作譜

Yearly Archives: 2007

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What I learned: High-res screenshots + Ableton Live = Frustration in my blood

Technophilia Professional

Making a high-resolution screenshot for printed materials will always be fraught with peril. I learned that the hard way when I attempted to incorporate screenshots of Ableton Live into artwork for the cover of Eponymous 4’s In C. A simple Google search for "300dpi screenshot" yields a lot of advice, some good, some bad. (The first result in the search is actually incorrect.)

For an explanation of why making high-resolution screenshots are so difficult, this AskMeFi question goes into good detail. This technique yielded the best results for other programs but not for Ableton Live.

The developers of Live have gone to great lengths to make the user interface look sleek in Windows XP. All the text is anti-aliased — not a single pixelated character in the interface. (Except maybe the menus.) Those anti-aliased characters wreak havoc when upscaling Live screenshots from 72ppi to 300ppi (or dpi, since that’s what Photoshop calls it.)

After experimenting with a whole bunch of tools — including some screenshot utilities for gaming — my only course of action was to remove all text from my Live screenshot. Once the text was gone, changing the color mode from RGB to Indexed Color resulted in a smaller palette, and I could resize the screenshot. Of course, that meant if I wanted the text back in the shot, I would have to add it manually.

Then again, there really is no way to go from 72ppi to 300ppi without some clean-up at the end of the process.

Apple users probably don’t have a problem with this.

What I learned: ‘Set Names utf8’ is your friend

Technophilia Professional

I knew at some point, given the amount of Japanese interspersed with English on my various sites, I would need to change the Latin-1 encoding of my MySQL database (say that five times fast) to UTF-8. It hasn’t been much of an issue because when I display that text on a web site, I send UTF-8 encoding in the header.

I reached a breaking point when with trying to sort a text field with mixed languages. Because the database was encoded in Latin-1, the multibyte strings were sorted as single-byte strings. On a web page, that meant Japanese text would appear in the middle of the sort.

Well, I finally did a Google search on what it takes to perform a Latin-1-to-UTF-8 conversion. So long as your data is fairly clean, it takes about four commands in a shell prompt to finish. And that’s what I did — I dumped my database, converted it and loaded it into an empty server to see the results. I liked what I saw in phpMyAdmin. Hastily, I decided to forge ahead and do a real conversion.

Imagine my surprise when I reloaded my websites and saw question marks where there should have been Japanese text.

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Huh, I thought it was 1999 all over again …

Technophilia Professional

The Register lists 10 signs you’re in a tech bubble. From my perspective, I would add to the list an item about getting contacted by third-party recruiters who have no clue about your skill set.

I can’t say I work for the most magnanimous employer where the purse strings are concerned, but there’s a stability here that I find refreshing from my earlier employment history. It would take, say, Nonesuch Records taking me on as their in-house webmaster to get me to budge. In other words, I’m starting to feel the other shoe about ready to drop in the next 15 to 18 months.

These are a few of my favorite fonts

WTF

Inspired by a previous article about Helvetica, Slate asked a bunch of authors about their favorite fonts. Andrew Vachss uses Courier? Fascinating. I stick with Times New Roman when I fire up a word processor because I’m just too lazy to change the default, but for things web, I’ve pretty much stuck with Verdana, Tahoma or Trebuchet MS. Yeah, I know — so 2002.

With the cover art for Eponymous 4, I use the fonts that come with Microsoft Windows, particularly the system fonts used in software interfaces. Chalk that up to laziness as well, but I like the idea of putting system fonts in another context.

Restraint employs Lucida Console, which is the font used for the Blue Screen of Death, while Imprint uses Lucida Sans Unicode. I believe Lucida Sans Unicode is the default font when you launch Notepad. A Ghost in My Shadow features 20th Century (Tw Cen MT), while Revulsion makes do with Century Gothic. I think the only non-Microsoft font I use with any regularity is Friz Quadrata, most famously featured as the typeface on Law & Order.

I’m particularly fascinated by the typeface used in the New York City subway system. According to this debate, Helvetica is used for the more recent signs, but a variation of Akzidenz-Grotesk named Standard Medium was used in the ’60s and ’70s. (Link actually points to Standard.)

When I was a kid — had to be when I was around 4 or 5 years old — I was endlessly fascinated by street signs. Back then, the way color conveyed message spoke to me somehow, and I have a strange fondness for the typeface of highway signs. There is no actual typeface for highway signs, just a a set of federally-mandated specifications. Blue Highway is often cited as the computer font of choice to emulate a highway sign, but back in 2004, the federal government sanctioned ClearviewHwy as an official alternative.

I’m no typegeek by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m sure if other things didn’t distract me, I could very well have become one.

Austin Music Hall might actually live up to its name now

Capital of Texas

The Statesperson is reporting (registration required or not) the Austin Music Hall is being torn down and renovated to the tune of $5 million. The renovations will expand capacity to 4,000 and add a restaurant.

Thank diety. I’ve been to exactly three shows at Austin Music Hall, and I’ve hated every one.

The first show was the Community Service Tour in 1999, featuring the likes of Crystal Method and the Orb. I didn’t know what to expect, so imagine my bemusement at being packed like cattle into a warehouse. The sound was awful, and the view of the stage wasn’t much of a view. The second show was Weezer. OmarG had an extra ticket, and I wanted to see what the whole Weezer fuss was about. A frat boy made me spill my beer on me, and he had the nerve to tell me to watch it. Also, I ended up not liking Weezer. The third show was the Smashing Pumpkins. It wasn’t a bad experience, but I enjoyed seeing them at Pink’s Garage in Honolulu ca. 1992 way, way more.

The Austin Music Hall was just a bad idea. Plop a stage in a warehouse, call it a music hall and stash as many bodies into the pit till it’s a fire hazard. Uh, no.

Bands I like don’t tend to play at the Music Hall, so avoiding the place hasn’t been much of an issue. Even if I did like a band, their booking at the Music Hall would be the dealbreaker. "Yeah, I like you, but not that much …"

So, good riddance, Austin Music Hall of Olde. When the renovations are finished, perhaps then I can enjoy a show there.

Birthday swag

Vital Signs

CDs I bought for myself during my Hawaiʻi visit:

  • CHARA, UNION
  • Tommy heavenly6, Heavy Starry heavenly
  • Quruli, Zukan
  • ACO, Kittenish Love
  • bloodthirsty butchers, blue on red
  • SUPER JUNKY MONKEY, Parasitic People
  • SUPER JUNKY MONKEY, Screw Up

Gifts bestowed on me:

  • New pair of shoes
  • $15 iTunes gift card
  • Cash totalling $280 (it went straight into savings)

Being the materialistic bastard I am, I wouldn’t be averse if belated birthday swag came in the form of:

Maui wowie

Vital Signs

It’s a good thing I tell all the bots to bug off from spidering this site because I’d hate for the title of this post to attract folks searching for a certain mind-altering vegetation.

I wrote about driving up Haleakala over at my Vox site. The entry in question also makes a recreational pharmaceutical reference. Wonder what that says about my interests.

In reality, I have to say I understand why visitors are more fond of Maui than Honolulu. Having grown up in Honolulu, I’ve only known city life. Maui is a nice middle ground — just enough urban not to feel isolated but more than enough rural to maintain some rustic. I can only sum up my visit with, "Wow." And I want to return to do all the stuff I didn’t give myself time to.

Oh, and there are pictures.

Debut EP!

Vital Signs

Here it is, folks … the reason I’ve been neglecting all my weblogs in the last week:

enigmatics short-run pressing

Yes, those are actual printed CDs. Sort of. They’re all actually blank, but they’ve been printed with the artwork I provided.

I experimented with using a service called Mixonic, which is the short-run duplication arm of Discmakers (both links point to variations of the same site.) Mixonic allows you to print as few as one CD and as many as 1,000. The whole transaction is self-service through an online interface, right down to designing the cover.

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