Falling Leaves - Home

Separated at Birth?

2012-02-01T12:20:00Z

I’m back! Did you miss me? Of course you did!

South African hip hop group Die Antwoord; and…

This Far Side cartoon?

I’m not particularly up on hip hop, but Die Antwoord certainly seem to be doing their own thing. Jesus, though…

No Thanks

2011-12-06T09:59:00Z

There’s a company that provides a useful service for local restaurants who want to cater to students. Their name, however, means that the jokes just write themselves:

Hork…

Some options here:

No way—do you know where they’ve been?!?
Thanks, but I’m a vegetarian—from this point onwards.
This presents the strongest case I’ve ever seen that English needs a vocative case.

Separated at Birth?

2011-12-05T16:34:00Z

Special creepy triplets edition!

Barmy Mahmoud Ahmedinejad; and,

Smarmy Euromillions Spokesmodel; and,

Charmy IT Crowd actor Matt Berry?

I must be scraping the bottom of the barrel: finding these images was surprisingly difficult!

Separated at Birth?

2011-11-28T14:36:00Z

The Tom Tom iOS app logo; and,

goatse?

Occupy

2011-11-21T15:18:00Z

It’s hard to concentrate on work these days. The Occupy protests have gathered apace over the past several months and it’s clear that the US, indeed the entire world, seems to be in a febrile state. The past few weeks, however, have provided us with shocking images of police violence on peaceful protestors.

A “measured police response” during the eviction of protestors at Zuccotti Park, New York City.

Fellow protestors come to the aid of an 82-year-old woman by flushing out her eyes with milk to recover from tear gas at an Occupy Seattle protest.

This weekend, police reacted disproportionately to the presence of protestors at UC Davis by pepper-spraying them in the face as they sat, quiet and peaceful, on a sidewalk.

The video of the Davis incident is truly shocking. That police officer theatrically brandishes his can of spray before he attacks children. To me, it’s clear that the offence he’s responding to is not the violation of some petty law, but that he, the embodiment of authority, was defied.

What’s even more impressive is to watch the students keep control, chant “Shame on you” & “You can go” to a bevy of clearly rattled police in riot gear—and the police withdraw. I think the police recognised—belatedly—the gross disproportionality of their response.

These images are shocking enough, but in private correspondence with people my own age, I’ve received quite a few comments along the lines of “Well, they were violating local laws”—as if that’s a reasonable reaction to this brutality. And newspapers like the New York Times don’t focus on the incident, but instead lazily report on how people are reporting the Occupy protests. Here, I see people both twice & half my age acting with remarkable bravery in the face of horrifying abuses of authority—and in the meantime, my own generation has apparently lost its moral compass.

Every Movie. Really.

2011-11-14T16:45:00Z

So some time ago, Cracked made a Trailer for every Academy-Award-Winning Movie Ever:

“Murmur of Agreement”

I love this.

Separated at Birth?

2011-11-11T08:39:00Z

Thug-playing actor J.K. Simmons; and…

Thug-playing actor Hulk Hogan?

Yeah, that wonderfully fractal Hogan picture is amazing, isn’t it? UNSEE!

Separated at Birth?

2011-11-08T11:48:00Z

Special literary/unexpected triplet edition!

Action Man Patrick Leigh Fermor in the 1940s; and…

Action Actor Spike from Buffy?

And also…

Suave Patrick Leigh Fermor in the 1960s; and…

Suave Sheffield actor Dominic West?

I’ll leave a Dominic West/Spike pairing as an exercise for the reader. It’s easily done—go on! Also, if (and when) they decide to do a good movie of Fermor’s life, they could do a lot worse than Dominic West.

All joking aside, Patrick Leigh Fermor was an amazing man: an inveterate traveller, a daring war hero, a fantastic writer, and apparently a joy to be around up until his recent death. RIP.

Shape Type

2011-10-31T12:29:00Z

Hot on the heels of Kern Me is Shape Type—by the same people, incidentally. This type, you test your abilities to design type as well as the masters who made the fonts in the first place:

Compare your aesthetic sense with the masters of type

My mind is thoroughly blown by this. It’s another tour-de-force of HTML5 programming. Like Kern Me, Shape Type is an amazing use of the canvas element. Who knew that you’d be able to replicate Illustrator’s vector-editing environment in a web browser? Not me.

Separated at Birth?

2011-10-25T14:15:00Z

Special double fortysomething’s countdown to Christmas edition!

Really cool character the Snow Miser; and,

Deeply uncool Senator John Kerry?

But Wait! There’s More!

Really hot character the Heat Miser; and,

Deeply lame Kazon from Star Trek: Voyager?

Ba dum bum BUM; waaaAAA UM…

Slimming Time Machine Backups, Redux

2011-10-25T10:16:00Z

I’ve written before about slimming Time Machine backups. Without careful pruning of the system, developers can find that their Time Machine backups become huge. For instance, if you’re developing Rails apps, you’ll likely want to not back up your logs directories. And everyone will probably want to exclude up their Cache directories, which of course are scattered throughout the system: I’ve counted /Library/Caches/, /System/Library/Caches/, and ~/Library/Caches/; and this doesn’t cover specialised caches you can find in */Library/Application Support/, for instance, for Flash. Remember this location, and note the asterisk: these become important later.

Well, since I’ve slimmed my Time Machine backups, I’ve noticed the occasional baffling 450MB or so backup in the morning, and periodically throughout the day. I couldn’t figure out what it was—remember, Apple doesn’t let you know what you’re backing up—and I was really worried that someone had broken into my machine and was using it to relay something really unsavoury.

Enter Time Tracker by Charlesoft, the author of Pacifist (I’ve since discovered BackupLoupe, which does much the same thing). Time Tracker is a very basic app that lets you view what, specifically, has been backed up, and how big it is. It’s a big help, and it helped me identify the culprit: Roxio’s Retrospect, which I use to create monthly backups of my work.

It turns out that even if you aren’t using it to back up your entire system, Retrospect creates a huge tally of your work. It’s located in /Library/Application Support/Retrospect/ and for me at least the files there tally usually in the region of 400–600MB in size. Which is backed up periodically throughout the day by Time Machine. Yes, the backups are backing up the backups. It’s backups all the way down, people.

I’ve never actually seen his show, but I giggle at the recursion jokes every time.

So, uh, if you’re paranoid like me & use Retrospect for monthly backups (because, you know, hourly backups aren’t enough), then you’ll want to exclude this from your backups. Since then, my backups are a lot saner in size, and my backup drive is no longer filling up with alarming speed.

Kern Me

2011-10-25T09:21:00Z

Type nerd? Appalled by keming? Then you will really love the Kern Me game.

Entirely too much fun

This is an inspired bit of coding, spectacularly well done. And not only do you use your left & right arrow keys to shift the letters, as in standard typesetting apps. To increase the amount of shift, and totally without thinking I held down the ‘shift’ key while using the arrow keys, and that works, too!

What It's All About

2011-10-06T13:53:00Z

In my post about Steve Jobs’ death, I didn’t write about the effect he’s had on my life. I should do that, here.

I got my hands on my first computer, a Mac Classic, in 1990. The first thing I thought was: this is a new tool for art. I started creating 2-bit artwork in glorious MacPaint and, while it was silly, pretentious stuff, those pieces were the first tentative steps that got me to where I am today, illustrating & making websites. Thanks, Steve.

“Pillar”, from a series called “My Family & Other Dead Animals” (1990)

Steve Jobs, RIP

2011-10-06T07:41:00Z

The morning brings sad, if not unexpected news: the death of Apple founder and saviour Steve Jobs.

He did a lot with his 56 years on the planet. He revolutionised computing not once but three times, with the Macintosh, the iPhone & the iPad. It’s hard to remember now, but when he took over Apple again in 1997, it had been so poorly run for so long that people thought it impossible that the company would survive. Now, it is literally the most valuable company in the world, in terms of market cap. I think it’s fair to say that he’ll go down in history.

He was irreplaceable, but—cold as it may sound—not indispensable. In fact, he saw to that. He surrounded himself with extraordinarily capable people on Apple’s management board, which includes the new CEO, Tim Cook, who is clearly a brilliant strategist & has locked Apple into a virtuous circle of success for years to come. And he worked closely with Jonathan Ive, who is a brilliant industrial designer. So, while the company’s fortunes were shaped by Jobs, its success wasn’t merely his doing. That is as it should be.

I never met him, and frankly I’m not sure I’d have wanted to. He was a famously intense man. If you ever watch him in unscripted events—interviews, say—he had this laser-like focus that I found utterly unnerving. It was like watching a predator wait for his prey to make a fatal slip-up. And, of course, there have been stories that span whole decades about his temper: it’s the reason why the lazy media always prepend the word “mercurial” to his name.

But to do great things, it seems likely that anyone would be intense & “mercurial”—you’d have little patience for fools, and the world is full of fools. I’d like to leave this with Jobs’ wonderful commencement speech at Stanford a few years ago.

Jon Gruber also referred to the commencement address. Here’s a quote he pulled from it:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Inspiring words. Steve Jobs, RIP.

Photoshop Scratch Disk Error Tip

2011-10-04T14:04:00Z

When starting up Photoshop today I received an error:

Could Not Initialize Photoshop Because the Disk Is Not Available

And then I was told that, specifically, my scratch disk wasn’t available. Huh? I have four of them! They’re right there!

It was all very peculiar, because I haven’t changed anything about my computer in the past several months. Other than to update to Adobe’s newest version of Camera RAW. I can’t say that this caused some problems, but I searched for the error message. Several people suggested checking out the scratch disk’s permissions.

Whilst doing that, I tried a little repair tip that’s useful for a lot of applications: I started up the app with the Command + Option keys held down. Voilà! I was asked to pick my scratch disks, and everything is sorted.