One for the Mac-heads in the audience. I’ve been trying to cut distractions while working on comics, which means that I turn off the WiFi on my Macbook now. However, this doesn’t work as well as it should, because the following behaviour occurs: If I switch off WiFi (AirPort) and then fire up Photoshop CS […]
Category Archives: Tech-geekery
Scribus sucks, but its suckage can be defeated with patience
What is this? It’s a screenshot of the open source DTP program Scribus on a Mac with the 143rd episode of The Corby Tribe open, as it is being prepared for presentation on my Drunk Duck mirror. The image is a Photoshop file with adjustment layers, and is not rendered correctly. However, it is at […]
There’s no better welcome home and no better start to the new year than a dead computer
As you may remember, the day before I left for Tennessee in mid-October, my Macbook died (it got better, especially after I gave up running Parallels on it). I just came home from Tennessee after a trip that included delays, lies about delays, the worst airline information I have ever come across and 1 hour […]
Running Windows on a Mac still to be considered harmful
Reader Kitchenbutterfly asks: Why have you burst my bubble? I’ve been living in paradise, claiming the MAC and all things APPLE to be the next best thing to sliced bread, or at least windows! And I know about buying computers in a hurry. Well here’s the thing: I loved my first iBook. I never had […]
How I crave real Internets
Reader Branko asks: “Reinder, how is life in the new fatherland? Have they internets there?” Well I don’t know about the rest of the USA (it’ll be a while before it’s really my new fatherland as I won’t even be getting my fiancé visa until early next year) but here in rural middle Tennessee, life […]
Just for once in my life, I’d like to not have to buy a new computer in a hurry
With 36 hours to go before my next flight to Tennessee, the Macbook dies. That means that a) I get to buy a new hard drive for my Macbook just to have access to my files (music including my vinyl album rips, scans – the paper originals for many of which I have recently thrown […]
A standard procedure for digitizing LP’s.
I’m really happy with my USB preamp for digitizing vinyl records and kinda wish I’d bought it years earlier. It’d have saved me a lot of money in CD remasters and other forms of buying-the-same-damned-record-again. What it allows me to do is remaster the records myself according to my own requirements. I find that I […]
On A/D conversion, advice and the weakest link in the chain
Reader Branko asked me privately what brand/type of USB preamp I’d bought, because he too wants to digitise his vinyl record collection. I’m really the wrong person to ask, because the entire comparison shopping process for me was to go to Okaphone, a local electronics store catering to DJ’s, and ask for the recommendation of […]
Adam’s basic sound restoration tutorial
I asked Adam for some pointers on restoring old records, and he spent a whole night creating a tutorial podcast on basic sound restoration, which tells me everything I need to restore my mother’s old Vienna Boys Choir recordings*). “Basic” here includes a lot of things I had already figured out but it also includes […]
Return of the Son of the End of Free, Part II
Over the years, I’ve become skeptical of paid content as a viable model for most of the content being published online, particularly for webcomics. In the previous part, I discussed what I believe are the reasons micropayments have historically failed and free content resurged in the mid-2000s. I believe Rupert Murdoch’s plan to start charging […]