Jan 232012
Jan 152012
I have finished cropping out the scans of all my OverPower cards. It took about 36 hours to scan them all in and probably about 60 hours to crop them all. The OverPower cards have rounded corners and I don’t like to have them showing up on my website because it’ll either be transparent or white.
Luckily, with Photoshop CS 5, I can fill in the missing corners with Content-Aware deletion. I created many Actions to help me automate this process but it still took a while as the process was never perfect. Cropping out the images from the scans were also pretty easy with Photoshop’s Crop and Straighten Photos tool. Again, it wasn’t perfect because some of my scans had cards that were too close to each other. In then end, all of the cards (minus about 50 of them) are processed and ready to be created into PNGs for the OverPower website.
Photoshop doesn’t have a nice tool to batch ‘Save for Web’ on directories with sub directories, so it was a manual process to select each folder for exporting.
And here’s where OptiPNG comes into play. After creating any (regularly visited) PNG for the web, I always run it through OptiPNG to shrink it down further. I don’t understand the algorithms behind it but it works. OptiPNG gives you an option to select optimization levels, with the -o [0-7] flag. Zero being nothing, 7 being sufficiently optimized. Basically, these levels sets up parameters for the program to brute-force compress the PNG file and finds the best type of compression.
Jan 072012
I find it really weird that the inkjet printer I own (Brother MFC-5490CN) doesn’t print properly with the drivers provided on Brother’s website. I tried every possible setting tweak with Photoshop but the colours always came up darker.
So today I reverted to the default Windows 7 provided drivers and my prints look amazing. You’d think that using the most up to date drivers provided by the manufacturer would yield the best results.
As some of you may know, I own a Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro phone. The phone is fully unlocked and rooted, including bootloader privileges. I received a notification this morning about an update to the Android build to 4.0.2.A.0.58.
The update required Windows for the Sony Ericsson PC Companion software to push the update. Update took about 10 minutes and went smoothly. However, after updating, the phone was un-rooted and required me to run the zergRush script from DooMLoRD to root the phone again. The update also pushed back a ton of applications that I had previously removed. Apps such as the Facebook sync, Chinese/Japanese keyboards, etc. The update also pushed back the bootanimation.zip that shows the Fido boot screen when the phone starts up. This required me to go through them and re-delete them all but it wasn’t an issue.
I haven’t had time to see what’s new with the update but one thing that I really like is USB device support. I used to have to load modules with busybox insmod but it looks like the phone has those modules now and I won’t have to load them. With a simple USB-OTG (USB On-The-Go) adapter, I can plug in keyboards and mice to my phone. It’s actually pretty neat to see a cursor on the Android desktop. Keyboard is extremely useful as most of my passwords are partially formed through my Yubikeys. It doesn’t look like USB keys work by default. It also doesn’t seem to like things that draw too much power.
EDIT:
There’s a screenshot button (power off menu)!
