Archive for November 2006

I’ve spent the evening playing with ArtRage 2, a great little painting application which I discovered via Bzangy Groink. It’s purely a painting program as opposed to a Photoshop wannabe, and does a brilliant job of creating paint effects.

Thick paint smears and blends, pencils and chalks smudge, and markers work just like they do in the real world. Many of the tools can be adjusted to give different effects. You can paint with thinned oils, use wet or dry markers, soften your pencil and control the hardness of the crayon, and much more.

The program enables you to import images to ‘trace’, and can automatically load your brush with the correct colour from the underlying picture. I especially like the option of washing out brushes in the jar of water.

The interface takes a bit of getting used to, but UI designers at Adobe could learn a thing or two from it (for example, palettes moving out the way when you paint near them, and the zoom tool, which I found really intuitive).

ArtRage is available for Mac and Windows and, best of all, there’s a free version as well as the full version (which is a steal at only $20!).

On an unrelated note (well, perhaps a tenuous ‘free things for computers’ theme), the Streetmap Firefox Extension is pretty handy - highlight a UK street name or postcode and right-click to launch a map of it from Streetmap, Multimap or Google Maps.

I managed to get away from London last weekend to do a bit of long-overdue catching up with friends. I took my iBook with me so I could get a couple of hours work done on the train, in between enjoying the complimentary drinks and muffins in first class (not because I’m too stuck up to travel with the riff-raff in standard class, but because this country’s stupid transport policies mean that it’s cheaper to buy two first class singles than a standard class return).

Unfortunately, within a couple of hours of arriving, my friend Chris managed to spill a very large glass of wine over my iBook as we browsed the web. It got well and truly drenched and immediately cut out. Chris quickly turned it upside down and I whipped the battery out, and we then dried off as best we could before leaving it to one side. Chris was pretty mortified, but with a few glasses of wine in me I had to laugh.

The next day I popped in to a shop and had a play with the latest Apple laptops, and started to think that perhaps it wasn’t such a disaster after all… claim on my insurance and get my 18 month old iBook replaced with a new Core 2 Duo MacBook. Sweet.

After three days drying out time I decided to try turning the iBook on, still convinced that all that wine would have shorted out the logic board and turned it into an attractive paperweight. Much to my amazement it booted up with the familiar Apple bong, and I was able to log in as usual. Screen, sound and hard drive all fine. By now I was looking forward to getting a new MacBook, so I wasn’t sure whether to be happy or not (I decided I was happy, as a new MacBook would mean shelling out on a larger Crumpler bag too). Quite how the iBook survived I don’t know, but it’s definitely earned the tag “Old Faithful”.

If only the same could be said about the Antec PSU in my Windows box. When I got back to London I fired up the PC and within seconds the PSU died. I was not a happy bunny, especially as this is the second Antec PSU I’ve had to replace within the last year. Although it’s still under warranty I decided to buy a different one rather than wait for Antec’s painfully slow RMA process.

My shiny new 600w PSU arrived yesterday and what did I discover? Not only did the Antec PSU die, but it seems to have fried my rather expensive motherboard in the process too (and I had to try every component in Rob’s PC to be sure). So now I’m waiting for a new motherboard to delivered.

The moral of this story? Don’t buy Antec PSUs. In fact, don’t buy/build a PC, just get a Mac. And be careful with your wine.