isoglossia

Try squinting. More. Nothing?

Tucked inside issue #7 of JPG magazine is a very brief article about an on-line resource called the Rasterbator. Regardless of your feelings about onanism or lame puns about it, this art project engine is worth a look. The program (dealing in half-toning, not raster layers despite the pun) will take in a digital photo and spit out a printable .pdf file. The printed pages are then cobbled together to form a (potentially very large) blow-up of your original picture. To connect the dots, this means that you can enlarge any picture^[1] to a size as massive as you want through half-toning, the big-dot printing seen on billboards.

[1] The on-line engine will process photos up to 1 MB in size; the free downloadable application has no size limit.

Well, this I had to try.

In the same issue of JPG there’s an article on recycling CD jewel boxes for displaying photographs. Though the magazine didn’t connect these two dots, it seemed natural to merge the two projects. There was an area of wall in the front room that had felt rather empty and was asking for something a bit under a meter wide to fill it. Enter the Rasterbator.

Because the application’s strength is in producing massive images meant to be seen at a distance, by default it expects to print on A4 or 8.5 x 11 paper. However, you can set it to produce an output file with larger or smaller ‘puzzle pieces’. It also allows you to set maximum dot size, and your choice has a lot to do with how the image will look at different distances. 1 mm dots produce a grainy photo-like look (and consume all of your printer’s ink); 10 mm dots would be good for a wall-size Che Guevara, say. All of the settings are adjustable, though, and I wanted a pseudo-impressionistic look, so I upped contrast and saturation in the source image and set the Rasterbator to produce medium dots in small images.

In seconds^[2] the Finnish software converts your photo (in this case a detail cropped from an old, lo-res tourist shot taken on Easter Monday, 2005) into the .pdf file ready for download. Print it out, trim margins away, assemble, and BAM! Homemade posters of your photographs in sizes limited only by available wall space and printer ink.

[2] Seconds once you are ready; I spent the better part of a Saturday night dicking around with various pictures and settings. It is way too much fun.

Here’s the end result:

Technical chatter: this image is 71 x 62 cm (or 28 x 24 inches, five CD cases high by five wide). It’s based on about 1/4 of a snapshot that was just 500 pixels wide, and Rasterbated with a maximum dot size of 5 mm.

What I like about it is that, as with the brushstrokes in an oil painting, the picture looks different depending on how close you are to it, and that it manages to do so by looking both industrial and impressionistic. It invites both distant glances and close examination. You get to see how many small and simple elements combine to create the illusion of something complex. Here’s another detail, the winged lion of Saint Mark against Adriatic sky:

FYI: Venice is still sinking.

Related: Jane has good things to say about Qoop, who will take your photos and make posters that don’t look like a game of Battleship^®.

We don’t geek around with video much at all, but we do use a video iPod to watch stuff we wouldn’t have access to otherwise. We have reason to love this program that makes it so painless.

This free converter, called iSquint, is a super-efficient way to get non-iTunes video into an iPod. Our iPod is kept eternally docked and connected to the stereo and to the television, where it has brought us much joy via The [American] Office, the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and so on, which enter the iPod with a minimum of fuss. Any other content, though, requires a fair amount of futzing around, and with iSquint this major bottleneck has been removed. We wholeheartedly recommend this program for Mac.

The only help available for this piece of freeware comes from the album of the same name.

My basic inquiries into whether a similar free-standing program for Windows exists were inconclusive: initially I found many highly articulated expressions of woe that iSquint is not available for Windows, but some say the same results are achievable with just a bit more friggin’ around; still others claim Videora is just like iSquint, only, not quite. I haven’t tried it, but it is also free free free.

Regardless of your platform choice and level of geekiness, we also highly recommend the BBC comedy “The IT Crowd”:

Jane seems to enjoy it, too.

N.B.: This post may bore the living bejesus out of some readers. Nobody’s got a gun to your head. If you don’t like geek talk, here are some pugs.

Quarterly report: it’s now been three months since I made the switch back to using a Mac after six years in the Windows world. I’m trying hard to avoid sounding smug or condescending (as so many Mac users are accused of being), but my initial reaction was “what the hell took me so long?” That feeling has only increased in intensity as this change has contributed immensely to my quality of life (where ‘life’ = ‘time spent at the computer’, which value is larger than it probably should be). Each time I have to do something on a Windows machine I am struck ^[1] by the severe contrast. Before sitting down to write this I stopped by isoglossia’s statistical analysis division, and it appears that 25% of you know what I’m talking about.

Not that the other 75% of you can’t get anything out of this. I resisted switching back for years, thinking that I couldn’t afford to; that I wouldn’t be willing to re-learn a different operating system; and that I’d have to give up vital software or shell out hugely for Mac-compatible versions. I was wrong on all counts, and I can now see that reason #1 was by far the silliest — while the Mac laptop I ended up with was more expensive than a comparably-equipped PC^[2], the cost difference has already been more than offset by the absence of downtime, serial re-configuring and associated frustration. If you are considering buying a new computer, don’t let vague concerns like those I’ve listed above keep you from seriously considering a Macintosh, particularly the price. You can hardly afford not to consider it ^[3].

Here are some details that further enhance this new Mac experience for me. What follows are some applications that I can highly recommend for Mac users reading this. Where comparable products exist for Windows, I’ll indicate that.

Quicksilver should always run in the background — here it’s launching from Todos (see below) for show only

Quicksilver seems a natural place to start, though it’s very difficult to describe. It is a highly powerful and configurable (and complicated) launcher for anything anywhere in your computer. Much has been written about this strange and compelling ‘invoker’. I’ll just say that 1) with a modest investment of time it makes your keyboard feel like an extension of your brain and 2) I don’t understand how stuff like this can be so robust, so gorgeously built, and so free of charge. I am using just a tiny fraction of its abilities, but with it I can access any contact’s address, say, in seven keystrokes without moving my hands from the keyboard. It’s revolutionary. Great tutorials for getting started with Quicksilver are out there. If you’re on OS X and not using Quicksilver, you should certainly give it a look. Unfortunately, nothing like it exists for Windows.

Todos delivers launchable thumbnails of all your apps with a keystroke

Although Quicksilver would seem to make it nearly redundant, I also love Todos. The name is descriptive: it delivers all of your apps in eye-pleasing thumbnail form. This happens with a keystroke, definable by you, so the time it takes to locate and start a program is effectively nil in comparison with opening folders and scrolling around until you locate the program you need. Compared with Windows tree searching in “All Programs”, it is the difference between an eyeblink and an eye appointment, so it’s a pity that no comparable product for Windows is out there. It is simple, fast, efficient, and pretty to look at.

With the Mac Uploadr, I love to send pictures to Flickr. With the Windows version, not so much

Flickr’s Uploadr for OS X is far superior to their Windows tool. It makes tagging and adding descriptions much more efficient and is a joy to use. Our Windows version is cumbersome, unreliable, and bug-plagued, causing frequent crashes and much Malkoviching, particularly when pictures fall through cracks opened by its failure. The Windows version does continue to improve, but the differences remain significant.

The above programs are all free but would be worth paying for if they were not. Here are a few that are not free, but are well worth the price many times over. Believe me; the whole internet knows that I am cheap, and I’m also relentless when it comes to finding free software.

TypeIt4Me is a mega-clipboard that takes in all the macros you can throw at it. At one end of its spectrum, I’ve made it so that I will never mis-type the definite article as teh again, along with eliminating many other common finger-gaffes. At the other extreme, it’s got whole form letters pasted into it for über-efficient emailing. It is also great for inserting things you type regularly even when you’re not being a cold, soulless robot (letter closings, for example, or special characters) and particularly for HTML tags; the code I use for most photo borders here looks like this:

style=”border:solid 1px #000000; padding: 8px;”

I love that I will never have to type all that again. Now when I want a border, I tell the keyboard stylpad and it “auto-corrects” this to the tag. (If I want to go back to the original unpadded grey borders, I tell it cdcd.) I have similar macros defined for pretty much everything I might need to do code-wise. This probably means I will forget whatever scraps of HTML I once knew, but I’m willing to make that sacrifice in the name of laziness. Avoiding carpal tunnel syndrome and halving your keystrokes must be worth $27. For a proper review and a link to a similar rig for Windows, see Merlin Mann’s archives here.

NewsFire provides visual and (if you want) audio cues to alert you to new content

NewsFire is the feed reader I’m using. It feels like a hovercar to Bloglines’ serviceable Model-T and to the donkey cart that was bookmarking. It is feature-rich and has made my daily reading addiction an aesthetically gorgeous experience (their marketing does not really exaggerate all that much when they call it “the Angelina Jolie of applications”, although as far as I know it’s not out birthing any kids in Namibia). Like most things in the Mac world, it is highly tweakable. A bargain at $19. Windows and web-based readers abound.

I’ll close with the least glamorous app by far, but one which addresses a common Mac myth, that of the one-button mouse. I don’t know why people still believe that Mac = ‘no right-click’. That said, SteerMouse is a must-have for adjusting the motion of your cursor, speed of scrolling, clicking, and general mouse-feel. Lifelong Mac users may not benefit from it, but switchers almost certainly will. For them, well worth $20, but the free trial gives you ample time to decide whether you need it (you probably do).

Also on the ‘no right-click’ myth: even with the one-button trackpad it’s an option: System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse> Trackpad > Place two fingers on trackpad and click button for secondary click.

Problems with this big change-over? Almost none. But if you really must know:

• Safari? Really? Compared to Firefox? I don’t get it.
• I’m still learning The GIMP, which I bitched about previously. I could run Paint Shop Pro via Boot Camp, or wait for Intel-ready versions of it or Photoshop, but I have a feeling I’ll like The GIMP by the time such releases come out next year. The lag in Intel-compatibility has also led me to play with Adobe’s Lightroom beta, which is a nice side effect.
• The mac.com account — are they serious? Can anyone explain this to me?
• Bluetooth, why you gotta be that way? You gonna crash the entire OS like that over a stupid wireless headset ? Get over yourself.

These items really are the extent of my quibbles. For a dissenting view of switching over, listen to this guy, dubbed Jackass of the Week by Daring Fireball. Overall I am extremely pleased with the move. If you’re reading this on a Windows machine, consider looking over the fence. If you’re a Mac user, I am very pissed off that you didn’t proselytize my ass over to your cool world a long time ago and so I’m no longer speaking to you.

(If you hate talking about computers and still read all this way, here’s your reward! Unless you read all this way because someone actually did have a gun to your head. That doesn’t count.)

Merlin Mann at 43folders points out this fantastically addictive Official Seal Generator. Choose your border (wheat is nice, but who can resist laurels?), color scheme, emblem, motto, font, etc, and you’ve got a custom seal faster than Photoshop can even load. Command+Shift+F4, or the site will automatically save it to your computer.

Get yours before it goes completely viral.

Oops. Too late*.

UPDATE: I’ve just learned that this marginally useful device comes from the same people who brought you the much sillier Church Sign Generator, which should already be bookmarked in your “Art Acts/Anarchy” folder.

* When I first read Mr. Mann’s post, Google returned 22 results for the string <Official Seal Generator>. Twelve hours later, it’s increased tenfold. This will be interesting to watch…

…and it is! Three days later, 64,600 returns.