Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong

Lilly and I have made it back to Austin TX, to visit her folks for a Holiday holiday, and enjoying the easy life right now! America is a special place. This isn’t my first visit, so despite only being here a couple of days, I am beginning to spot some of the terrifying things about the States that only an outsider would notice. I was pretty unimpressed to see pharmacies sell cigarettes here (sure they sell a load of other tat too, but selling cigarettes just seems counterproductive), but I also discovered something worse when out for a little walk to the nearby grocery store:

These two signs are either side of an intersection, which is what made me notice the issue at hand- as much as I tried to get them into the same shot, it didn’t work as there was a big old tree between them, but hopefully it conveys the desired point-

Petrol is CHEAPER thank milk here!

I like to think I’m not some green hippy eco-warrior, but I do consider myself reasonably environmentally aware, so this just seems really really wrong. I don’t get how a substance produced from finite resources, and which causes pollution and war, can be cheaper than a liquid produced from cows. And there are a lot of cows in Texas too!

To think Americans complain about the price of petrol too- for any readers out there who aren’t so good at maths, at current exchange rates, that works out to about 39 pence a litre. The last time I filled the vespa up it was about £1.15 a litre, so that’s about a third of what we pay in the UK.

Maybe Berocca Obama should do some european-style taxation on petrol- he could use the income to bail Arnie and the rest of the country out, and it might make the environment a bit happier too.

America makes me hate cars, it really does.

Tony Colman Waffle Machine

colbo

I had forgotten about this until this morning, when I woke up and found an email from Tony telling me it was alive- the first loosely-Trickartt-related iPhone application!

Hospital have been wanting an iPhone application for a long time- it got to the point where Tony was trying to convince me to make an app myself (I wish I could, but I am still wrestling with PHP as it is). He was trying to tell me to remake the Grooverider Soundboard then cut them in on the profits (I think he’s been reading too many App Store gravy train reports), so I suggested as a joke that we should make a Tony Colman soundboard from his podcast.

(Un?)fortunately, after a day or two, he decided he liked the idea- so that much he enlisted Phil of Code Army to make it happen. Riley went through the archive and got some clips together, then I did some graphics for the interface, which Phil then tied together and (I assume) sent into the black hole of iPhone app submission. And here it is!

colmin2

It’s pretty simple, and pretty crass, but Phil was kind enough to put my name in the credit on the app store (pictured above) without me even asking, which was nice of him! So there we are. I am now in iPhone Territory!

Christmas Cards

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Happy December, internet folk! After a few weeks of tinkering, begging for supplies, doing test prints, whittling and re-engineering, Lilly and I have finally made our first useable letterpressed product- some christmas cards to send to friends and family!

After the fold, you’ll find pictures of the process and all, so click to Continue reading “Christmas Cards”

Aperture fullscreen toolbar rethink

toolbar

I hope I’m not an idiot and can’t actually do this, but I really wish the fullscreen toolbar in aperture went the other direction. I mean, having it horizontally across the top makes sense if you have a 4:3 screen, but you can’t by any Apple computer that doesn’t have a 16:10 screen.

top
Aperture’s usual toolbar position. Look at all that wasted space!

left
…and my more efficient version. Nice snacks huh?

Note that it even fits on a 1280×800 screen (the smallest size Apple makes now), but this really causes me the most frustration on my dual screen setup!

If you’re using Aperture, then you probably have a digital camera, so you probably have photos in 3:2 or 4:3, so if you’re using aperture in fullscreen mode, you’ll almost always have wasted space on the left and right, so why not put the toolbar there instead of making the photo you’re trying to look at smaller?

So here is my ‘doesn’t this make a lot more sense?’ mockup of a vertical toolbar. Not that anybody is going to read about it or care. Who knows though, maybe someone will, and I’ll see this implemented in a future version! I can hope can’t I?

 
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