May 2012
5 posts
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In Praise of Markdown
I hate word-processors. They are the spawn of the devil, for anyone of an artistic temperament. Ugly, bloated and stinking of corporate dullness, they sit there, sucking the very creativity out of you. Every time someone sends me a Word document, a bit more of my soul withers and dies. And it’s just as bad when I have to write up some kind of formal document myself. Even though I’ve eschewed...
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Getting Stuff Into and Out Of your iOS Devices
Being an Apple ‘fanboi’ of long standing [I got my first mac way back in ’93] I love my shiny iPhone and iPad. But one bugbear I have with these gadgets is the way that Apple makes it so difficult to get stuff on and off them, without either using only Apple apps, like the execrable iTunes or using clumsy workarounds such as emailing files back and forward as attachments.
So here are a few...
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Review: Starsky and Hutch
Seeing as it’s a proven scientific fact that all popular culture created after the mid 1990s is complete shite, I’ve resorted to downloading complete TV series of classic television from ‘the good old days’ off the internet, to give me something to gawp at while shovelling my dinner into my gob, of an evening.
At the moment, I’m working my way through all four seasons of the 1970s cop show,...
April 2012
4 posts
9 tags
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No.100 –One Hundred, Not Out!
My one hundredth scroodl. Go me!
scroodl:
Having donned his best driving bra and taken a firm grip on his joystick, Colonel Wanderbury is looking forward to an exciting evening’s racing, when he discovers to his horror, that the rampaging triffids have completely smashed his Scalextric!
[With apologies to B-movie fans, everywhere!]
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March 2012
7 posts
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Mini Review: The Last Station
One of the websites I frequent is currently holding a poll to find the “Worst Film Ever”. I added my tuppence worth to the debate and then realised that, with a bit of cynical recycling, I could rehash my post there as a review here . So here it is. Apropos of abso-bloody-lutely nothing, save the fact I’ve not actually written anything for a while, just been re-posting my...
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February 2012
5 posts
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All the World's a Stage
As self-appointed “person who stands at the back, pointing at stuff” and general dogsbody for the animation 2nd years stop-motion “Project Innocence” it fell to me to knock up lovingly hand-craft the stage, within which the ‘magic’ will take place.
A few weeks back me and Stefan did a bit of setting up cameras, fiddling with tripods, measuring distances etc. in...
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January 2012
8 posts
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Exciting News!
██ ████ all ██ ████ is ████ ██ ████ ██ well ██████ ██ ██████ love ██ ████ your ██ ████ ██ government ████ ██
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Review reviewed
I’ve just stumbled upon this, through the randomness that is retweeting and I love it! It’s an entertaining read and it combines a review of the film with personal anecdotes and hand-drawn artwork. what’s not to like? Possibly something to ponder for you lot out there with reviews to write for your PDPs.
“Think outside of the box”, and all thon!
War Horse –an...
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Have you made your 250 contributions to world... →
squid-vicious:
Tumblr Post limit:
Okay so it’s 250. I guess that’s like a lot of posts in one day. But as someone who used to spend like a whole day on Tumblr because I had nothing else to do and posted 300+ posts (not every day, on rare occasions), I have posted more than 250 posts in one day many times.
So…
I stumbled across this post, whilst trying to search the Tumblr API for a...
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Remembrance of posts past
I’ve been racking my brain for a week or two now, trying to remember the name, web address [anything!] of a site I came across a while back, whereby you sign up with them as an illustrator and [subject to being accepted] you get to illustrate eBooks for iPad, from a selection they sell on iTunes. I thought it might be of interest to Vanessa in particular, but also to some of the rest of...
December 2011
1 post
2 tags
Meet Scroodl
Howdy boys and girls.
At that depressing post-Christmas time of year, when you look at your haggard hungover face and turkey & mince pie-bloated carcass in the bathroom mirror and realise that you’ve spent the entire Christmas break stuffing your face and poisoning your liver and done “absolutely-no-work-at-all©” it’s nice to set yourself some aspirational New...
November 2011
6 posts
8 tags
calendar-iffic
How do you like my saucy new mini-calendars, showing the post-dates on my blog entries? Pretty nifty, eh? – and the cool thing is that it’s all done with good ol’ CSS. No image files were hurt in the making of this website.
If you fancy having a go, here’s what you need to do:
1: First, add the following code into your theme’s custom HTML. If you don’t know how to...
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less pain - more gain
Trying to edit your Tumblr theme’s HTML was annoying enough previously but, since the latest update to the interface, it’s even more of a pain in the arse than ever. Now you have to have two tabs open and make at least three clicks back and forth between the “Customise” section and their annoying HTML editing screen, every time you want to make the slightest change.
...
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stop-frame genius in action
I saw this video a month or two back and forgot to book mark it and had absolutely no luck since in finding it because:
A: I couldnae remember who it was about
B: I couldnae remember the name of the film.
Thanks to a casual comment by Rob [AKA “Big Tough Gully”] in one of his posts yesterday, I finally remembered that it was
A: Barry Purves
B: Tchaikovsky
Really clever on two...
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Charlie and the Pickelhaube of doom
After they got fed up with me hanging about looking dejected, because I wasnae allowed to play with plasticene too, my 2nd year animation students took pity on me and said they’d allow me to design one of the characters for our forthcoming ”Project Innocence” stop-frame animation.
Presumably because they’ve already seen the state of my drawing and modelling skills, I was...
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Cert. Ed. –ifiable
At the last session of my terminally tedious Cert. Ed. course [which I’m being forced to complete, to prove I’m qualified to do the job I’ve been doing for the past eleven years], I was actually given carte blanche to do some doodling in an official capacity –instead of using it as a means to attempt to preserve my sanity, while the lesson drags by, as is usually the case.
We...
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Project Innocence
Since I’m looking forward, in the next few weeks, to bollocking those of my students who’ve not bothered to post anything to their PDP blogs, since the current term began, I thought I’d better get my arse in gear myself, lest some barrack-room lawyer pipe up with a, “Please stop hitting me with that length of two-by-four dear tutor for, in our indolence, we were only...
August 2011
1 post
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clean slate
Well, I hope all you smart young NMD and Anim students have been listening to the repeated advice from your Uncle stío and Auntie Alex, to back up and keep copies of all your work. Because, last week, while we were on holiday some fuc.. twa.. ars.. clever person from IT decided to completely wipe every computer in room 222 –without even consulting with us first.
So, anything not backed up is...
July 2011
2 posts
6 tags
the great sketchbook project rip-off
I’m feeling pretty pissed off this morning.
After writing previously [on a couple of occasions] about The Sketchbook Project and my mixed feelings about it, postie has just delivered my sketchbook for this year’s outing –and i’ve got to say that $25 for the tiny, sorry looking sub-school exercise book quality “sketchbook”, which tumbled out of the envelope, is a...
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Digitisation across the nation
As I’ve mentioned previously, I participated in The Sketchbook Project last year and, in true student fashion, failed miserably to complete mine in the allotted time –although, in my defence, I did only hear about the project about a month or so before the deadline.
Anyway, at the time i entered the project, I stumped up the extra twenty greenbacks to have my sketchbook digitised. As the...
June 2011
2 posts
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a dilemma
Now, here’s a dilemma for me…
What do i do with the “following” list on the mancol.tumblr.com blog, now that all the students on there will be leaving us, to go off to pastures new?
Obviously i’ll need to clear the decks, for the new intake, or it’ll all get very messy, with a mixture of current and ex-students. But it’d be nice to still somehow be...
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mad hallucinatory experience
Logging into my Dashboard today, i notice that changes are afoot in tumblrland. I’m not sure if i like it. You tend to get stuck in your ways, once you hit your mid seventies and i feel a bit disorientated by all this crazy new-fangledness.
Hopefully i’ll wake up in a minute to find it’s all a dream and i’ve just dozed off listening to The Archers again.
May 2011
4 posts
5 tags
lordy! lordy!
Given that i’ve been comparing Richard’s developing graphical style to that of Rod Lord [of original “Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” graphics fame] and that Rich has posted a couple of Rod Lord animations himself, i thought i’d share with you this excerpt from the great man’s website, wherein Rod tells the tale of how they put together a demo ...
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google maps typography
This is pretty cool. Aussie artist Rhett Dashwood spent about six months, poring over Google Maps, to compile this landscape alphabet. Some ‘letters’ work better than others, and i reckon it would work better with more instantly recogniseable landmarks. But nonetheless, another one of those really simple ideas to file under “why didn’t i think of that?”
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mac vs. pc infographic
Mashable have posted this infographic. Based on data gathered by hunch.com from user profiles of visitors to their site, it confirms that all your preconceptions and stereotypes about mac users vs. PC users are true. Click here to see the full version.
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a pictorical paints a thousand words
This is a really nice idea. In essence:
Pictorical are a publishing house, who sell ebooks for iPad. You apply to register with them as an artist and –provided they like your illustration style– they sign you up and you choose from their list of available books and illustrate it. When it’s done, they sell it as an ebook and you [as the artist] get half the profits.
Applications are...
April 2011
10 posts
4 tags
fuckwitts' corner no.217
Dear Tumblr
What, in the name of Beelzebubb and all his legions, is the point of providing an HTML editing button for posts, if you strip out any custom code we write, anyway?
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if at first you dinnae succeed...
For about three days in a row over this [alleged!] holiday, i’ve been wrestling with my webserver, trying to configure it so i could use embedded Ruby in my webpages. Something i’ve been meaning to do, ever since i switched from using Apache to Nginx for my server, a while back.
The consensus of web-wisdom suggested that the easiest way to do this was the allegedly...
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busman's holiday
Even though i’m supposed to be on holiday for the next week, I cannae resist tinkering on the intarwebs. So today i’ve given my tumblr blog a bit of a make-over:
before:
after:
Widened the layout. there was s-o-o-o much wasted space in the old one. i think it was about 700px wide altogether. my new one is 1000px wide.
Changed styling of post title, footer bars and sidebar...
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stupid oul' bags
I found this advert on the Moleskine website.
If you ignore the fact that the bags themselves are [as they used to say round our way] ‘pure mingin’, it’s quite a nice wee piece of stop-frame animation. Not entirely original though. I can see shades of Evelien Lohbeck in there.
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apple knows where you've been!
Lots of scandal in the technology press this past week about the discovery by Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden [a couple of computer security researchers] that our beloved iPhones are keeping tabs on us wherever we go, storing this information in a hidden file called consolidated.db on the phone and also backing it up to your computer, whenever you sync your phone with iTunes.
Apparently it is...