Field Notes
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Thoughts on Vimeo Advanced for Live Streaming
Took on a job to live stream something I didn’t want to hosting on my own social platforms [the village’s annual cow-running is not for everyone], so I opted for a Vimeo Advanced subscription. At €115 + VAT for a month it wasn’t free but it didn’t break my budget. On paper, it made sense:…
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Photobook Layout & Print – Best Options for a Pro in Spain
TL;DR Long, high-quality wedding albums (90–190 gsm paper) Lightroom Classic Book Module + Blurb Best for 100–200 page albums Design directly from RAW files Seamless round-trip editing Excellent quality, sensible pricing Costs: Blurb pricing varies by size/paper; no extra software cost beyond Adobe subscription Short, premium-feel books (240–368 gsm cardstock) Export JPEGs + Saal Digital…
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Exporting JPEG Spreads from a PDF from the command line (macOS)
[Sorry, but I’m assuming you have some basic knowledge of the command line!] Because I’ve cut back on Adobe subscriptions, but needed to export a PDF book’s spreads to JPEGs.. Bit of faff with the ChatGPT monster and came to this two step solution. This solution requires Poppler and Imagemagick (and comfort using Bash or…
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Fixing source clips’ timecode to match actual time
“Aaaaarg – the timecode on my source clips doesn’t match the actual time they were shot!” If your camera date/time was accurate, you can fix the timecode by transcoding the source files based on their actual creation time (as saved to your SD/XQD/SSD card in-camera). You’ll need to run some scripts. This solution is from…
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Favourite Midjourney Parameters
Repeat Function As it says on the tin. Get x times 4-up variations –r 10 Describe Function Get Midjourney to describe what it “sees” in an image /describe [then upload your reference image] Style Reference Style Reference (needs 1-3 reference URLs space separated) –sref [URL of image you want to copy] [another URL] Style Weighting (0-100) –sw…
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Happy to be back on macOS after two years on Windows (10)…
…two years of enforced grumbling. [Use was enforced, not the grumbling.] Very happy to be back. But there were a few things I liked about Windows… Clipboard history. [Windows] + [V] Miss this. There are plugins for macOS, but a built-into-the-OS solution would be much better. Right-click to open a folder with Adobe Bridge (better than…
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Pixel-, and brain-, friendly grid for 1280×720 HD InDesign documents
As if by magic, you can get a 12 col x 7-row grid of nearly square sections on a 20px gutter/margin layout. Over a 5px under-grid. In an 16:9 ratio HD document. The main sections in the layout grid are 85x80px. Tidy as.
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A website maintenance page optimised for user experience
What a lovely little thing to add to a downtime message. My favourite online UX course provider added a game of minesweeper to their maintenance page. Took my mind off the wait and informed me when the site was back online. [Although I didn’t notice the update.] A good user experience indeed. Masterly even :D.
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Alpha Bravo Charlie alphabet for Spanish
Here, below, is a current Spanish radiotelephone/radiophonic spelling alphabet. There’s not an official one to be found – at least nothing up-to-date – so I’ve cobbled one from a couple of sources as well as recent experience. No hay equivalente oficial español al alfabeto radiofónico del OTAN, pero de las varias que he encontrado Wikipedia…
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A Fabulous 21st Century Helvetica Alternative
Inter is a very complete, modern, free (open source), Helvetica-like font. It comes in regular ‘static’ font weights and variations (18 styles) and as a new-fangled dynamic Variable Font; a single typeface with variable width and slant metrics. Plus it’s loaded with features like contextual alternates, tabular numbers, fractions, case alternates, ligatures (discretionary ones too),…
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WP Forms Lite is a spam magnet
I wanted to try a free WordPress contact form plugin. WP Forms Lite seemed very popular – with 5,000 positive reviews. Unfortunately, it comes without any type of spam protection. My contact form was found by the spammers and boy did my inbox suffer. WP Forms Lite is a terrible spam magnet. I’ve now reinstated…
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Spaces doing strange things in your HTML? Check your non-printable unicode characters.
A couple of weeks ago we found this strange problem in an email newsletter: random spaces between words – clearly visible in the source code – were disappearing or very narrow in the rendered email. Turns out that, somewhere in our collaborative workflow, spaces were being added as the Unicode character for ‘NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE’.…
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Simple, reliable local WordPress development on macOS. 2020.
Is *AMP-stack web [design and] build is what you do? [Hacking WordPress!] You need a local dev environment. You need and want your dev environment to be a fuss-free, stable, reliable and long-term partner. The thing about the options I’ve used to now (macOS’ built-in Apache web server, MAMP Pro, VVV) is that they’ve failed…
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Fat-cat apps on small SSDs
Oh my. Five per cent of my hard drive (8.5 GB) was taken up by Microsoft Office applications. 2GB just for MS Word. Yeowch. Apple’s built-in Notes.app is 16MB. Compare.
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How to crop and resize images for the web, without Photoshop, and for free
For a non-pixel-monkey, adjusting a high-resolution stock image for use in a website at a specific pixel size/aspect ratio and to a limited filesize is trickier than it sounds… Three separate functions are required cropping something compositionally decent to the correct proportions resizing the image pixel data down (never up!) to the required size compressing…
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Prettier underline on text links
Funny post about Comic Sans’ing pointless or snarky comments over on CSS tricks. It’s a very amusing idea. However, when looking at the originating article “SNARKY COMMENTS IN COMIC SANS” I noticed their lovely text links. Chrome inspector to hand, I found the CSS declaration, cross-referenced text-decoration-color back on CSS Tricks and learnt that text-decoration…
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Fixing HTTPS on DreamHost with Cloudflare
One solution to fix an ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH error
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Keep your lights bright and clean [5000º K clean]
[Update – a kind reader pointed out that using regular Daylight bulbs as I suggest may very well not be good enough. If your work is colour critical you’ll need to control your lighting more and exclusively use proper ISO 3664 accredited D50 light bulbs. If colour is critical to you you really should also…
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About Pantone Solid Coated vs Uncoated colours and on avoiding Pantone Color Bridge Uncoated swatches
Pantone, Solid as a Rock?
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Fix missing Pantone swatches in InDesign/Illustrator
First problem beware the Pantone/Adobe swatch search box! The first thing to check – is the swatch actually missing – or is it just difficult to find*… There’s a long-standing, horrible, horrible bug in the swatch search field. Say, for example, you want to add Pantone 542, you’d assume that typing 542 in the search…
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Alphabetically sort any text in macOS
Quickly sort any text in macOS. Original info from an old post over at macosxautomation. Maybe a few years old but content still relevant to macOS Mojave (10.14). Only difference is that Services are now “Quick Actions”.
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Google owns .dev
Don’t use the .dev TLD (any more) for local dev work. Use .test instead. Google now owns/controls the .dev TLD, Chrome and Firefox are forcing HTTPS connections and local dev work is now at least tricky using the old localhost-dev-site on a .dev TLD hack. Per RFC 2608, Section 2, .test is one of only four TLDs guaranteed never to be allocated.…
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Official Microsoft VMs for IE8 through IE11 and Edge
Legitimate Microsoft Windows virtual machines to test legacy and current MS browsers for VirtualBox, Vagrant, VMware, HyperV and Parallels.
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CSS animations and performance
Very few CSS animations are cheap in performance terms. Anything that causes the layout process (AKA reflow in Gecko browsers) is bad. The more complex your page the worse the performance hit. But – these four are apparently particularly cheap (and often GPU assisted): translate(_n_px, _n_px); scale(n); rotate(_n_deg); opacity: 0…1; (edited) Read more: * developers.google.com/…/design-and-ux/…/animations-and-performance *…
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User onboarding teardowns
With a good WordPress onboarding teardown: how wordpress onboards new users
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Desktop browser chrome as responsive Sketch symbols
Cramming designs into the generous default canvases of Sketch* is not always a good idea. Here are four responsive Sketch symbols – Chrome, Firefox and IE on Windows and Chrome on macOS – to further limit your design window. Design for your customers, not yourself! Download Sketch the file: Desktop-browser-chrome.v1.1.sketch *Sketch default desktop option is…
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Batch setting the correct time and frame number on 35mm scans in Lightroom
Scans of my 35mm film shots always come back from the minilab both numbered in reverse order and with the scan time as the only date. Alles Not in Ordnung. If they all have the same timestamp – then they will order by filename. We need to reset filename and timestamp. Both settings can be changed…
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Installing Adobe Creative Suite (CS5) on macOS Sierra
I am actually still using Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5) at home. Recently I’d updated to a more recent iMac and found it impossible to re-instal Design Premium. Was using the official disk image – freshly downloaded from my Adobe account. This was the pesky error message: “Install.app” can’t be opened. You should eject the disk image.…
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General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and email
New Europe-wide regulations are arriving in a year or so… This will have enforceable impact on any company sending marketing emails to or within the EU. Enforceable as in these are EU regulations, not directives, and there are potentially very large fines at stake. Main points I can see opt in must be explicitly requested by the…
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Patternify (for repeating patterns not repeating paternity)
‘Cos I forget where I find these things – and as far as Base64 pattern generators go this one’s a doozy. An old doozy, but a doozy, nevertheless.
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Search multiple tags with WordPress
There’s plenty of backend solutions and plugins available – but if you just want to keep it simple; type your known tags into the URL bar with a “+” joining them (don’t forget the “/tag/” part): example.com/tag/cats+dogs/