Sunday 29 December 2013

Christmas Season

It is the season of Joy, Peace, Happiness and Love.
And I am still not well enough get home to my boat.  Nor am I able to get back to my girlfriend at the moment.  But health issues aside, it is holiday season.  We should enjoy.

Friday 11 October 2013

Into the Jelly Bean Jar again

Android Honeycomb was good. The upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich impressed me, but on both the Motorola Xoom and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 started coming up with errors.  I got used to seeing reference to Android processes having stopped unexpectedly on a regular basis on both devices.

Wednesday 9 October 2013

Libre Office and Graphics

It's easy to tell when I am in a lot of pain, or suffering badly with fatigue and bored senseless.  I write in this place again.  Being house bound is forcing me to mess around with programming and graphics again within the limits of endurance.  I can only sit upright for short periods, which makes productivity a bit hit and miss.

Ok, Recently I wrote a script to automate preparation print images and text to go on ceramic mugs.  The script program can be used to make output for printing then pressing to iphone cases and mousepads, coolers, in fact just about anything.  It started as an exercise to make a simple preview program that would project the output of a mug design onto a cylinder.  From there I just made it print to a blank picture of an actual mug, then took it to its logical conclusion and made it spit out a layout page ready to print.

Monday 7 October 2013

GIMP Tricks #13272

Another quickie for working with GIMP image editor.
I often want to make an image fuzzy around the edges, but have the fuzzy part transparend rather then the default white..  GIMP has an option for fuzzy borders in the menu under:
Filters > Decor > Fuzzy border... 
To achieve the desired transparent edge result there are only a few simple steps, BUT !!  The first step is very important.

Friday 4 October 2013

Android Browsers

There is an amazing array of Web browsers available for Android and while the big three are excellent and familiar,  some of the new ones are even better.  I have tried out a lot of them,  looking for a combination of speed,  versatility,  ease of use and general usefulness.  As I did with office programs,  I put them through some rigorous tests. Recently I found one that works well and even lets me post to blogger,  a big stumbling block with most.

Thursday 3 October 2013

Jelly Beans and Minties

Android has a few thing I don't like,  but a lot of the experience depends on the support from your devices.  My first Android device was a Motorola Xoom tablet,  followed by various phones.  Then I got a Samsung Galaxy tab 2 10.1 tablet,  and later a Samsung Galaxy W phone.  The Samsung devices really showed me the differences in Android.
My Motorola is still running an early version of Android honeycomb.  Since I've had the Samsung tablet it has had Android updates. Most recently it was updated to jelly bean.

Friday 16 August 2013

Working with ANDROID

The longer I spend with my Android tablets and phones, the more I am enjoying the similarity with Linux.  The common heritage is obvious.  There are annoying similarities to Windows as well, like the way things just crash for no apparent reason, but at least with Android it has never resulted in my losing data.  The exception was the blogger incident - but that was Google itself, not the tablet or the operating system or an app.

Wednesday 14 August 2013

Blogger and Google and Feedback

Trying to post from a tablet today and I discovered a fun 'feature' of blogger.  About half theAndroid browsers don't support blogger and several of the keypads also will not work with it.  I tried Google Chrome, hoping that would be better, and that stupid 'send feedback' popup caused me to lose my entire post.  Not only that, but it did the same thing three times in a row.  The first time I lost a lot of work, but I expected that supplying feedback would stop it happening again.  You'd think google would be able to design a feedback system that only asked for feedback occasionally, but no.  This thing nags all the time.  It didn't even save my work. just binned the lot and called it a draft.

Saturday 10 August 2013

Fixing Firefox 23 (August 2013)

As demands on storage and transfer are increased we are finding limits to the ability of the newer browsers to cope, even with more powerful computers.

Firefox is among the browsers that suffers.  This morning I was again annoyed with the slow page loading and the lag before beginning to scroll a page.  I could scroll the mouse wheel about three turns before the page view even moved.

Sunday 4 August 2013

I was sitting the other day, playing with the latest alpha of Kubuntu linux, and reflecting on the changes in computing over the years.  By the time I got back into computers, they had evolved into things like the SinclairZX80, Tandy TRS-80 and Commodore PET and VIC20.

Saturday 20 July 2013

Odds

This blog is not being used much.  For that matter neither are my Whitsundays blogs at present while I am not sailing.  So maybe I will just write some random stuff here to make use of the space.