Category Archives: Uncategorized

lollygaggers, gallinippers, gollywhoppers, doizabizzlers & flipadoodles

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21°C, clouds

A year on…
Reading through old entries is interesting, for comparison with the now.
I was avidly painting as well as finishing a 3D animation for the Whitley Project. this year I have but one painting on the go, I grumble about tiredness but that has clarified itself into a head-cold now.
The Walrus is despirate for a completed animation clip, in addition to a new plan that is old. A few years ago I made an animated video for the Stirling Association AGM. The guy I swent to Shuttleworth with last weekend tells me that they are very keen to see more and ask of me every time they meet. As a carrot & stick, they are having  a big "do" next winter which should be attended by their Chair – Dame Vera Lynn. The request was to get the film built up for that occasion. That puts me now in the planning phase again, storyboarding and keen to include the Walrus in a walk on part.
Making the storyboard also produces a shopping list of models to make, I have the various planes, crew and an airfield. It needs populating with buildings and vehicles (see below). Deespona’s 500 3-D collection should help here, though I prefer to do all the building myself. It will have sounds.

If you are a silly looking creature is it better to have a silly name?
lollygaggers, gallinippers, gollywhoppers, doizabizzlers, flipadoodles. And here was I thinking Daddy-long legs was a silly name.
BBC have featured an article on the Crane fly, but it doesn’t seem to provide an answer to its own title "What’s the point of daddy longlegs?".
The population round here has crashed, it seems a species that only lives about 2 weeks. They are still going in my painting, crash or not.

Spaces Live

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16°C, clouds & liquid sunshine

Uh oh! I don’t mind the new formatting bar a couple of problems:
  • the page is too wide, looks fine on my 21" monitor but most people are on 19" screens and that forces side-scrolling
  • no option for a black background for text boxes, this grey is fine except many of the old posts have highlight-colours chosen against black.
  • I prefered the tabbed preview pane
"Live" may fix this sometime.

Live®Messenger

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27°C, +wind & showers.

Live messenger: do I need it, is there any advantage from new features. It should work with Win 2000, but does that mean a bigger memory footprint? Does anyone know?

Follow up: well, that did exactly nothing. I downloaded live messenger and installed it, all it has done is reinstall MSN Messenger 7.

Putting the windows back in

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27°C, hot

Re-installation is tiring: It takes ages to put windows back on, the OS is the easy bit, but it’s all the fiddling with different software. MS Outlook is still generating errors, possibly due to this version of ZoneAlarm. The whole idea is to make space for things, Win 2000 needs at least 10 Gb to hold all the files for 3 users and leave room for defrag to work properly.
Aand, I want a separate OS to run 3D animation and video editing software. That one should be without firewall or anti-virus software so it runs faster. That means no internet access with it ( WinXP). I shold have warned you that this bit isn’t very interesting. It has taken most of the afternoon to do , and taken away some paitning time.
 
Turpentine: started submarine swimmer picture. More tomorrow, it’s drying right now.

Error 651

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27°C, some clouds+humid

I’m baaack!
Last Sunday, I switched on the computer and windows wouldn’t boot up. It reported a corrupt file in the system32 folder. I tried all afternoon to get it running, endlessly loading up the four floppy dics needed to run the installer & repair modules. In the end I reformatted the drive and put a fresh copy on. Unfortunately the boot drive had to be formatted too, so I’ve lost the dual-boot up too.
 
Anyway. Now I have a fresh installations, but the modem wouldn’t work, giving the above error code. Finally after about four days of trying things out to fix it, I had a nagging feeling the modem wasn’t talking to the motherboard properly. Today, I removed the modem completely, then took out the motherboard drivers. Cleaned out everything to do with the modem and finished with putting stuff back in with more care over the order they they are put in.
 
Things learnt:
  • Install motherbaord drivers first
  • Backup the boot drive
  • Backup the OS partition (move all temporary folder to another drive to make this easier)
 
Tomorrow, the virus checker gets put back in, but it’s amazing how much faster the system runs without it.
More arty talk tomorrow…
 

You’re not allowed to say that

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Chicken is a banned word in Space titles:
 
See the attached picture, We’re prohibeted from using the word "chicken" in our  titles.
Instead I am going to say it in my post here:
Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken & so on…
 
See! it lets me do that!
 "Chicken" must be either obscene or blasphemous in American English (since msn is American I can only assume).
try that in your next entry title & let me know if the same thing happens. It made my last post rather difficult to post intill I could isolate the "offensive" word.
Hold on! has an American corporation patented the word "chicken" and blocked me from using it without paying a license?
 
puzzled.

Streaky printer- the sequel

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20°C, sun

830U: still needs a heart bypass operation, it has bad veins which seem partly blocked. Adding the spirit-cleaner has triggered the error light which has not gone away for a few hours. the printer driver claims that the colour ink has run out- hard to believe since it was half-full before.
 
Laterz: it’s working now, except the yellow is still blocked. So an improvement.
Linseed: posted the Handprop picture in the "Finished" section of the photo galleries.

Epson 830u

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14°C cloudy

Unreliable printer: in one last desperate attempt to get this infuriating printer to work, I’ve ordered a set of cleaning heads. The cleaning routine doesn’t work at al now, in the past it has needed 6, 8 or even a dozen runs to get rid of the white streaks in the page. Usually it still has streaks in the printout up to time the self-clean routine has been run so many times that the ink cartridge has emptied. There are plenty of references to this problem on line, so it’s not just me.
 
Hope isn’t all lost yet though: here is an interesting tip

 

Try the Windex trick… I tried it on my Epson Stylus Photo 890 and it worked great:

1. Open up the printer cover.
2. Get the print head into the center: you can do that by starting the cycle to change the ink cartridge.
3. Now, turn the printer off (with the catridges unseated in the centre) from the mains (to prevent the printer from automatically returning the heads before power-down).
4. Look to the area where the printer head usually sits when it is not printing (it’s on the right hand side on my 890). There should be a pad/sponge there.
5. Using a dropper, transfer 6-7 drops of Windex cleaning solution (those blue ammonia liquid that they use for cleaning windows) onto the pad/sponge. Try not to touch the sponge (according to some websites, this sponge is spring mounted and touching it may damage the springs). Try not to overspill the Windex solution as well.
6. Turn the printer on again so that the print heads are reseated onto the pad/sponge.
7. Now turn off the printer the usual way (the printer will reseat the print head properly before power down).
8. Leave the print head to take up the Windex for 1-2 hrs.
9. Do the usually print cleaning cycles/nozzle check.
10. Your printhead should be unclogged by now.

For the really stubborn clogs, you might want to leave the print head overnight for soaking in Windex.

Finally a more detailed suggestion is here: InkjetArt
Who knows what Windex is, but there is a bottle of cleaning solution up in the cupboard there *points*.
 Printers at work are quite exaspirating too.
 
Anyway it’s Sunday, so time to get the bike out and ride off….


Patch news

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14°C, heavy rain

Brother in Arms: new patch, it’s been out nearly a month but went unnoticed. Description to follow.
Not much of a fanfare on this release, it adds some new single-player missions,
get it here:
BIA_EiB 1.03

It’s possibly changing some of the bahaviours of the AI as well, but maybe I’m imagiing that since it’s not stated in the readme. It does add three new single games:Brothers in Arms:

Earned in Blood by Gearbox Software – English retail v1.03 patch

Changes in v1.03:

– Added three new skirmish maps:

Flanked from Above is a free Skirmish mission that takes place in a rural town of Normandy during the famous D-Day invasion. Players take on the German role with orders to defend against the American paratroopers descending from the night sky! Play solo or cooperative with a friend to complete this unique and challenging mission.

The new Skirmish mission, Across the Marsh, for BiA:Earned in Blood is the largest Skirmish mission to date! Players are challenged to fight across the open marsh toward the city, where several paths are available to complete the same objective. Victory will not come easily in the city. The Germans will put forth their best defense, so playing cooperatively with a friend might help you conquer this map.

Locate and destroy German flakvierling anti-aircraft weapons amongst the hedgerows and fields of the new EiB Skirmish mission, Into the Farm, but beware! The weapons are guarded by mortar fire and Germans expertly using the bocage to their advantage. Once you’ve taken the farm, you must use all the squad tactics learned from the original EiB missions to defend it!

 
MySpace: was in the news today, what is it? Is it better than msn spaces? Does anyone know, (or care)?

To the Endth degree

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12°C

Nth… thanks to Y12 for that little goof. Pity it wasn’t from one of my lessons. Last time someone in one of my groups made an error like that, I issued them a commendation. I did of course point out it was wrong, but some errors are so well thought through. On that occasion we were talking about mono-chrome, so I first asked what "mono" meant- ( they got this one right), the second part was what is "Chrome" about, the first brave reply was "something to do with time?"
I love things like that! There are stupid mistakes and there are brilliant mistakes. These are examples of the latter. Without them, we’d have no creativity.
 
Ubisoft have aplogised for the botched patch they released this weekend. see->Terriblysorry :
Boontybox are probably the real culprits, Ubi will have commissioned them to provide a download manager-installer, just like most software houses employ Wise-installers. There will be more paid-patches for games, so I guess we’ll have to install Boontybox to add patches then remove that dirty little prog’ each time we’ve finished with it.
 
Oh well, at least the patch itself is of high quality.