I’m doing 45 minutes of cardio (most) every day on my LifeFitness 5500 elliptical cross-trainer. Doctor’s orders. I like working out on this machine, and it’s certainly good for me, but I’ve always had a problem occupying my mind. In the past, I’ve simply listened to music on my iPod, generally a PopTarts mix (or, more recently, JPopTarts). Studying kanji and vocabulary for my Japanese class would be an ideal use of this time, but I never ordered the optional magazine stand, and it doesn’t look like they make it any more.

So, I stopped at an office supply store and bought the only non-ridiculous copy-holder they sold. Just setting it on top of the crosstrainer worked fairly well, but hid the display. I really needed it to sit above the display section, but there was no obvious way to accomplish this feat. And then, a moment of clarity:

How to attach this...
What mounting system will work?
Ah! Some gaffer tape!

If your (Mac-only) word-processing needs fit within Writer Express‘s feature list, the generally sensible UI will make it a superior alternative to Word. Within its limitations, it’s an excellent, useable program.

However, if you need table support that’s better than an ancient version of Netscape, real Word interoperability, or precision layout tools, look elsewhere. For now, at least; they’re working hard to improve the product.

Note to people with fond memories of the Mac OS Classic Nisus Writer: Express implements a subset of the old features, along with a bunch of new ones.

I got sent to Denver (okay, Longmont) for a few days to do some setup work for our office here, and the folks at Budget begged me to take a free upgrade to a minivan, to help alleviate their shortage of smaller vehicles.

Anyway, it’s got a gutless engine, poor sound insulation, and a whopping big blind spot when you’re merging, but otherwise it’s actually a pretty nice travel-mobile. Very comfortable to drive, plenty of room for adult passengers, and decent handling for its size. It’s no comparison to my Lexus RX-300, but still, a lot better than I expected.

While my Japanese class is going well so far (the pace is a bit slow, due in part to the overhead of community-college drop/add handling), I’ve found one serious annoyance: the audio CDs are crap.

There’s nothing wrong with the content; the material is presented clearly by native speakers, and the original mastering was well-done. Unfortunately, it was mastered for cassette tape, and the CDs were apparently converted from that format. How well was this done? Here’s a thousand words on the subject:

That’s what it looked like when I loaded a track into Audacity. I can crank up the gain, but then the hiss becomes objectionable, and Audacity’s noise filter introduces some rather obnoxious artifacts, even at its gentlest setting. I’ll be using these CDs until March, so it’s worth a little time and money to me to get them cleaned up. Any recommendations for a good tool?

After trying out a few types of sake and doing a little reading on the subject, I decided to gather up all of the useful information commonly printed on labels and menus, and arrange it on a double-sided 3x5 card. It was as much an excuse to play with the new version of Adobe Illustrator as anything else, but it should come in handy the next time I try to figure out what to buy at Mitsuwa.

Apropos of nothing, I thought I’d mention that the two most recently posted pictures here were resized in Photoshop CS, using the new(-ish) Bicubic Sharper resampling method, available in the Image Size dialogue box. I hadn’t seen any mention of it until about two weeks ago, and had been using Mac OS X’s command-line tool sips for quick resizing.

Bicubic Sharper is much better than the standard Photoshop resizing, sips, or iPhoto. It’s particularly good for rendered images with fine detail. I’ve been working on a Roborally tile set for Dundjinni, creating my basic floor texture with Alien Skin Eye Candy 5: Textures. Dundjinni expects 200x200 tiles, but Eye Candy renders best at larger sizes. Resizing down from 800x800 using the straight Bicubic method produced an unusable image. Bicubic Sharper? Dramatically better.

I found the tip in a discussion of photo-processing workflow, which makes sense. For a long time, photographers have been making Unsharp Mask the final step in their workflows, because if they sharpened at full size, the slight softness introduced by resizing for print or web use would force them to use Unsharp Mask again, which tends to look pretty nasty. Integrating it into the resizing algorithm takes advantage of the data you’re discarding, reducing the chance of introducing distracting artifacts.

Looks like they ripped out my old apartment building in Columbus and replaced it with something bigger and better. Good thing, too, since it burned down at least once, while I was living there (hmm, now there’s an old Usenet post I should resurrect here; I used to use it as a great counter-example to the “ban guns because they make domestic squabbles fatal” argument).

The concrete canyon Brian and I lived in before that is still there, though, and probably unchanged. Trigger-happy towing, unsafe parking, and next door to a neighborhood pool; a bunch of kids once broke into my car just to steal the change from my ashtray so they could get in. Cute girls running around, though, and our storage closet was big enough to hide a dozen illegal immigrants in. Two dozen if they were close friends.

America’s Largest Community Of Brick Homes hasn’t changed a bit. Nearly 50,000 houses based on four floorplans, so you always knew where the bathrooms were at your friend’s houses. Not the easiest neighborhood to deliver pizza in, especially in Dominos’ 30-minutes-or-free days, but the tips were always good.

As for the first home I remember, Old Powell Road is almost unrecognizable. They got rid of the sharp curves that used to send cars into the abandoned gravel pit (that, along with date-rape attempts, was the most common reason someone would knock on our front door after dark), the formerly-toxic landfill appears to be capped and made pretty, but it’s still sparsely developed. The house is long-gone, but I knew that already.

These days home looks like this:

Gamer friend Scott just discovered that the reason he was having so much trouble with PCGen under Linux was that the JVM was defaulting to a rather small heap size, effectively thrashing the app into oblivion when he tried to print.

Now, while it’s true that PCGen is as piggy as a perl script when it comes to building complex data structures in memory, it’s still fundamentally a straightforward application, and yet it exceeds the default maximum heap settings. He had plenty of free RAM, gigs of free VM, and here was Sun’s Java, refusing to use any of it unless he relaunched the application with a command-line override. Doing so not only fixed printing, it made the entire application run substantially faster. Feh.

I’d noticed a slowdown with recent versions of PCGen on my Mac as well, but Apple was good enough to compile their JVM with defaults sufficient to at least make it run completely. Sure enough, though, increasing the default heap settings makes it run faster, by eliminating a whole bunch of garbage collection.

In other words, with Java, Sun has managed to replicate the Classic MacOS annoyance of adjusting memory allocation on a per-application basis, and made it cross-platform!

PCGen is still the only major Java app I have any use for on a regular basis, although there’s another one that has recently entered my arsenal of special-purpose tools, Multivalent. I have no use for 99% of its functionality, but it includes robust tools for splitting, merging, imposing, validating, compressing, and uncompressing PDF files, as well as stripping the copy/print/etc limitations from any PDF you can open and read.

There’s another Java application out there that might join the list sometime soon, Dundjinni, but first the manufacturers have to finish porting it from Windows to the Mac…