Tuff Nuts

Sunset at USYD

Sunsets rock. That was a pretty bad day but sunsets are always spectacular. (Technical: So I blew out the contrast a bit. I don’t care. It’s taken on a 4MP digital camera, okay? I can do whatever I want to the photos it takes… I want some HDR gear so I don’t have to :P)

RJ-59 crimp connectors

I was contending with the first example image below (left) this week. Why on earth does a crimp connector need SIX SEPARATE PIECES??

Pin, connector, sleeve. You don’t need two washers (rubber, metal) and a part-conical metal ring to crimp something in place. WES components sent it to us and I’m so convinced they must have sent the wrong thing because I have absolutely no idea how anything is meant to crimp into place inside that thing. There isn’t even a sleeve to crimp. There’s a screw-on connector that does absolutely NOTHING for cable tension. Utterly useless. And you can’t crimp the barrel because there’s a die-cast metal screw inside it, isn’t there. And even if you had enough strength/a big enough crimp tool to manage that, all you’d succeed in doing would be crushing things and the connection would suck. I say this having tried on the part-cone which proceeded to quite literally shatter into fragments. Wow I love crimp tools, they exert so much force without appearing to, it’s hilarious!

But, whilst speaking of cables, Madison Technologies get a good rap. They’re cost effective and ridiculously fast with their turnarounds (regrettably so fast they wouldn’t wait for a courier, insisting on sending their own — but it was less than quoted, so that’s not so bad). Uhh, they do custom cables amongst other things. Good stuff. Ordered late Friday afternoon, the guy said he’d do it first thing Monday, and it was despatched by before lunchtime (which was when I called to give them our courier details, only to discover someone had already left!) Awesome service.

More on supplied graphics for the web

I ranted about crappy supplied creatives a little while back, and I’m doing so again.

Only this time it’s clueless marketing people, not graphic designers. The problem is they’re not even bothering to ASK for quality. If I get another badly compressed JPEG or GIF image too soon, I might just go completely postal in the general direction of the person responsible. So what, it’s the web/video? Video, in case people hadn’t noticed, isn’t exactly low-resolution anymore (even if you’re broadcasting in, erm, “pretend HD”) so it’s hardly as though a 200 pixel-wide GIF image is always going to suffice there, either.

Irrespective of how crappy your broadcast compression is, the quality of some JPEGs that come through is infinitely worse.

This isn’t just me being a purist. It costs real time. Every time I create something that uses one of these monsters, I’ll probably spend at least half my time cleaning up the crap. Why? Because I’m about to compress it again and it’s impossible to edit losslessly, so even if it looks acceptable in Photoshop, if I’m going to get it consistent with the rest of the graphic and/or compress to a reasonable level, it’s going to suffer. Bleh.

People are stupid. Vector formats aren’t that hard. They’re easier, it’s so much harder to break a vector graphic. I’ve tried using Illustrator to trace logos in stupid formats in the past, and that works quite well. Just that my PC at work has a pathetic motherboard, and so I can’t have HyperThreading enabled or it constantly crashes (yeah, tried new BIOS, etc. No luck.). And so Illustrator is nearly impossible to use, feeling heavier most of the time than Photoshop does.

I love coming home and creating things for here. Firing up the GIMP in about 5 seconds, launching Inkscape instantly. Open-source rocks.

Mmm rant quota filled for a couple of days. I feel better now.

College Romance

Apologies for crappy lighting. Feel free to leave own captions in comments!