samsung web site). The HP1010 would have needed an upgrade to OS 9 at least, and even then might not have worked. So I’m very happy.

It’s not the fastest printer in the world, but I’m happy. A web page from Safari spat out fast enough, but some fairly complex Adobe Illustrator artwork took much longer, but looked great when it appeared.

Ah, I love the smell of ozone in the evening… and I have another reason to get a Gocco now… oh, dear, could be quite an expensive cheap laser printer, after all.

This is just really a memo to myself – just worked this out, I need to scribble it down somewhere where I won’t lose it!

Problem: I’ve been given a PAL widescreen still from a video and I need to put it on a web page. It looks squashed for two reasons – because the pixels are not square and because it’s anamorphic 16:9

I need to get it looking good on a web page, and I have Photoshop Elements as my tool.

First, open the squashed image – this is 720×576 pixels.

Resize it so it’s 768×576 pixels – make sure ‘Constrain Proportions’ is NOT ticked, and ‘Resample Image’ IS ticked.

Your image now has square pixels, but it’s still squashed because it’s anamorphic.

So now resize it again, this time make the width 1024 pixels (this is 1.7777777 times 768, its width in square pixels).

Or given what I started with and ended with, I guess you can just multiply the original still frame’s width by 1.422222222222222222222222222222

There are few lengths I won’t go to in order to mess things up for myself. Nothing really spectacular, of course. Not heroin. Not gambling. Just little things that make my life less interesting (and possibly less lucrative) than it could be.

I blame Perfect Documentary Syndrome. PDS is something I first noticed in my schooldays and it still applies as much today as it did in the 1980s.

What is PDS? PDS is the strange feeling that over-takes you when you see listed in the TV guide a documentary on a subject you are REALLY interested in. A subject you know a great deal about. Perhaps a subject that you’re slightly obsessed with. You feel queasy. You feel weird. And you don’t watch the programme.

I haven’t really stopped to analyse the reasons why, but I guess it’s a pretty obvious mixture of envy and ennui. After all, it should be you making the programme, or at least you who’s one of the talking heads explaining why exactly this thing means so much.

PDS isn’t just about TV shows, though. It applies in many spheres of life. Mil Millington has a really nice piece in the Guardian magazine this weekend about his uneasiness when his girlfriend started getting into gadgets. I think there’s a bit of PDS going on here, as there is when I’m luke-warm about the idea of buying a new G5 iMac, when my wife’s quite keen on me spending �800 on a shiny new computer.

I can trace a couple of times when PDS has had an effect, possibly on the entire course of my life. I run a fan-site for an obscure album called Consequences by Peter Cook and Godley and Creme, and once I got an email not only from a big cheese at Polygram records, but it was sent from – of all people – Tony Wilson’s email address. I think I emailed him back, but I never phoned. Consequences hadn’t been re-issued on CD then, but who knows what would have happened had I made the call. But PDS struck…

Another, potentially more disastous, occasion happened… well, I can remember it clearly. Studio C22 at Bush House. I was working on a World Service programme called East Asia Today, and one of the RPAs (I think it stood for Recorded Programme Assistants) got wind of the fact that what I really wanted to do was not wibble faders up and down on a mixing desk, but write TV drama. She mentioned this to the presenter who had similar ambitions. He bounded into the studio and said ‘Hey, I hear you’re interested in writing TV drama, do you know of any good software? What have you written?’. ‘Nothing, really’ I mumbled. ‘Oh. Okay then’ he said and walked out.

That presenter was Mike Bullen who went on to write something called Cold Feet, which you may have heard of.

I have been wibbling faders ever since.