Someone once told me that interesting stories start like this:
Establish what “normal” looks like in your world. If your story is set in present-day New York, you can do that quickly, during the opening credits. If your story is set in Middle Earth, it takes a lot longer.
Break the routine. Frodo has to leave the shire. This is when the story really starts, and why you’re watching it. Today is different.
The remake of the classic 80s series, Miami Vice (2006), fails at number 2. For the whole film, two undercover vice squad detectives go undercover to bust a vice gang. Sure there’s fast cars, guns, all that, but it could of been so much better.
In response to monkeys stealing his coffee beans, an Indian farmer observes: If you start shooting monkeys, you’ll spend the rest of your life shooting monkeys.
The cooking instructions for my Tandoori Chicken Breast microwave lunch, are to cook…
…until internal temperature reaches 74C (165F).
How many office kitchens have a cook’s thermometer? Score nothing for usability.
Should you for any reason attempt to sue the manufacturer, it will rapidly become apparent that you didn’t follow the cooking instructions. Score one for legal.
I have been playing Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe, or OpenTTD on and off for a while, but I confess I only understood train signals very recently. The game gets a lot more fun once you can have complex track layouts, so here’s a tutorial on train track layout and signaling for complete beginners.
Building tracks the wrong way
If you’re anything like I was, all your train layouts probably look like this:
When I was 16, I wrote a computer game, called Micro Zooides. It was called that partly because on Windows .EXE files all start with the two characters MZ, and partly because it was about small creatures. Micro-Zooides was going to be about humanity’s progress, it was going to be Civilization, which didn’t exist yet.
The game had a splash screen of a Far Side comic, then a short video of me tromping through the woods like a Neanderthal, which my Dad filmed and which I digitized with a very early video capture card.
In Borland’s Turbo C++ 3.0 I wrote a basic graphics engine to display the tiles of the world, and an event loop so I could move the main character around the world. I drew sprites for a proto-human (the micro zooid), dirt, rocks and sticks. He could walk around the world, and pick up and put down rocks or sticks.
Then I took a break to plan. I have a proto-human, rocks, and sticks. How do I get to civilization?
I’ve been using Picasa to edit my pictures for a long time, and it’s an excellent program. Recently however I’ve started shooting RAW, and I’d like control, so I’ve started using GIMP. It’s more powerful and more complicated than Picasa, so to start myself off I went through all the features of Picasa and made notes on how to duplicate that operation in GIMP. Here are those notes.
Most of what Picasa does can be replicated with the Colors / Levels or Colors / Curves tool. It’s well worth spending a little time experimenting with both of those (the documentation is very good too).
Crop
In the Toolbox, click the Rectangle select tool
In its options (beneath the tools), tick ‘Fixed: Aspect Ratio’
Enter 6:4 ratio (for 1.6 sensor, most DSLRs)
Tick Highlight.
Draw a rectangle on the image that you want to crop to.
Image menu / Crop to Selection
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