Desktop Theatre Sc 45: Robots Miss Their Friends

 

 

The Tao of Workflow

Like most webcomics on their first year, The Tao of I.T. Al has changed over the months, as the workflow has been changed and refined.

Originally I had followed the current "traditional" comics art route with pencils and inked work done with actual graphite, ink and paper.  These were then scanned, cleaned up, and then painted digitally.  Now I work entirely digitally using Corel’s Painter for pencils and Adobe Illustrator for inking and coloring. Some backgrounds are hand drawn, but I primarily rely on a growing library of scratch-made resources made in Illustrator. Workflow is important to me because it the more it speeds up the processes, the more time I can spend drawing!

October’s batch of Al is done, and he’s back in action. Much of the recent material has been concentrating on the supporting characters, but Al has reasserted himself recently. It’s good to draw him in full martial arts mode. And it comes out so easily.  It’s rather odd that one of my major skills is to draw a large armadillo in a hakama! The hakama, sometimes known as "samurai pants", is a very elegant traditional garment worn by aikido, kendo, kenjitsu, iado, and Japanese archery practitioners.  Back when I was practicing aikido, I thought it made my technique look ten times better than it did. Read more

Adding a Logitech VX Nano to my wife’s MacBook

I really love the trackpad on my MacBook Pro and finally got to the point where I stopped using my Logitech Mx510 mouse with it. While the trackpad doesn’t give me the control that a mouse does—especially when doing fine point adjustments in an image editor—I found myself quite comfortable just using the trackpad nearly all the time.

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Upgrade the memory in a MacBook in 3 minutes

When I bought my wife’s refurbished MacBook I got it with the smallest amount of RAM I could get, in this case 1GB. The reason is that Apple charges a lot more for memory than what you can buy from an aftermarket seller like Other World Computing, which is a great resource for Mac memory and hard drives.

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The Tao of I.T. Al #33

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Setting up a Time Capsule

When I purchased a refurbished MacBook for my wife I also grabbed a refurbished 500GB Time Capsule from the Apple web site at the same time. At $249 it saved me $50 off the price of a new one and should provide a nice simple way to keep her MacBook backed up. Since I made the switch to Mac I’ve been raving about the simplicity of Time Machine and having a Time Capsule behind it sounded perfect.

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Buying a refurbished MacBook for my wife

Ah, the sound of a delivery truck in front of the house is always a welcome sound for a gear-head like me. I’ve gotten to the point where I can distinguish between UPS and FedEx by the squeal their brakes make. After a 1 day delay because I left the house for 15 minutes yesterday and that happened to be the window for the FedEx Ground guy, I had to wait an extra day to actually get my wife’s new MacBook in hand.

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Skype + LaunchBar = Ultimate Landline Style Phone

Though I started playing with Skype a couple of months ago I did it primarily as an alternate video conferencing option to iChat. My family members in California running Windows never seemed to be able to get their video based AIM tools to work, yet once they installed Skype we were able to hook up quickly and easily. All was good and Skype became my occasional use tool for chatting with the family and a few Skype enabled friends.

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Complete Guide To The Nikon D300 By Thom Hogan

On User Manuals, Digital Books, Travel, The Importance of eBooks and The Foresight of Thom Hogan

I like physical books.  By that I mean I like a book I can hold in my hand, feel the texture, and maybe even revel in the smell of the paper and the ink.  I like to consume well-done images that inspire or instruct.  I like books that open themselves flat and allow me to look at them without having to hold down both sides of the tight binding of a signature in the book without being afraid that the book would snap closed if I turned lose with one or both hands.

But then I have to say that there is a “but” that goes with all of that.  The bigger a book gets the less likely I am to have it along when I want it.  Big books in heavy bindings don’t fit easily into the weight requirements of modern-day air travel.  They’re, well, “big” and “big” and “ease of travel” are oxymorons.  They just don’t work interchangeably. Read more

The Tao of I.T. Al #32

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