Posts Tagged ‘pdf’

demented tiles for demented people

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

I’d totally put these up on my walls, but I may end up climbing them:

I made them by taking 32×32 pixel tiles of random grey noise, Atkinson dithering them (using pamditherbw) then vectorizing them using potrace. If you click on the tiles, you can download/view the PDF source of each.

(pgmnoise, the source of the grey noise, relies heavily on the system time as its seed. Before I introduced a delay between image generation, several images appeared almost identical.)

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banjo chord forms

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

I’ve been trying to learn banjo chords for a while, and the books I have keep flopping closed. So I resolved to make a blank chord form that I could fill in, like this:

You might wonder why it goes to the 7th fret. If you’re in Double C tuning, you’ll need that if you’re drawing a tuning chart.

So for G tuning, the F chord would look like:

There are 12 fretboard images to a page - that’s enough for four whole folk songs!

Download: stewart’s banjo fretboard / chord grid [PDF].

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Lady Goosepelt Rides Again!

Sunday, August 19th, 2007

Lady Goosepelt, from What a Life!

In case anyone wants them, the 600 dpi page images of What a Life! are stored in this PDF: what_a_life.pdf (16MB). If you merely wish to browse, all the images from the book are here.

I got a bit carried away with doing this. Instead of just smacking together all the 360 dpi TIFFs I scanned seven years ago, I had to scan a new set at a higher resolution, then crop them, then fix the page numbers, add chapter marks, and make the table of contents a set of live links.

I’ve got out of the way of thinking in PostScript, so I spent some time looking for tools that would do things graphically. Bah! These things’d cost a fortune, so armed only with netpbm, libtiff, ghostscript, the pdfmark reference, Aquamacs, awk to add content based on the DSC, and gimp to work out the link zones on the contents page, I made it all go. Even I’m impressed.

One thing that didn’t impress me, though:

aquamacs file size warning

I used to edit multi-gigabyte files with emacs on Suns. They never used to complain like this. They just loaded (admittedly fairly slowly) and let me do my thing. Real emacs don’t give warning messages.

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doesn’t rule my web

Tuesday, August 7th, 2007

Lots of people are drooling over the book Rule the Web. I’m not, particularly. It’s good in parts, but reminds me so much of those mid-late 1990s “Best Web Directory Ever” tomes that are currently propping up shelves in bargain bookstore, and propping up houses built on landfills in Arizona.

My biggest complaint is its US-centric approach. Pretty much everything related to buying, selling or finding people or things mentioned in the book only applies to the USA.

As is the way when web meets paper, some things are out of date already. It happens, but it’s a shame when the book’s pretty new in the shops.

I did find a couple of things I genuinely didn’t know about, but might find useful:

  • Combine PDFs, for slicing and dicing PDFs under OS X. (I could do this with pdftk, but Combine PDFs is purty).
  • The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. When I next need a comic boing, I’ll know where to look.

It also gave links to OnyX and HandBrake, both of which I already use. But that’s about it. I’d have been peeved if I bought the book (yay, Toronto Public Library!), as this is more of a basic manual than a compendium of coolness.

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composed entirely of bananas

Friday, May 7th, 2004

acrobatguy.jpg
Does anyone else think that the Adobe Acrobat™ logo guy looks more than a bit musaceous?

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