It's been a while now. Both since I did anything here on my blog and since I made Opera related desktop candy. Good thing then, that I decided to brush off the ol' 3D skillz and play a little. I think it was nearly five years since I worked in Rhino, and I was wondering how much was lost on me since then. Luckily it is a bit like learning to swim - the basics stick forever. The new stuff is of course, new. And will have to be looked into. But all the shortcuts came pretty quickly, all the quirks are still quirky and the rendering takes just as much time as before. Albeit, the results are dramatically better and the rendering engine awesomely more powerful. Also something that needs a good looking into. If I find the time.
Anyways, check them out in the My Opera Wallpaper section by clicking the images below. Don't forget to leave a comment or a rating.
Having followed the excellent recipe at Frisk Design I've made many a puny png nice and crunchy. But the method works on folders only, and that is not always desirable. If you're working against a folder already containing optimized files, it makes no sense to try and crush them again. Not to mention all the time this takes. Well, it usually takes a couple of seconds, but it feels totally unnecessary. And it is.
Since Windows 7, throwing shell commands into your registry has changed a bit. For file types, you now have to hunt down HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\.ext. (AFAIK, this used to be directly at HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.ext.)
Anyhow. To make your single png crumble beneath your cursor, add a key to the .png/shell key and name it "crush". Selecting this new key, double click its default value and name it something like "Crush this PNG". Then add a new key and name it "command". Give this key's default value this baby: (On one line.)
It's getting close to that time of the year again when Opera innovates the web. In anticipation of that, I just wanted to share this little thingybingy I made for fun. Who knows, maybe it'll turn into a nice t-shirt someday?
I have recently played a bit with a really simple technique in Photoshop that produce very cheesy results. As you can see above. The principle is simple; you take one nice pose (photo or drawing, it really doesn't matter), gather some brush strokes (not too complicated, and preferrably with a decent resolution), some more complex filler shapes (experiment) and some ambient background shapes (smoke works very nicely) and free transform outlines and fills piece by piece until satisfied. See video:
It has taken me almost a year, but now it is starting to look awesome. I think there are quite a pile of bugs yet to fix, but I simply cannot hold this back any more now. The skin is inspired by the Internet Channel of the Nintendo Wii, but adopted to fit the desktop. Among things needed to be done, was to create new icons. All together, some 250 unique icons were made, and this has taken some time.
Replacing icons reveals some funky cheats used in the default skin, and anticipate my icons not working 100% in all contexts. Some icons are reused a number of places, and if the new icon does not have the same ambiguity as the default one weirdness probably will occur.
A default Opera setup should work nice with this skin, but please make sure that the "Panel Toggle" is active. (Tools - Appearance - Panels - Panel Toggle checbox). Also, I recommend enabling the "Personal Bar" and showing images only (View - Toolbars - Personal Bar, right click on the Personal Bar - Customize - Style - Images only).
Enough talk, click the image to get to the real deal. And please leave a comment. Cheerio!
Suddenly I got visitors, and I was lingering around in my underwear! Something had to be done to occupy my guests, but what? A cute kitten, perhaps? Yes! Definetely!
Here, most honored guest. Have a cute kitten:
Click on the image to get a 1600x1200px wallpaper. Click here to get a 1284x1024px wallpaper. Nag me for other sizes, or do the scaling yourself.
Being a big fan of Opera, but hating our logo is frustrating. To let off steam, I tend to play with it and sometimes the results are interesting. Here's a late take:
I quite like the simplicity of it, allthough the white outer line probably isn't the best idea. Unless the background comes with it, of course. Hm.
Taking cues from big corps forcing DRM on their users, I've come up with a little scheme to secure my pension: (Open the image to read the fine print.)
I will hang this up all around, with a little box to store the money. Then people will have to give me their money each time they read the poster.
My Opera
