I got the paper for my DIY light tent in this afternoon, finally, and after dinner I started assembling the frame. The roll of paper I got is 48″ wide, plenty big for shooting large objects, and I built a cage out of inexpensive lumber that measures 48″ wide by 36″ high by 48″ deep. There’s a plywood platform for the objects to sit on, and the paper hangs on a roll that’s part of the framework, so when it gets dirty, I just cut the bottom off and unroll some more. The diffusers are white bedsheets.
It took some time to set up the lights satisfactorally, and I’ll probably upgrade to something brighter than 60-watt bulbs, but in about 15 minutes I had decent shots lined up with Canon’s Remote Capture application.
My first subjects are the members of my tube radio collection, a hobby of mine that dates back to my first lean years out of college. I’ll start with one of my favorites, a Philco that dates to 1942. It’s smaller and more compact than the rest (although not the smallest) and the lines are beautiful and sleek. I’ll post more of a history of this set later (it’s 12:30 and I’m tired) but here’s a sneak peek:
I shot about 50 photos this evening. With some practice, and better lighting, this is going to work out well.
Update: WHOA.
We’re having some issues with our collection of fonts this week, so I’ve done some research. Here’s a list of handy font reference material:
Font Doctor, for fixing conflicts and repairing bad fonts. So far, our experience has been good. If it’s doing what it says it’s doing, we have approximately one BILLION fonts with conflicting ID numbers. It’s a nice little app, and it’s busily humming away while I type this.
How Fonts Really Work In OS X and Font Fatigue: Pruning Excess Fonts in Mac OS X go into detail (for 10.2) on where fonts live in OS X and how to deal with them. Both were written several years ago, but I think the information is probably relevant for today as well.
Font Locations, via Apple. Additionally, Using and Managing Fonts In OS X are also 10.2 specific, but full of good information. (Who knew that fonts live in six different places on OS X? This is not normally a problem until you load 10,000+ fonts into Suitcase—then you’re going to have some headaches.)
Finally, a Apple Forums article which goes into exhaustive detail about pruning fonts and then how to reset your system (essentially, prune the system, trash your font manager’s preferences, and reload everything) so that Quark doesn’t shoot you the finger when you try to use Helvetica. This is good information.
I’m still giving Linotype’s Font ExplorerX a thumbs-up, even though we’ve had some conflicts between its auto-activation feature and inDesign, forcing a retreat to Suitcase to get some things to work. I’m thinking this is an overall font conflict problem and not a Font ExplorerX problem, but stay tuned.
Comments are now fixed. I forgot the </form> tag in the search field, so whenever someone tried to leave a comment, they got search results. Not that anybody left a comment to tell me or anything.
Last night I refocused some of my ADD into working with the images I scanned in New York. Because I scanned them at such a high resolution, I wanted to know if I need to reduce the image size or change the file format to work with the program I’ve got (iMovie 5.1). Doing a little reading, I found some advice online that scared me away from using iMovie to do the photo montage work altogether. Apparently when still images are exported to DVD from iMovie, the program throws out every other line of resolution so that the images show up onscreen without flicker. This obviously tosses half the image quality of the photo, which is less than optimal. I was also impressed but not excited about the photo manipulation tools in iMovie, so I followed some other advice and found two applications that look promising: Still Life and Photo to Movie.
Still Life is a nice little application, set up like a Quicktime window with a little timeline below. You can add “shots”, essentially keyframes for pans and zooms, and add in fades. It also allows for the layering of music tracks, although I haven’t fooled with this at all.
Photo To Movie is a step above Still Life; It opens up with a timeline view at the bottom and features adjustable panning and zooming, something iMovie and Still Life lack. It also has an adjustable background color, something I couldn’t find in Still Life—which makes using scanned photos much easier. Best of all, it took about 3 minutes to be up and running in this application. In a half-hour, I had four photos positioned, panned and scanned, titled (no small feat with multiple subjects in each picture) and ready to go. I’m most likely going to spend the $50 on the full featured version of this program after a DVD test later next week—I’m putting Photo To Movie up against iMovie in a head-to-head duel.
Jen took Friday afternoon to rearrange the living room to where four people can sit comfortably and chat with each other, which is a huge difference; it’s really refreshing to have some feng in our shui, at least where that room is concerned. It would be great to make major structural changes in there, but just about everything we want to do will cost major cash, which we don’t have on hand right now.
Saturday we hit the Home Despot and spent a little cash on supplies for the house. The yard here at the Lockardugan estate has been the bastard stepchild since autumn of last year; after the elm in the backyard was felled and all the rest of the trees dropped their leaves, I’ve ignored it completely. Meanwhile, the neighbors in back have a little senior citizen dude they hire in who shambles around with a rake and a broom, and over a few weeks’ time he got their yard cleaned up to where it made us look like trailer trash. (He mowed their lawn in January. They’re fucking with us deliberately, I know it.)
The first order of business was to rake the leaves, which were slowly oozing into (and killing off) our already anemic back lawn. In about fifteen minutes I put a mulch enclosure in, and got the majority of the leaves off the lawn. Next, Jen and I started pulling up some of the English ivy that’s overtaking the southwest corner of the lawn. English ivy is sort of how I imagine kudzu would be—pulling armfuls of it off the lawn only reveals more armfuls underneath. Apparently the Doctor was all kinds of hot for English ivy, because that shit is all up this be-yatch—there’s ivy hanging twenty feet off our trees. We cleared a section measuring 15’x30′ out (five bagfuls, total) and moved the existing logpile to the back corner. Next, we got the debris from the felled tree that was still spread across the lawn up, and stacked it in line with the rest of the wood, leaving the huge crosswise cuts that can’t be lifted for a date with a chainsaw. I’d imagine we have at least two cords stacked right now and another two cords in unmoveable wood to go. Then, I stopped over at the Cauzzis’ to help push the Galaxie back into the garage. That car is too damn fine (and rare on the east coast) to wind up looking like my Scout. Despite a low front tire, little battery power, and a soggy trunk, we were able to push, pull, wiggle, and coax it into the garage, where it should stay dry. When little Callie decided her Uncle Bill was just too scary to deal with, I packed up the Saturn and headed west for dinner: Potato-leek soup, which was mouth-wateringly good the first time Jen made it and better this time. I even sprung for a six-pack of Harp, which went down very well after the day’s activity.
I also picked up a pair of cheap Hi-8 cassettes for the Thrift Store Camera and within five minutes had tape rolling of our cats wandering aimlessly around the living room. Sears carries a no-name battery for $17 that I have to go back for this week that the engrish website claims will work on this camera. If I had a video card with RCA-out, I could rip it digitally, or use the camera as a webcam (hot geek webcam action!) but for now, I’ll keep it plugged into the wall.
Sunday we took a fistful of gift certificates to various home-decor stores in the mall and browsed through all kinds of expensive stuff we can’t afford. Who pays $350 for a set of bedsheets besides Liberace? I mean, really, what’s so different from a $40 set Martha Stewart hawks at the K-Mart? It ain’t the thread count. Maybe the Restoration Hardware kind is woven with golden silk or some other bourgeoisie thing that sounds good on the little cards they use to rationalize the 700% markup. “Handmade by a blind Nepalese monk with genuine free-range mountain yak assfur—as everybody knows, mountain yak is the smoothest, gentlest assfur known to Man, and worth more than its weight in gold.” In the evening we decided to make a dish Jen found called Scallops Charleston, which cost us all of about $10 and tasted wonderful, even though I didn’t broil it as well as I should have. Feeling pious after our day’s work in the yard, we busted into our remaining bottle of red wine—Mmmmm, red wine—and ate like grownups at our dining room table. Then, we enjoyed a glass of port on our couch in front of a blazing fire.
Meanwhile, the sore throat I woke up with on Saturday morphed into post-nasal drip and a rocking good head cold for Monday morning. Swell. I felt awful about infecting my consulting clients this morning (and considered rescheduling), but as it turned out, the wife of the pair has the same cold. They watched me do battle with Verizon and Quicken 2006 for a few hours, and fed me homemade chicken soup for lunch. Verizon won (their DSL modem is hosed) so I’ll return Thursday to fight the good fight. Also, Quicken 2006 for the Mac seems to be a big bag of shit, so I’d recommend staying with the 2005 version until Intuit gets they’ head out they’ ass.
My first eight illustrations are live over on the portfolio site. I have to complete “H” this week, but from the look of things that might not happen too soon. Let me know what you think of the series so far.
Yesterday I went on my second network consulting gig in a week (word must get around or something) in which I undid the evil wrought upon a design firm by a ‘professional’ consulting firm. I use the term professional in the loosest sense, because I don’t actually advertise my services, and the job the ‘professionals’ did was so abyssmal that I wonder how they stay in business. (Setting up two routers on the same network to provide DHCP addresses? Bad move. Assigning both routers the same IP address? Idiotic. I thought they taught the kids better at ITT tech.) Four hours later, I had the whole thing sorted out and left the studio running smoothly, for a fraction of the professional rate.
Not that I want to drive around in one of those stupid Volkswagens with a sticker on the side, but I could he happy doing Mac tech support as a side gig…
I spent the better part of six hours doing some computer consulting yesterday, for some folks who bought a new iMac and wanted to transfer all their stuff from the old machine. The process was lengthened by the fact that the old machine was running OS 9.2, and I had to remember where all the various crap used to live in the old OS (importing email from Outlook Express is a painful chore, like doing home dental surgery). The best part? I got to drag them from the horror of dial-up to the majesty of wireless broadband. When my client went to check his email on the old machine, and I heard the first shriek of the modem, I felt like I’d been transported back into 1998. The new iMacs are beautiful—the built-in camera on the bezel and the Front Row Media Center thingy is slick. (A remote for my iMac? Cool.)
His house is one block down from my old college apartment, so I walked up the street and tried to take some pictures of the place without looking like a pervert.
It’s changed considerably since I lived there (I called it “the Swamp”, and the backyard featured all kinds of broken TV’s, weird sculpture, and castoff art projects) but the front of the house still looks the same.
The current tenants have plastic over the leaded-glass front windows just as I did in 1992. The empty lot around the corner has been rehabilitated into “F Scott Fitzgerald Square”, with gaslamp-style lights, benches, and plantings. I’m going to dig through my archives and see if I can find a good picture of the place back in the day and compare it with yesterday’s photos.
I bought Jen a 4th-gen iPod for Christmas-the color version, not the video, to replace her 1st-gen model, which is broken. The battery is pretty much toast and the FireWire jack appears to be broken-a common ailment of this model. Now that she’s got a viable replacement, I’m looking into fixing the broken one.
Therefore, these links are for me than you (and I make no claims as to the quality of services provided; CAVEAT EMPTOR):
iPodresq, Ist gen firewire jack repair ($55), case opening tools ($5), new battery with opening tools ($59), iPodmods repair testing, open the case on your 1st gen iPod, Cnet’s video for opening the case, another step-by-step review.
At this point, I’m thinking that a new battery and fixed Firewire port are a no-brainer; I was toying with the idea of finding a 15-gig drive and upgrading that too, but they all appear to be $150 or more.
More info as I find it.
Fix Your Own LCD Backlight.
they’re grammar isn’t good, but the info is.