By Ruben(nerd) Schade, a UTS university student and IT guy in Sydney and Singapore. c.2004
Aside from the technological significance of the DEC PDP11 computers, I'm also so thoroughly in love with their design, colours, fonts and advertising material.
Quintessentially 70s. I want that chair! The carpet! The red walls! A bank of dead PDP11s for hanging my clothes in, with a Mac Mini running an emulator inside it!
Scan by PanelswitchMan on Flickr.
If you'll recall from my earlier post looking at Singapore in the 1970s, I'm fascinated with modern history! Today I unearthed the Historical NSW Railway Timetables website.
Firstly, yes I am aware the image above is clearly not a retro rail map, or even a contemporary rail map at all. In fact, other than a couple of physical train lines entering the bridge there isn't any indication that rail activity is taking place. It's called setting the scene, this is a photo of North Sydney taken in 1980 by nicksarebi on Flickr. Interesting how some things are clearly the same, but so much has changed!
Moving on! Hey, that was a bit of a pun... how come I'm only funny by accident? Don't answer that. The first map here is the suburban network in 1969, go the font!
Now we jump to 1987, when I would have been 1! You can kinda tell from the typeface and simplified, coloured block lines; perhaps a homage to the London Underground? :)
And finally we jump another decade or so to see the map Olympic people would have used to find their way to New South Wales Taxpayer Sinkhole Arena, as it was almost called:
What strikes me about all these maps is just how little things have changed in the intervening decades. Entire networks in other cities have been built from scratch during this time, and Sydney has barely had a dozen new stations introduced.
New map designs and signage, while being incredibly fascinating looks into our modern past, don't hide the fact the state has seen little new investment in public transport for a painfully long time. The new Liberal government claims transport is their "number one priority", but we'll believe it when we see it!
Dear Apple Engineers,
Regarding dimensions, or a lack thereofWith every Mac OS X release since 10.4 Tiger (and quite possibly even earlier) your Finder application has refused to display the dimensions of certain images.
It is my opinion the Finder in column view sets the standard for graphical file managers that other software outfits have emulated, but never surpassed. However, this one nagging bug that has yet to be fixed in at least six years could potentially cause premature balding, and despite how attractive some men look with that style I doubt it would suit me.
Peace, health and happiness,
Ruben Schade
Any other Australians saw the Word for Mac 2011 icon and thought of Big W?
Various vexillological societies and The Wikipedias are reporting that Malawi has changed its flag to restore the previous Pan-African colour layout, a change the opposition party is none too pleased with. I don't pretend to know or understand the political motivation behind the change, but I like it. It looks brighter, more cheerful :).
When I was growing up I was intensely interested in flags and logos because so many designs could be visually expressed with so few colours and geometric shapes. People used to call me a loser, can you believe it? Don't answer that.
Despite not knowing the first thing about graphic design, I'm a unabashed logo and symbol nerd so I've been intently following the story of India's search for a Rupee symbol. Now Reuters is reporting they've found one. Reminds me of something.
I didn't like it at first because it seemed unbalanced, like it would topple over in a stiff breeze, but the way they able to incorporate Hindi and Roman lettering along with the de facto double line that's found in the Dollar, Yen and Euro was pretty cool. Is my lack of graphic design knowledge showing yet?
I often wondered why currencies like this never got their own symbols. When I lived in Malaysia I got a kick out of having part of my name in front of every RM denomination, but it takes up twice as much space and isn't terribly imaginative.
I wonder how this will be implemented in Indian computers? Will they ship with a symbol on the R key you can activate with FN, or will it replace the $ on the 4? And where in Unicode will it go?
Now I know what it reminds me of:
I suppose Indian people are always winning beauty pagents and whatnot, so it makes sense. Unfortunately as anyone who has seen me can attest to, I also know virtually nothing about hair and hair care. I think I'll stop while I'm ahead. Get it? A... head!?
Actually now that I look at them side by side, they don't look anything alike at all. Disregard this entire post.
I've decided to replace all the icons for my Mozilla browser installs with the icon from Netscape Navigator in a fit of nostalgia. Technically, it's not completely a falsehood, kinda.
If you want to as well:
You might need to remove your browser from the dock and add it again for the changes to show.
First browser I ever used was Netscape Navigator Gold two point something, in primary school year five. Lots of numbers in that sentence.
I get my insatiable appetite for trivia from my dear granddad. From the time I was a kid he would regale me with a particular fact, then triumphantly exclaim "so there's another one to add to your vast store of useless information!"
The Hyundai logo, a slanted, stylized 'H', symbolizes the company shaking hands with its customer
I never saw that, but I can kinda see it now. Clever logos are cool.
Best. Error. Message. Ever!
I have to come clean and admit I never really got past the dabbling stage in Adobe Photoshop, I grew up using and loving Fireworks (back when it was Macromedia). For my own uses with my crappy old Lumix camera it did everything I needed it to in a fraction of the hard drive space and with a much cleaner interface; people complain about The Gimp's interface but I think much of it comes down to what you're used to, I thought the Photoshop interface was nasty.
Anyway I'm getting sidetracked, with Fireworks I could also use it to make vector graphics. It was like a beautiful Swiss Army knife application to me; sure a proper steak knife and cork opener would work better than the miniaturized versions in an army knife but the army knife was just so gosh darn practical. Did I stretch than analogy too far?
When I graduated from high school and was no longer eligible for student pricing (at least I thought so at the time) I balked at the price and decided to force myself to use The Gimp. I had also just got one of the first Intel MacBook Pros (that I'm still using!) and it seemed a Universal version of Fireworks was a long way away. By comparison, third party developers had tirelessly ported the Gimp over to Intel within weeks, and the performance was so much better than Fireworks in Rosetta it wasn't funny.
It took a lot of getting used to, but now I have a photo and graphics editor that I can afford, with dialog boxes that have a sense of humour to boot :).
Personally the feature I found most confusing initially was the way the software dealt with layers. Particularly coming from a Fireworks background which lets you have multiple free floating elements in one space, The Gimp uses a separate layer for everything unless you specifically flatten it. Even if you copy a part of a layer and paste it, it becomes a new layer. Once you get your head around that everything becomes gloriously simple, but that mental roadblock was a tough one to get over!
When used with the really elegant and fun Inkscape software (which is also free and open source) you can do some amazing things. For example all the graphics on this site were made in Inkscape then imported into The Gimp for processing. Hardly a glowing endorsement because my tired old logo I originally designed when I was a kid is really quite terrible, but there you have it!
If you haven't used it in a long time, I encourage you to check it out again. The unified menubar and the inclusion of UFRaw in 2.6 has made it much easier to use.
The next step for me will be to look at it's scripting capabilities which are supposed to be insanely powerful.
This could be the greatest CD cover, ever! I don't know why.
Howard Hanson: Symphonies Nos. 5 & 7; Piano Concerto; Mosaics
Main performer: Gerard Schwarz
Time: 67:48
Release Date: 1992