August 20, 2009 – 8:30 pm
I’m a bit of a fan of command prompts and batch files. Geeky yes, and most other geeks would probably hate the fact that I rather like doing things in Windows command line interpreter (cmd.exe). “Hey, I could find a random file in a single-line perl script, and it would stitch two images together, and it would make you a double espresso” you may say. “Well maybe, but you’re still an ass” I would retort. Despite what some people think Microsofts command processor is actually rather powerful, as demonstrated by the oft interesting Command Line Kung Fu.
Anyway, I decided I wanted to have a photo of my son on my Windows desktop at work – partly to remind me why I spend my days there (so we can afford to keep the little tyke and don’t have to send him back for a refund), and to give me encouragement to go home at a reasonable time of an evening. However, my work system is a dual-display machine, so my desktop resolution is 3200×1200, with a big black gap in the middle (the monitor case). So my idea was to stitch together two images selected randomly from a directory-full, set that as the background, and refresh the display. How to do it? Batchfiles, of course!
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By icabod
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Posted in Development, RealLife
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Tagged batch, command prompt, desktop, icababy, Jamie, nconvert, photography, wallpaper, windows, xnview
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August 15, 2009 – 7:20 pm
This was my first competition entry that hasn’t been ZX Spectrum-related. “OverXposed To The Sun(down)” caused RC55, the party-organiser, a little worry considering the title. It’s actually my attempt at something like “clever photography”, and happened almost by accident. I was playing with my video camera and took a few still shots while the camera was moving, resulting in some blur (oddly enough) and it gave me an idea.
I borrowed LaesQ’s rather nice camera, set the exposure to about 10 seconds, and… waved it around while taking a photo. The idea was to get a nice “S” (for “Sundown”, you see) from the various light sources, and it went rather well, especially as you can see the whole party-place with relatively little blur.
The photo came something like 6th, which sucks, as I’m better than everyone else, and I smell pretty. Or something. Ah hell, the winning entry was a really nice photo anyway, so props to the winner, although oddly with competitions like this… where do the entries end up?
If you’re feeling keen you can download the large version (2848 x 2136, 1.4Mb), ‘though the linked version above is just as good.
August 15, 2009 – 7:04 pm
With Sundown 2009 coming up next month I figured it was time I actually posted some information about my entries for last years Sundown.
This is a screenshot for “Tribe“, my fairly quick-hack demo which saw something of a new style for my… stuff. I took what I call the “CPU-Approach”, which means a complete disregard for what the ZX Spectrum hardware is going to do – instead I ignored any possible colour clash and flicker and just whacked some stuff on the screen. Oddly it works quite well, especially when you have some kind of Gigascreen-enabled emulator. It came in second to a rather nice (and marginally more worthy) Vic20 demo, although I believe “Tribe” was the only oldschool entry to be run on real hardware.
The demo features a rather nice little music-loop by LaesQ, and some graphics that I stole from Slengpung… and then forgot to greet everyone whose photo I used. Oh well. The best bit of making the demo was, of course, using Riznix’ PC to finish up the demo at the party (the first time I’ve done that), and being semi-blinded by his bloody huge monitor when I loaded up a pure-white text document. Marvellous.
Here’s a download.
January 19, 2009 – 8:30 pm
I’ve had a few people mentioning that I’ve not been posting more photos of Jamie here, so a very quick pointer to my Flickr page, where I occasionally post new pictures.
October 1, 2008 – 9:58 pm
On Monday morning, September 29th 2008, at 2:37am (BST), my wife Catherine gave birth to James Cooper, our son, weighing 7lb 13oz. James is our first child, and so far parenthood is proving to be rather… surreal. You don’t really notice that anything has changed, until at some point you realise that almost everything has. Catherine and James came home from hospital today, and as I type this I’ve just finished bottle-feeding him, and he fell asleep against my shoulder as I quietly whistled “Sweet Baby James“. It’s difficult to explain how it feels being a Dad, but with moments like this, I think I’m going to like it.
There’s so much more I want to write, but at the moment I’m not sure what it is. So for the time being, here are some photos…
Tonight is the last night we’ll spend in our current house, Mrs.Bod and I. Tomorrow we move to a new house, on the other side of town. A brand new house, un-lived in by anyone (apart from a handful of woodlice). I’d say that I’m excited at the prospect – but frankly I’m just tired. I’ve spent the last couple days packing everything we own into boxes, and I’ve been doing the same for the previous two weekends – this post is being written just prior to packing away my PC and being without internets for a couple weeks. It’s tiring. It’s stressful. I’m quite looking forward to not having to move ever again. We’ll just have to wait and see how that pans out.
I’m a big fan of AVG Free, the cost-less anti-virus software from Grisoft. I’m a keen advocate of it, and have installed it on several computers of friends and relatives (tho’ trying to ensure they keep it up-to-date is a trickier matter). Around this time most users will be seeing dialog boxes appear stating that they should be installing the new version – AVG8. I would agree, as it’s certainly fine software… I have some niggles regarding its installation of unwanted (in my case) web browser addons, but that’s something that’s easily fixed. Not so simple, at least from reading various forums, is killing AVG8 – so I found a way… Read More »
