Sero sed Serio

It’s true. About halfway through the movie 30 Days of Night, there’s a scene in which a young girl vampire assaults the heroes, who realise she’s not from their town, and must have arrived with the vampires. The girl has tattoos, and isn’t yet in her teens, implying that she received those tattoos at the hands of her vampire bretheren. Bizarrely, one of those tattoos is the clawed symbol used by pioneering German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten.

Ergo: Vampires love Einstürzende Neubauten.

I’m a lazy, lazy uploadr.

See the photos on the right or my Flickr page…

Yep, I’ve been further tweaking at my lovely cheesy little T-Shirt Shop…

New offerings include a few thangs I designed aaaages ago (15 years in one instance) and a few new ones….

The MegaCroissant is one I’ve had brewing in the back of my mind since I first got hold of a Megadrive/Genesis joypad.
Sh*t Flakes is a doodle I did a full 15 years ago, in Smartsketch, Flash’s precursor, likewise Magic Gav (With authentic torn Cobain shirt). The Zomby Fiction doodle is a random oldie I dug out of one of my old hard drives. I like it because the guy looks so terrified.

And with these, some newbies, freshly excreted from a cunning combo of my mind and photoshop:
Rawk is good and simple. You gots to tell people you rawk. Just like people should be reminded that it’s not about what’s in your pants. Take it as a Warning.

Go on, buy one. It’s less for the £1 of markup I get on the base price, it’s more about knowing my tees are out there, being worn!

Astute datewatchers might well have noticed I’ve not updated my blog, flickr, or, well, much online for a while. I’ve been a very busy monkey with my everchanging job at York College, which has kept me thoroughly distracted for some time. But one can’t just run a blog when one’s doing nothing interesting, nor grind one to a halt because one’s all busy on blogworthy projects.

Anyway, if you’re one of college’s denizens, I’m the one in the dinosaur/photoshop/other geek T-shirt wandering round sticking his head (figuratively) into college’s Apple computers. And seemingly scaring girl students when I walk round blind corners.

*configures iPod touch for blogging*

Well, until they see fit to give me copy&paste, Email, Notes, and a manually cacheable version of Maps, Apple are just going to have to put up with me jailbreaking my 1.1.2 iPod Touch quite a bit.
It’s all looking quite inevitable that the touch will gain many of the iPhone’s apps - otherwide, once the SDK is out, the iTouch will be running 3rd party apps for all those functions, and it’ll look a bit eggy on the face of Apple.

Anyway, if you’re in a similar boat, maybe you’d like my replacement icons for the MobileMusicPlayer app (that’s Music or Ipod to most of you…) You should be able to SSH it into mobilemusicplayer.app…. but back up your old icon.

There’s or to dig…

I don’t have iPhone jealousy, gawddammit, until a few versions on, and if I can entrust my iPod, phone and web slab to one nonswitchable battery, though.

Indeed, now Liz Fletcher actually has a site - and here it is.

http://lizfletcherart.blogspot.com/

I’ll be slowly adding shots of her works, so keep looking back. Maybe we’ll have postcards for sale.

Yes, our dear old friend Liz is about to get the posthumous web gallery that we kept almost making together while she was alive.

I’ll be setting up a flickr gallery and blog very soon for her, and making a little web shop where anyone can buy prints; the profits from these prints will eventually be used to make her some form of nice memorial, and to make sure her works stay online to see for all forever.

I have a really rather large swathe of her works and sketches to cover, but, Fletchers & Swinbanks: I need pictures of more of her works!

I know she’d not want so much fuss over her, but those of you that know her know she’s worth it.

Those of you that don’t know her, or her works - watch this space - I’ll blog it the second I set it up.

Yup, yup. I’ve also redesigned my T-shirt shop storefront, so it looks a bit less… generic, now.

The new tees speak thusly: One is a play on your computer’s ctrl key, and freakishness. Another makes a faintly filthy play on the phrase “four on the floor“, there’s another computer key to strike fear into the heart of hitchikers all over the galaxy, and finally, for da laydeees, there’s a t-shirt with a corset on the front and back - for those moments when a real corset’s a bit much.

Go! Look! Buy?

Well, if it’s intel core, I may as well mix things up a bit, right?

Unfortunately, my black Macbook doesn’t boot from USB, but most linux distros that can live on a keydrive can be booted by CD. It’s these kind of distros I want to get into - I really like the idea that lots of PCs with dead HDs sitting around are perfectly serviceable web stations/media players, and can be pressed into use with just a boot cd and/or a keydrive.

As technology pushes further, more and more of the stuff we do on computers is online, and not always stored on the actual computer the user sits at. Between other people’s computers, one computer of their own with many a HD, and some kind of portable web device, (omfg, the new iPod) a cunning web ninja can pretty much do their digital living.

Anyway, Here’s the roundup.

DSL (damnsmalllinux) Booted fast-ish from CD, but during the bios process it clearly has trouble with the USB bus. Once booted, you can’t do anything - no mouse, no keyboard. All you’ve got is the power button. I’d be interested to hear if anyone can get a desktop intel mac to boot and run properly.

Feather Linux - likewise, I couldn’t get any inputs working with this distro.

Puppy looks like a good option because of its simplicity, but it clearly has trouble with the processor, as it runs at about 4 frames per second. Otherwise, it seemed to work. Ew to its choice of the full seamonkey suite as a web browser, though. Likewise, comments from other mac types please!

Ubuntu - ah, Ubuntu. The most maclike of linux distros. The one that requires a stormingly large keydrive if you’re going to play the keydrive OS game. Nonetheless, it boots and peforms just fine on my macbook. The touchpad’s second finger operations don’t work, but a ctrl-click bacomes a second click, as all hadrcore single-button mousers should know. A comfortably predictable result, since Ubuntu also supports powerpc processors.

So, for now at least, Ubuntu seems to be the Distro of choice for my learning Linux. More bloggynews later once I can be bothered to torrent some of the larger distros.

Yes, it does.

Since I’ve been a fairly diehard Apple Mac Ninja for about 13 years now, I thought maybe it was finally time to make a blog within which to sit down and geek out.

I’ll be casting concepts and opinions around, sharing tips and links thereto, and every now and again making with a tutorial or two for aspects for all-round digital living.

‘Twill be a miscellany. But it might be useful.

Yay, more new T-shirt designs!

There’s one with four comiclike panels illustrating a horrible night of insomnia and redeye.

The others are more illustrator-y… There’s the old Second Life favourite, “It’s not my fault your day is my night” …because an englishman online often finds this to be the case.

Finally, there’s a wise proverb of old, which old friends of mine might remember… Grow a Beard!

(Yunno, we posted it up all over the 6th form in 4-foot letters after a mad day with a laser printer? What do you mean you don’t remember?)

Ah, yes. After picking around in Cafepress and spreadshirt, I found Printfection and am now finally happy enough with the way they work to commit to some of my t-shirt ideas.

Since they can do shipping to the UK in just one week, not two, they seem like a fine bet - and they have a 30-day money back guarantee, which ought to assure people who fear buying print on demand products.

So far, there’s only a few due to rampant perfectionism, but there shall be mooooore.

So! go see!

New Adventures in T-Shirts…
http://www.printfection.com/newadventures

One of my very first “proper” fonts, initially doodled 12 years ago in an A Level English lesson, is now retweaked, rebalanced and ready to emerge again at last.

Once my MyFonts foundry page is set up, Creole will be the first to hit the shelves, so to speak.

Also, here’s Creole’s page from the little E-picture-book I used in 1995 to distribute my fonts!

Here’s where I’ll be blogging my progress of bringing my fonts, first made in 1995, back to the world’s designers.

Wow, you’ve really got to hand it to Belkin. They make a cable router and USB G adapter for only £50.

What they don’t tell you is that the USB wifi adapter in the box can be any one of 4 versions. Only one of these versions has mac drivers on the belkin site, and what’s more, only for 10.3. It even says on the site: Please note that the Mac OS version is for OS 10.3 only, not for earlier or later versions of the OS. All this is despite the fact that the supplier had it down as mac-compatible, because the datasheets belkin provided them say so.

If that wasn’t enough, the router itself even came bundled with the wrong power supply. Not the wrong voltage, mind; It simply doesn’t fit the hole on the back of the router.

A not-so-quick call got me through to someone who, after as said I should get my drivers at zydas.com, which has clearly been reclaimed by its domain provider. I told them this, and the errrrred for a while before telling me I should download the lastest (Windows only!) drivers and try it anyway.

So, instead, I went forum cruising, and finally found mac drivers for it here and a manual here. But, with all that installed, and the damn thing up and running, I hit my final problem, which is the decider: The USB wifi adapter can’t see or connect to the router that came with it. Yeah, that’s right. It can see other networks, including the one 5 houses down, but it can’t see my own network, broadcast from a router supplied with it; the very network I’m using right now to blog this. From the same room as the worthless adapter.

So, up yours, Belkin; you’re supposed to like macs, not pretend you support them while pointing you lazily at the drivers your suppliers wrote, but you can’t be bothered to rebrand and distribute.

They’re even selling iphone cases on the front page of their site. I imagine they probably require windows mobile installing over the iphone’s OS, if this little performance has been anything to go by.

If I’d ran into this much hassle setting up a network for somebody on a tech consultant basis, The invoice would already outweigh the cost of the hardware. Which, incidentally, I am sorely tempted to leave out in the rain before returning.

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