Hazmattronic

Mar 25

Install new fonts for Photoshop CS5 in OS X

Using new fonts in Photoshop on a Mac really has nothing to do with Photoshop. Open the Font Book application (Command + Space and type, if you don't know where it is), and navigate to File > Add Fonts. From there you can select the folder containing your new fonts, and they'll be be added to the User collection of Font Book. Then close Font Book, restart Photoshop, and you should be good to go.

While we're talking about fonts, Font Squirrel is awesome. It's where I get all my fonts, for free. Check it out.

Feb 24

Figured it out J

Over the past year or so, I've been having a lot of email communication with various Microsoft people, setting up my internship for this summer (another story). I've long been puzzled to find random capital "J"s interspersed throughout their emails, and when I saw the same thing in an email from my dad yesterday I finally made the connection.

This is a quirk caused by a quasi-bug in Outlook, in which it replaces ":-)" or ":)" with the "J" character in the wingdings font: a smiley face. However, the problem arises when the email goes to a client without wingdings installed - the character defaults to some other font and simply displays as a capital "J".

With a bit of Googling, I found this simple fix, in which you simply direct Outlook to replace a text smiley with the unicode ☺. Check it out if you use Outlook and want to stop confusing people. J

Jan 17

Epic.

Jan 7

Useless bay

I'm currently vacationing with my parents at a house we're renting for a few nights on Useless Bay, Whidbey Island. The bay is aptly named: it seems shallow and muddy, but at least it looks pretty through the misty haze that is typical of the Northwest at this time of year.

In other (somewhat related) news, I have recently acquired an awesome mobile device: the much heralded iPhone 4. It is wonderful, and I couldn't be happier, especially after many years of mediocre phones. I'm currently posting from said iPhone, since our place doesn't have wifi, and this gives me a chance to test out the iOS Posterous app (very nice). I also downloaded the Pano app for panoramic photography with the iPhone; attached is a shot of Useless Bay itself.

Dec 30

The latest project

Since I got back from school, I've been working on a social game modeled after the Game of Things. As of now, it's pretty much functional, and I've sent the link out to many of my friends from school, hoping that we can all enjoy playing it, and in the process I'll get some testing help. I haven't put any work into making it look nice yet, but it should work without too many bugs. Of course, it's still proverbially "in development", and I plan to work out the kinks, make it look nice, and then maybe buy a domain for it. I have to also think of a better name; right now it's called "Online Things", which could easily be subject to trademark concerns if enough people start using it.

Anyway, it's been fun to get it this far, and of course instructive in the practice of web design. I've gotten another chance to use MySQLi and some jQuery, as well as general PHP scripting skills. Good to keep the mind active over break.

If you're interested, check out Online Things!

Dec 21

'Tis break!

Break has come at last, and my third semester at Brown has concluded. It was great, albeit seriously challenging academically. As a direct result, though, I learned a lot, and enjoyed most of what I learned. The classes I ended up taking were an Intro to Systems class, the Matrix (linear algebra for CS), a philosophy class on meaning and value, and a religious studies class examining conceptions of the apocalypse throughout history. I also got a full course credit for TAing, which is a pretty sweet deal.

Now that it's break, I have a chance to address the many things that I've been wanting to do for awhile. I've decided to stop working on CrowdSplat for the time being, as I've lost a little bit of interest and I just want the time to work on other things. As it is, it's pretty nice (as long as you're not an IE user), and still resume-worthy I think, just for all the stuff I learned through doing it. Good to have experience, if not 100% awesome final products.

Anyway, what I'm planning to work on this break:

fixing up my team website for the new season
redesigning my personal website for nicer looks and more relevant info
learning how to mix with Ableton live
learn at least a little bit of Objective-C and Cocoa (and build something cool?)
work on several web projects including a social game and an email/text reminder service
get started on getting employed for the summer
relax

Dec 7

Orble

Playing with Processing, I wrote a little game I call Orble in a couple hours last week. Not polished, but a fun test of one's reaction speed and trackpad dexterity. Click here to get a zip file with .app and .exe versions.

Dec 1

Long time. Cool stuff.

I am doomed. This is the second blog I've had which has degenerated to "long time, no post" posts. The truth is, I don't really have time for this sort of thing, with school, and life in general.

Ironically, I'm taking time to write this post. I'm sitting in my religious studies class (about conceptions of the apocalypse, pretty cool) and wanted to give you, my avid and imaginary reader, an update on my doings.

Cool stuff:

I wrote a compiler (mostly, from a course provided stencil), which takes input in a prosaic language and outputs assembly. Awesome.
I have a Soundcloud account.
I'm in the process of better learning how to use Ableton Live, to mix things. A new and great hobby.
I've got TouchOSC and OSCulator set up for touch controls in Live.
I now have OmniGraffle Pro. Great tool for making flowcharts and whatnot.
Class is over.

Sep 8

Guess who's back

It's been awhile, and since my last post I've moved in, gone through TA training, and started classes. I've also started playing frisbee and doing team things again, which is pretty great (just got back from a 7:30AM run, for better or worse). It's great to be living with friends again, and learning things.

I'm taking two CS classes, 31 (intro to systems architecture) and 53 (linear algebra in CS). 31 seems like it'll be a good class to have taken, but it will definitely be very challenging, and I can already tell that I'll quickly grow weary with the extreme pedantry of low-level programming. Good to know what lies beneath my compiler though, I suppose... 53 will definitely be worthwhile: as the alternative to math-linear, it's supposed to be less boring and more directly applicable to CS. So far our homework and labs have been mostly composed of writing short list comprehension scripts in Python, which I think is pretty fun.

I'm also taking linguistics, which is the most precarious balance of fascinating and mind-numbingly boring I've ever seen. I think these two qualities can be directly attributed to the subject and professor, respectively, which is kind of too bad - to think it could easily be better with different instruction. Though I could easily take a religious studies class (Apocalyptic Imagination) instead, I think I'm going to stick with linguistics for now and hope it stays bearable.

Finally, I'm taking "The Meaning of Life", a course in ethical philosophy. The question which the course is based around is, what does a happy human life consist of? Happy being over a life as a whole, not as a feeling in the moment. So far we've read some of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which is verbose but very enlightening. I've wanted to take a philosophy course, and I'm happy to have found what looks like a really good one.

TAing is great so far, it's fun to be developing the mastery of a subject which comes from teaching it, and I'm really enjoying the community of fellow TAs. The best of collaboration, as I see it. It's cool to get to know Andy better too, and also to act in the class skits - I'm not much of a thespian, but I still find it fun to try my hand at it in front of the class of 300 students (including many of my friends).

Oh, I'm also auditing an Italian art/history course (Word, Image and Power in Renaissance Italy), having gone to the first lecture on a whim and being astonished by the quality of the class. Unfortunately I don't have time for the coursework with everything else, but I talked to the professors and they're fine with me sitting in on the lectures for the year. So I'll get three hours a week of Italy.

Life is grand.

Aug 19

Oh btw I'm twenty

The last few days I've been super busy, though by design and in a distinctly positive way.

I turned twenty (wahhhht) on Sunday, so I'm officially no longer a teenager. Now I have no excuse for being difficult and immature, so I'm pretty much an obnoxious adult. Or a college student, I guess that fits the bill. Either way it feels significant to be entering my third decade, and I'm excited to see what it has in store for me. In another ten years I could be anywhere -- my goal is to be happy, an indescribable combination of health, wealth, and ...stealth? Or even a psychological state involving none of the above. We'll see. I'm a big fan of "winging it", so that's pretty much what I'm doing. Sophomore year, let's go.

Speaking of, I have approximately three days left in Seattle. I fly out on Sunday, getting into Providence super late and waking up super early the next day to start a week of training for being a TA in CS015, an intro course for OO programming in Java. This is a class I took last fall, and it was by far the best class I've had at Brown so far, so I'm pumped to experience it again from a different angle. I also know a lot of people involved pretty well -- other TAs are good friends of mine, and a couple more good friends are taking the class. Should be lots of fun. Plus I'll get to know Professor Andy van Dam, the CS juggernaut himself.

But back to the three days left, I'm solidly booked with packing, friends, family, and, did I mention, a LOT of packing? How do I have this many clothes? Shit, I'm male! Hopefully I can fit all this crap into my allotment of bags. I'm going to assume I can. I already sent off my espresso machine (which I got for my birthday, by the way) with my cleats and some other essentials, so that frees (whatup Adam) up a bit of space.

This afternoon I'm going to Emerald Downs to lose some money on horses, and tomorrow I'm getting Chinese with friends, followed by attending a viewing of The Room, presided over by The Great Tommy Wiseau, a much anticipated event. I haven't written code in days, looks like I'll be finishing up summer projects back at school...somehow. I'll have even less time when the year gets in full swing, but it'll work out.

That's my catchphrase, I think: it'll work out.