Sub Ubi

http://www.macmerc.com/article.php?sid=2205

This tutorial on creating a “Comic Effect” in Photoshop is actually nice because it (fairly) cleanly simplifies the color palette and strengthens edges in the photograph. That makes it a useful “tool” considering that I would like to try and create a LEGO mosaic sometime in the next few months. Having a clean palette reduction to a LEGO palette is an important step, and some of the techniques here may help.

This just in! (Actually, I’m just in. From Madrid. But, more on that some later.)

Stephen Fraser of Lulu.com dropped me an email regarding my last post, and reports that the Xerox iGen 3 is currently what is used by Colorcentric to process jobs sent via Lulu.

One. Serious. Printer.

A question came in today from Matthew:

Thanks for the information on lulu.com and your  experiences creating
picture books.
I’m curious if you could compare the photo quality to other sources?
Is it better than glossy magazine?

As for the layout tools, it sounds like what you want is Pages, which
is part of the iWork bundle.
It lets you create custom layouts, select layouts on a per page
basis, drag and drop from iPhoto (or, even better, from the built in
“media browser” which is integrated with iPhoto) onto placeholder
images, and print to PDF (just like any good mac app).

I’m probably going to order an experimental lulu book soon.  Thanks
for the review/comments.

(I’ve written about creating photobooks under Mac OS X and sending them to Lulu.com in a few previous posts; oldest to newest these are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.)

I talked a little bit about quality here, but realize that I’m rather vague about the print quality in some respects. Is it equivalent to or better than a glossy magazine? No. Glossies are printed on heavier paper, with higher-resolution processes than available to us as purchasers of low-cost print-on-demand services. However, what exactly is going on with the printing made available through Lulu? I’m going to try and dig that out…

So, first off, I’ve found some good details about how to prepare and upload your documents—especially if you want full-bleed inside the document. This usually won’t matter, I don’t think, but it’s good to know. Additionally, Don Campbell has a good PDF creation FAQ—but again, this isn’t getting us to print quality. (I thought it was there, somewhere!)

A-ha! Here we go—some snippets from the linked thread:

Some of you may know that Lulu uses two different printers. For Lulu orders, the printer is Colorcentric, based in Rochester NY. For retail orders, books are printed by Lightning Source. (LSI) which is owned by Ingram, Lulu’s retail distributor.

…

I’ve seen my book printed from both Colorcentric and the retail version from LSI. They are indeed bookstore quality. By no means, do they look cheap or lpoor quality. Only thing I’d like is if they started to use acid-free paper.

Now, I don’t know what “bookstore quality” means, but it probably means high-quality printing on a reasonably heavy-gloss acid-free paper. Consider that my last photobook was made in January 2004, which would predate the Lulu partnership with Colorcentric by a number of months. So, I’ve never seen the new photobooks Lulu produces; I will soon (I have one or two to order for friends departing Canterbury), and I suspect I’ll be even more surprised by the quality than I was with the first book I ordered.

That may not be a perfect answer, but it does put you in a position to dig further and perhaps discover exactly what printers Colorcentric uses for Lulu orders. I’d certainly like to know, and will update this post if I dig it up later today.

So, I’m moving Carrie from Bangor to Canterbury; for the first time in three years, we’ll share a living space for more than, oh, a few days at a stretch. (Last summer we did a month or two as a trial for this; we shared one room, and that was… challenging.) For this move, I caught a train out to Wales, and we’ll drive a mini-van (or “people carrier”) back with her and her stuff.

And it’s the stuff I’d like to talk about. There’s a few nasty surprised that I’ve encountered here:

1. Books. Someone let Carrie buy lots of books while I wasn’t looking. Getting them to Canterbury is one thing—but what then? Where will we put them? How will we ever move them again? I don’t want to think about all the books we already left behind in the States in the last move.
2. Girl stuff. Somehow, they hide this from us when we live with them—that, or guys just naturally block this stuff out as part of a self-defense mechanism. I just opened three drawers full of… girl stuff. Creams. Oils. Things. Who knew?
3. Clothes. We came over with the same amount of luggage. I swear to you, I have fewer articles of clothing now than when I landed here three years ago. I’ve picked up a few t-shirts, and have replaced some underwear and socks. I’ve received a sweater or two each year for XMas, and probably have swapped out a pair of jeans along the way. But this… her clothes reproduced. There’s now a wide assortment of tops, bottoms, and things in-between! Where did it come from?
4. Shoes. Don’t get me started. I know for a fact that there were not that many shoes on the voyage over.
5. Kleenex. Actually, I only see one box—I threw this in as a switch-up. Mind, we didn’t bring one over with us from the States, but I think one box of Kleenex is quite reasonable. Of course, I just use a bog roll…
6. Shoes. Did I mention the shoes?

I’m going to go risk packing the drawers of girl-stuff at this point. We’ll see how I manage…

From the headline:

Info on 3.9M Citigroup customers lost

Computer tapes with information about consumer lending lost by UPS in transit to credit bureau.

That’s just great (in the global, ironic sense). Some poor driver is now having a really, really bad day (that’s not great, in the “he’s just this guy” kinda way).

From BoingBoing: Why the BBS Documentary is Creative Commons licensed:

Cory Doctorow:

Jason Scott, creator of the kick-ass, five hour BBS Documentary, has written a stupendous essay on why he chose to license the produce of his years-long labor under a very liberal Creative Commons license:

Even if you are honest, open, friendly, making a kick-ass product and totally changing the world with your little whooziz, some people, on principle, do not pay for media. This is what they do and they have tools to get media for free, tools that are better than your tools are and which are much more ubiquitous and better updated. In realizing this, perhaps you will stop treating every single person who purchases your product like a scumbag, guilty until proven innocent, beneath and below you. A number of people do not pay. This happens at the circus, the rock concert, your local supermarket and at your job. To turn your customer base into a constantly-on-alert totalitarian wasteland is not the effective solution. Instead, assume that if you’ve actually made a unique, interesting product and put your heart into it and made something that can’t truly be duplicated, people will pay. And if you treat them like they’re human beings, they’ll ask other people to pay too.

Result: You save a lot of lawyers fees, and people feel like customers and not shotgun targets. Also, your breath will smell better.

Link (via Waxy)

This post is redistributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 1.0 license.

http://www.archos.com/products/overview/pma_400_tech_specs.html

I’m always on the lookout for a new “robot brain.”

This device has two USB ports, an IR remote control, gets around 9 hours on a charge, has built-in 802.11b, and runs Linux.

It could certainly function as a host for a Brainstem or similar; however, our experience with the Zaurus was that PDAs tend to have so many “other” things going on that getting low-level control of the device (like working with a serial port) can be a real challenge. Given that we’d need to use a USB->serial adapter with this device (and get drivers loaded on it, and… and… and…), I suspect it would be more trouble than it is worth.