foomandoonian
10/12/2008
» listening to "Buck Rogers - Feeder"
Get a house in Devon, drink cider from a lemon…
Link posted at 13:02
08/12/2008
The birth of Tux
- Not an artist: Let's make a revolutionary operating system!
- Not a designer: What should our mascot be?
- Not an artist: How about a fat flightless bird sat on its arse
- Not a designer: Okay. Can you draw
- Not an artist: Not really, but I'll have a go
Conversation posted at 22:19
KolourPaint - feature suggestion
[Note: This post is mostly here to support a wishlist bug submitted at bugs.kde.org]Some years ago I used a generative art package (called Signwave Auto Illustrator) that used to let you import a bitmap image to use as a palette. The image would distort to fit in the palette area and you could easily select colours from there. A simple, brilliant idea and one that would fit in nicely with KolourPaint.
Some additional thoughts:
- An option to blur the palette and shift the hue/saturation/value of the whole thing would be handy.
- Maybe, as an option, a proper palette could be generated from the chosen image (like the Big Huge Labs palette generator).
Text posted at 20:52
@virginmedia 'Stole' my Twitter account!
About a year ago, after a particularly frustrating experience with Virgin Media, I created a Twitter profile, @virginmedia, and set up a TwitterFeed, drawing from various forums and keyword based news searches. The design of the profile copied their branding (better than it currently does!) and had the sarcastic bio: ‘We’re Virgin Media, you’re just a customer’.So not exactly great PR for them.
It amused me that most of the stories were complaints about service or technical difficulties, but the account could easily have tweeted positive stories. The feed seemed to be a pretty reasonable reflection of their service to me.
Anyway, today I have just noticed that the page has been ‘claimed’ - presumably by Virgin Media itself. The page has been wiped clean: zero followers, zero following, zero updates. Zero bad Google karma.
So my question is, how pissed off should I be? I feel like this is fair game… it’s not my brand to screw around with. If I fought it in court, I’d certainly be out of luck. It’s not like I’d have fought for it anyway. But still, I’m a bit pissed that Twitter just gave over the keys to the account like that!
Ah well, Virgin Media Sucks, but I have no other choice!
Text posted at 12:57
Custom Moleskine notebook for Asus Eee PC
A few snapshots of my notebook for my Asus Eee PC, all inked by myself with Faber-Castell PITT artist pens. I use it too keep notes of all the applications I like, solutions to problems, all the Firefox extensions I can’t live without and various other things. (I use Google Notebook a lot for this kind of thing, but that’s of limited usefulness if you can’t get your internet working!)You know, it’s almost sacrilegious to say this, but I never liked Tux! To me, he’s a really unappealing manifestation of a Penguin. Mine here is a first attempt at an alternative. He looks a bit too mean perhaps.
Text posted at 12:03
07/12/2008
Anyone want to help develop a pixel art app?
I’ve been trying out KolourPaint for a short while now. It’s basically MS Paint, but with some nicely implemented features. I’m using it to experiment with pixel art, a job for which KolourPaint is almost perfectly suited. (Ironically enough, the power of Gimp or Photoshop counts for very little here!)It strikes me that this would be the perfect starting point to make an absolutely killer pixel art app. Throw in some isometric brushes; more flexible colour palettes; some kind of clone tool; build in pixel fonts; special pixel fonts for type at angles; maybe a library so you can drop in details you made earlier; maybe layers… well, the brainstorm starts here!
The only thing stopping me is my utter lack of programming skills!
What do you think though, good idea? Stupid? Is there already an app for this?
Text posted at 20:44
Today's photos: Cosmeston Lake
Another set taken at Cosmeston Lake, in South Wales. It was clear and sunny when we arrived, but almost instantly became foggy.
Text posted at 17:58
Link posted at 02:21
» del.icio.us: Pencil Project
Pencil is a Firefox add-on to do GUI prototyping and simple sketching
Link posted at 01:21
06/12/2008
Today's fun cemetery pics
None of these came out as well as I had hoped. I thought the wonky headstones would look great as a black and white. Then I overcompensated and over-saturated the others! The last one is an attempt at a lomo look.
Text posted at 18:34
This Week in Tweets: 001
I might make this a regular feature. What follows is a selection of recent links I’ve shared on Twitter. I think a lot of these are worth one more pimp before they fade back into the interwebs:http://tr.im/foomonster - I rediscovered my ‘Monster by Mail’
http://tr.im/haver - Haver: It means to talk nonsense, chatter. “And if I haver, I’m going to be the one havering to you.” - The Proclaimers
http://tr.im/holy_wow - Found via Digg, this may not be art, but it is awesome!
http://tr.im/bye_pownce - A goodbye from Pownce.
http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/ - (Retweeted from @ewebber).
http://tr.im/underwearshowing - This flickr group, started by Zeldman, exposes websites that have failed to specify a background colour, instead relying on browser defaults.
http://tr.im/seattle_sketcher - Sketches of Seattle, on a Google map.
http://tweetake.com/ - Backup your Twitter messages, contacts, and all that good stuff.
http://tr.im/1002ha - A first look in pictures at the sexy new aluminium Asus Eee PC 1002HA.
http://twitpic.com/q37n - @ruskin147 (The BBC Tech correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones) visited Cardiff.
http://tr.im/mabinogion - The BBC Wales History guide to the Welsh myths.
http://tinyurl.com/6p2bey - (RT from @plasticbagUK) The beginnings of an ‘Emotional Mark-up Language’.
Text posted at 02:30
05/12/2008
» del.icio.us: CrunchBang Linux
An Ubuntu based distribution featuring the lightweight Openbox window manager and GTK+ applications. The distribution is developed from a minimal Ubuntu install and has been designed to offer a good…
Link posted at 23:18
Design: 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's pin badges
Each of these have been designed to illustrate a decade. I’m least happy with the 60’s one, but I’m pleased with 70’s and 80’s. Turns out I can’t install fonts at work, so I had to make do with what was already on my system.What do you think? Anyone have a better idea for 60’s or 90’s?
Text posted at 15:51
04/12/2008
» del.icio.us: Telnic
The .tel is a service that allows individuals and businesses alike to store and manage all their contact information and keywords directly in the DNS without the need to build, host or manage a…
Link posted at 10:11
03/12/2008
» listening to "Money For Nothing - Dire Straits"
I’m running low on props! (Prop me up?)
Link posted at 12:26
