Chasing the Capybara

Posted on by Ricky

This is pretty much the highlight of my Holiday holiday this year – today Lilly and I got to meet an internet celebrity – Caplin Rous, the giant coconut capybara!

He is pretty much the coolest creature in the world. He is so gentle, so smart, and so charming! He makes the coolest little noise too, which you should be able to hear in the below video.

He also really likes blueberries! We were feeding him frozen ones. We didn’t get to feed him a popsicle, but it was probably a bit cold out today.

So if you didn’t know what a Capybara was, you do now! They are the world’s biggest rodents – just like giant guinea pigs! I like guinea pigs. Capybaras come from South America natively, but Caplin was born in Texas. Apparently there are a handful of people who keep them as pets, but none as well trained as Caplin – he could stand up, shake hands and twirl around when pried with the right treats. If you want to know more information about Caplin, or capybaras in general, you can find a lot more interesting and fun related stuff on Caplin’s website, GiantHamster.com.

Thanks to Melanie, Caplin’s owner, for being kind enough to let us come to meet him.

End-of-year SCED Roundup

Posted on by Ricky

Going away put posting this a little off-schedule, but it was a good thing really as it has straightened up my months. Here we are anyway, with a roundup of the last of the year’s Something Creative Every Day project. Some of the action includes letterpressing, diplodocuses, iPhone apps, and American excursions. Cool!

Considering this project was started on a whim, I think I’m doing pretty well 3.5 months in. For the statistics fans out there (like me), I have managed to post something creative for 91 of 112 days, giving me a success rate of 81%. Maybe my new year’s resolution should be to bring that up to 90%. Or maybe it should just be to get some more interesting paid work!

After the fold are all the old direct links, for posterity’s sake. Continue reading “End-of-year SCED Roundup” →

Petite Fireworks Excursion

Posted on 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 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.

Tony Colman Waffle Machine

Posted on by Ricky

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

Posted on by Ricky

570

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

Posted on 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.

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?

SCED – October/November 2009

Posted on by Ricky

Another month of creative junk has passed already! It’s been a bit dominated by the letterpress, but that’s no bad thing. Here’s the roundup:

And there you have it. Tune in next month, where I might try and understand the flickr API to make this process a lot easier!!

After the fold are all the old direct links, for posterity’s sake. Continue reading “SCED – October/November 2009” →

Virtual Adana

Posted on by Ricky

Me being me, someone who likes to make stopmotion things and having an occasional fancy to make random flash-based toys, I decided to make this this afternoon- a virtual version of Lilly’s letterpress!

It will run by itself, but you can mouse over it to make it work yourself too! just move your mouse up and down over it!

If you know your letterpresses, you might be a little confused by the ink disc ratchet. Yes- it’s something I made myself, out of an old scrap of metal, and a cent I have had knocking around on my desk for ages (it wasn’t heavy enough on its own and Abraham Lincoln was happy to help!). The original one was very broken, too short, and not well attached, so I made this replacement on the weekend. I didn’t have a bolt of the right size though, so it is currently being held on with a small screw and chunk of wood. I’m not really sure if it looks or works anything like it is meant to, but it seems to work!

If you are curious to what we’ve been printing so far, you’ll probably find it on my Flickr. This weekend, we made our first prints with the litho ink I scored last week. Cool!

A graphical tribute to Laika, or The Future Sound of Russia

Posted on by Ricky

laika

I went to Hospital’s offices at The Purple Gates today, and while I was there, I managed to pick up some finished copies of the new Future Sound of Russia album. I think it isn’t out for another two weeks yet, but Hospital themselves have started Pushing it around the internet, so I figured I could do the same too!

As you should be seeing above, I managed to slot a tiny drawing of a space dog into the artwork as a tribute to Laika and her contemporaries. Poor animals! It’s probably not too hard to find now you’ve seen the above image, but see if you can spot it if you have a copy of the album yourself.

Anyway, like all good Hospital record covers, the artwork is a nod to another obscure artist- under the usual direction of Chris Goss, this cover is based on a really handsome old poster by a Russian designer called Alexander Rodchenko. Hopefully my Sputnik additions and hand-drawn type add a bit of my own artistic merit to it though!

So if you’re into Drum & Bass (and let’s face it, you probably are if you’re sitting here reading this, as nobody seems to know me outside of this little world), go buy the album!

DSC_0280

 « Page 20
contains Newer Entries
You are currently reading
Page 21
Page 22 »
contains Older Entries