Despite having a dead iMac under my roof, I’m still addicted to reading books about Apple Computer, Inc.
Here’s a great addition – the story behind Graphing Calculator, a bit of software bundled with all Macs since the PowerPC was introduced. I’ve no interest in Graphing Calculator itself, I’ve never used it, but this story is great.
My friend Jon likes Playmobil.
I beg to differ.
We have large amounts of Playmobil in our house. Well, I say in our house – I should also say under our house.
The very detail that Jon applauds means that Playmobil figures have tiny parts – such as cuffs – which my children like to stuff down the cracks between the floorboards. (Yes, it serves me right for still having stripped floorboards).
I spent hours assembling the – admittedly beautiful – Playmobil Pirate Ship, and it took my children minutes to totally trash it, to deconstruct it, to post vital elements under the floor. It was the same with the small boats and fire fighters that my wife brought back from New York.
Occasionally I lever up a floorboard or two and recue a selection of daggers, spears and other tiny plastic pirate paraphanalia.
So Playmobil is banned this Christmas. Lego is in. Even the smallest 1×1 Lego brick won’t go down the largest floorboard gap.
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
