rubbish – Page 6 – Trickartt Notes

Speedbeard

Posted on Friday 26 February 2010Monday 19 November 2018 by Ricky

This is my creative activity for today, but I’m far too amused by it to only post it on my Flickr-based SCED project, so it’s going up here too! Besides, it looks a lot better via Vimeo than Flickr’s video service.

I took the Vespa out for the first time in the best part of three months this week, and came back feeling rather hairy. I’ve been convinced for almost as long as I’ve been driving this machine that my facial hair grows quicker when I ride the Vespa. It kinda makes sense in a fuzzy (pun not intended) logic kind of way- my face feels the cold, so my body probably tries to do something about it short of growing a scarf!

Trickartt DJ Bio Generator

Posted on Thursday 14 January 2010Thursday 14 January 2010 by Ricky

Somebody on one of the forums rediscovered this today, which also led me to rediscover it- I had completely forgotten I made it! Apparently it dates back to last June. It’s the Trickartt DJ Bio Generator- a piece of PHP junk designed to generate your very own low-budget self-gratifying D&B DJ biography.

If you’re not familiar with the world of Drum and Bass, or any other DJ-centric music, it might be easy to miss the point. Similarly, it might not be so funny if you had already put the effort into writing yourself one of these manually (I bet you’re kicking yourself now- you could’ve just done it by filling out a few simple boxes!), but here it is anyway.

DJ Bio Generator

Hooray for basic PHP!

Petite Fireworks Excursion

Posted on Friday 1 January 2010Monday 4 January 2010 by Ricky

I still haven’t decided if this Blog is purely professional or still borderline personal, so here is a non-work-related post. I might decide it’s rubbish and delete it in a few days, but for now, it shall live. Anyway.

Happy new year! Yesterday Lilly and I had a tiny fireworks excursion for the occasion, partially in the name of her brother, who is out in The Gambia, West Africa, in the Peace Corps. He is a fan of fireworks.

We managed to find this tiny fireworks stand (pictured above), run by vaguely redneck-ish (but friendly!) people. We figured we’d start small for our first fireworks excursion and only got a few little bits and bobs, and I took a few nice pictures – more than I would post on Flickr in one chunk, so I thought why not write a blog about it! Continue reading “Petite Fireworks Excursion” →

Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong

Posted on Friday 18 December 2009Saturday 2 January 2010 by Ricky

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.

Aperture fullscreen toolbar rethink

Posted on Tuesday 1 December 2009Monday 19 November 2018 by Ricky

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.

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

…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?

An artist called Ricky

Posted on Wednesday 30 September 2009Wednesday 21 October 2009 by Ricky

So Little Log’s album is on the streets in all formats now and the Hospital hype machine is in full effect. He’s doing interviews here, there and everywhere, including the now not so magazine-like Knowledge Magazine, in its new online format. It was quite nice to see my artwork get a little mention:

The cover alone makes the vinyl edition worth buying with Logistics confessing a love for pop art that has been passed down from his Dad. Hospital commissioned an artist called Ricky to paint a canvas for the cover, with Logistics settling on the album’s title in hope of something reminiscent of the old Batman, comic book-style onomatopoeic speech bubbles.

“It’s a bit more playful which I like. Everything’s so serious these days. I think I might ask for it one day when I’m old and retired. There are a couple of things, like for the first album they made a big LED kind of thing, which I’d still like to get. The two of them together would be quite a nice thing to have. Maybe I’ll have to buy them back!?”

Starts well, I’m glad the writer thinks the cover is worth owning alone, but then Hospital commissioned an artist called Ricky – could that be more vague!?

Life in numbers

Posted on Friday 14 August 2009Wednesday 21 October 2009 by Ricky

Hello internet world!

It came to my surprise that despite the depreciation of my blog, people did like to read it! It’s not so much that I’ve had requests to bring it back, but people occasionally comment on stuff they read on it, despite the content being years old. For that reason, I have taken the effort to migrate all my badly hand-coded stuff to this wonderful new WordPress blog, so here we are a year and a half later.

Life goes on without weblogs though, and since I last posted, I have:

Clocked up 115gb of work
for at least 21 different clients,
Had 41 physical vinyl singles, and
13 albums released with my artwork on the cover,
Created 12 fully functioning websites,
taken over 20,000 photos,
Upgraded both of my Macs,
Flown across the atlantic another two times,
Helped import Lilly to the UK,
and Started my own home

Amongst other things.

So greetings from my nice new weblog. I haven’t decided if I’ll use this seriously yet, but one thing that is for sure is if I do, it will be a lot easier to update than it used to be!

Wrangles

Posted on Monday 10 March 2008Monday 19 November 2018 by Ricky

Hello, internet world! As usual, it has been aeons since I wrote anything here. I’m quite sure I have a reasonable amount of stuff to write about to show for my time between writing here. so let’s see what we have!

Stopmotion

Mouse Stopmotion

I’ve been having rather a lot of fun with my Nikon, as you may have been noticing if you follow my Flickr, as heaven knows it gets updated a lot more than this. Although I don’t think I’m taking anything particularly exciting, I’m enjoying hiding behind a nice big peice of glass wherever I go. Anyway, that’s mild digression. Following a bit of inspiration from the Lilliship, I have found myself dabbling in stopmotion animation, which I’ve put some of the fruits of up on YouTube– They’re only a few seconds long but I’m rather fond of them, so check them out!

Black and Red

Syncopix – Icarus
rcp

Logistics – Reality Checkpoint

Like the first felt tip markers in the pack to run out on you as a child, the past three album covers I have made have all ended up mostly black with red detailing, by some freak coincidence. This includes the long-coming Icarus album cover. When Syncopix told me he was calling his album Icarus, I decided to take the title semi-literally for the art and ended up sculpting a pair of wings, casting them out of wax and melting them back down again for the cover imagery, photographing it all along the way.

John B – Mr. Freud

There are smatterings of new works throughout the portfolio for those who are looking for a new reason to shower me with money and to entertain you Trickartt-stalkers out there, in various sections. A couple worth talking about are the sleeve for John B’s new single, ‘Mr. Freud’, and the Sausage Bracelet. Mr. Freud appears to be a runaway popular sleeve, and despite my apprehensions when I made it, it turned out rather nicely. I was worried it was going to be a bit too much like a cheap blue monday, but it ended up holding itself up. When I received the finished copies, it made me feel like I was holding a giant floppy disc, which in my eyes qualifies it a success. The sausage bracelet was a valentine’s gift for Lilly (aren’t I sweet?), modelled on her sausage dog, hand-sculpted by me. It’s not perfect, but i don’t think anything I make by hand is.

As usual, there are other random bits forthcoming that I’m not really in a position to talk up, as well as a whole world of incertainty. I guess if you’re interested, you’ll find out whenever the time is appropriate. So that’ll do for now!

Hacked!

Posted on Sunday 13 January 2008Monday 19 November 2018 by Ricky

Wow, two months since I last wrote here. I’ll make an effort to write something proper soon, I’m sure.

anyway, just a quick apology to anyone that tried to get to my site to find a 403 error instead- I was hacked! we had to shut down my site until I repaired the code, which I have done now. Blessing in disguise really- now my URLs are a lot tidier!

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