Tuesday, 8th August, 2006

Behind The Typeface — Cooper Black

Sheer typographic joy — my favourite bit is Brush Script's latest album (via Tom )

Very quick thoughts on Leopard

Jon's quick reactions to Apple's newest OS — and I have to add a small "meh", along with a disdain for the 'Time Machine' interface

Crowdsourcing The Metaverse

Gwyneth Llewelyn on Open Source and APIs in Second Life

I find it hard sometimes to express exactly how I feel about Open Source — which I think comes from my twenty two years (holy shit!) of being a Macintosh user.

I'm very used to the idea of closed, proprietory software — locked into one paticular vendor. But I've been exceptionally llucky in that the vendor I've been locked into has (for the most part) been fantastically groovy, totally tasteful in its output, and (quite frankly) shed loads better than the rest of the PC shit out there

So I'm biased, I think, against the idea of using third-party software as opposed to 'official' stuff. My browser of choice is Safari, I use Mail, iPhoto, iCal — basically I plump for Apple's software, inwardly smiling with a sense of 'continuity' and 'officialness'.

So my instinctive reaction to the idea of different clients/addons for Second Life is "Um, no ta" — I kinda think "No, everyone should be working together to make One Solid Client™, not hundreds of offshoots and inconsistent interfaces".

But then again, I was on the loo a moment ago (number twos if you were curious) and it struck me that I don't always use Apple's software. I prefer Proteus to iChat — favouring the interface and loving being able to congregate all my IM accounts in one place. And as interesting an (perhaps) innovative as Safari's RSS integration is, I much prefer NetNewsWire's way of doing things.

So yeah — basically I'm inconsistent and confused in my thinking about APIs and third-party apps. So I'll just shut up

Front

photo

(As opposed to "Back")

I did two significant things yesterday. I'll come to the other in a bit, but the first thing I did was trawl through the 10,000 (or so) photos on my hard disk — mainly looking for shots of me to whack on Flickr, but also noticing lots of photographs of my house in various stages of development.

I might put a few of them up (because all the ones that are embedded within this blog are lost on Erin, and the prospect of going through, working out which is which, and renaming the originals is too daunting) just to chart the things that I've done in here over the years.

It's weird looking at them, I must say. Sometimes I look around my meagre little home and despair at the (a) mess, and (b) lack of w00tability™ of it. But then I compare it to how it used to be — how it looked when I first walked through the door some 11 years ago — and I come over all proud.

...

In a very similar vein, I look at photos of myself from a few years ago, and compare them to me now...

  

...and whilst I don't know if "proud" is the right word to use, I certainly feel smug about my hair

Desk Tidy

The other significant thing that I did yesterday, was to help a friend shift some furniture and build a shelving unit.

Seeing her restyling her workspace, my inbuilt tendency to want to reorganise space kicked in, and I was inbued with an over-riding urge to tidy my studio.

Which I did

Much better ... now for the rest of the house...

A List Apart: Gentle Reader, Stay Awhile; I Will Be Faithful

"[A]lthough I do hope my readers enjoy what I write, my primary goal isn't to appear larger-than-life." — Heh, speak for yourself

I know my reader could be doing any number of other things, but he is choosing to spend his time with me

Yeah, maybe this is where I'm going wrong It would appear that for some readers, I'm just a backdrop to their daily activities...

Adding Film Grain To Screengrabs

grain photoshop tutorial

To some extents, my little quest to make the snapshots I take in Second Life more 'authentic' goes against my assertion that CGI should be more than just a 'replication' of photography. But it's fun, and I like the results.

Like this one for example...

Seeing As I'm Lovely™, I thought I'd just quickly share the little technique I use to make semi-realistic film-grain — because it's more than just whacking a bunch of noise over the top of an image.

I tend to stick to using black and white images for this, because I'm not sure how well it would work with colour ones. I also find that high-contrast grabs work best, which is why I piss about with levels so much.

Starting off with a basic shot then:

The first thing I do scale it up so that it's about 400% of what it was. Then I create a blank layer above the background, fill it with 50% grey and add noise to it (Filters > Noise > Add Noise...)

The exact amount of noise is fairly arbitrary I guess. I tend to go around the 60% area mostly.

Raw noise is, IMHO, too explicit to look like grain, so I soften it up using the Median filter (Filters > Noise > Median...)

See how the grain is looking a bit more organic?

Then I set the composite mode of this 'grain layer' to "Overlay" with 50% opacity, and make a new layer above it in exactly the same way — but without the median filter — and set that to 25% opacity.

I do this just to 'sharpen' the grain a little. It might be totally superfluous, but I'm a creature of habit

Finally, I resize the image back down to its original dimensions, giving me something like this:

YMMV, of course — and the outcome may or may not be to your taste.

Discussions about why I happen to be running around in a furry AV will be reserved for later.

why, u got an alt?

Sunlight

photo

...is the hardest light of all

Um, are we? I guess we do all react to it ... I've got a fantastic t-shirt tan at the moment, from last weekend when I was driving a tranny-van around Harrogate.

I've even started to peel a little

The "hardest light" though, was a reference to the "Hard Light" composite mode in Photoshop — that image is eight photos of me taken in quick sucession ages ago, layered on top of each other.

...and a Police Box, and ... um, haven't we had this conversation?