Find out if you are Mac or PC – take a fun test at SwitchToMac.com and find out which side you’re really on!

I just took the test and came out 100% Mac.

Actually it was my second attempt, the first go was very nearly, but not quite 100%. But let’s face it, “87% Mac” doesn’t look quite so impressive. So anyway, if you want to skew the results, think carefully whether you want to think ‘different’ or ‘differently’…. you’ll see what i mean. Oh, and obviously Mac users eat salad!

While you’re there, you can read my guest blog “10 things I love about my MacBook Pro” – a run-down of the ten things I like best about my laptop.

My MacBook Pro narrowly avoided disaster a little while back (see my earlier post The Luckiest Laptop in Leitrim.

I recently completed a web design project for RT Software who provide realtime graphics systems and services to the broadcast industry.

More of a face-lift than a complete site re-structuring, nonetheless they are very happy with their new look.

The site itself is built on a bespoke (i.e. not Wordpress) content management system, and the code was very clean with enough class and ID selectors to play with, so in the end I managed to give the entire site a complete make-over by changing CSS only, and then uploading a few new images that are referenced by the new style-sheet.

See : www.rtsw.co.uk

Just a quick reminder that the Broadcast Video Expo opens on the 16th February at Earls Court in London.
It’’s one of the biggest UK technology events for broadcasters, audio and video manufacturers and suppliers, and anyone interested in production, post & delivery.

And of course, don’t forget to visit Booth B24 and have a chat with our good friends at RT Software.

RT Software develops and supplies PC-based real time 3D graphics solutions for broadcasters. These solutions are aimed at sports, news, elections, interactive TV, virtual sets and for playout graphics.

Visit the RT Software site now for Real-time 3D graphics broadcast solutions.

I expect the odd bit of promotional email to arrive every now and again. But recently I’ve noticed a marked increase in emails offering web services and/or SEO, always from India, and always sent to at least four separate email addresses at this domain (contact@, support@, services@, ceo@, products@, among others – none of which even exist). Come on guys, please don’t make me set up a spam filter to look for the word ‘India’.

I can laugh about it now, but I wasn’t laughing a couple of weeks ago when the pipes burst. I’d guessed we’d frozen up during the cold snap when all the water went off upstairs, but we weren’t expecting later that afternoon to find a ten foot hole in the kitchen ceiling with a load of water pouring through it. Apart from all the great chunks of plasterboard everywhere, it was the fact that the water was pouring down directly on top of my laptop that particularly caught my attention… …read more

I recently upgraded the entire Adobe Master Collection on my Macbook Pro to the CS4 versions and earlier today Photoshop started crashing. The horror. It happened whenever I tried to change the font on a piece of text. I was highlighting the text and using the arrow keys to flick through all the fonts in the list, one by one. Several ‘unexpected quits’ later, I’d narrowed it down to one particular font that was causing problems. …read more

Red Giant Software are having a secret sale right now – ALL products 40% off. Just for the rest of today (about 11 hours left as I write this – sale ends at 11:59 PM PST).

As a big fan of Magic Bullet Looks, this was a great opportunity to upgrade to the full Magic Bullet suite.

I’ve just had a quick try out of a few of the plugins in After Effects – Instant HD 1.1 and Frames 1.0 look pretty nifty. Steady looked promising if a bit slow, but to be fair, the test footage I was trying was VERY shaky. I may try some more realistic tests later in the week.

Anyway, a big thank you to Mary and Dave at Red Giant for replying so promptly to my cheeky emails.

And also a very big thank you to Angus for phoning me earlier to let me know the sale was on in the first place.

Here’s a quick website design I recently completed for a holiday apartment in Cannes. The client was looking for a refresh of their existing site, so I designed a quick-loading page template with a sunny feel and moved over all the existing content to the new design with a few on-site search engine optimizations thrown in. Everything up and running in under 48 hours.

If you view the site in Internet Explorer you’ll see that all the boxes (including the heading banner image) have square corners, but if you use a proper browser like Firefox, you should see rounded corners. I know it’s a bit of a cop out, and I did (briefly) investigate JQuery rounded corners, but in the end I opted for a IE conditional comment to replace the heading strap with an alternate (square cornered) image so that at least the look and feel is consistent depending on which browser the site is viewed in.

I’m also now a big fan of Parallels Desktop for the Mac. While I was doing a quick check for cross-browser compatibility I was able to run Firefox and Safari and Explorer versions 6, 7 & 8 all at the same time on my laptop. Possibly the subject of a future blog post I think…

I was very pleased to get an email today from the Series Producer of ‘The Hairy Bikers Food of Britain‘ (the show is still running on BBC Two – the final 5 episodes go out next week I think). I’d provided title logo, title graphics and content maps for all 30 episodes). Anyway – this is what he said :

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I’ve recently been experimenting with Cufón text replacement, and decided to put it to use on a site I’ve been messing about with. I’d also been converting the whole thing to a Wordpress-powered site (more on that later), so it seemed to make sense to look for a plug-in to do the job.

So, the plugin is called WP-Cufon and you can get it at wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cufon/

It’s quick to install, has good documentation, and it’s easy enough to specify some rules to control the text replacement on your site.

So for example I’ve used :

Cufon.replace('h1', { hover:true });
Cufon.replace('h2', { hover:true });
Cufon.replace('h5');
Cufon.replace('#navbar a');

which replaces the font for h1, h2, h5 headings and any link text within the ‘navbar’ div with a special font of my own making. All of the subsequent styling is covered by CSS. It really is very simple to set up.

You need to convert your font first into a format that Cufon can handle – there’s a Cufon generator that does the whole thing very neatly. It also, importantly, allows you to limit usage to certain domains to protect the font from use elsewhere.

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Here’s my latest virtual set for Setanta Sports Ireland.

You can see it on some of the Magners League shows, and it’s also on air for ‘The Hub‘ with a different logo in the virtual screen.

As usual, it was built as a 3D model in Cinema 4D and then painstakingly textured up using my special secret process (which I may reveal as another blog post at some point).

Finally, it was exported as an fbx file which I loaded into tOG (by RT Software) for some final tweaks before the whole thing was zipped up and downloaded by Setanta at their end.

It was a pretty fast turnaround for this one – under a week to get it on air, with a few updates supplied after the first TX.

You can see more images here.

Conference : 10-14 September
Exhibition : 11-15 September

Although I won’t be able to make it over to Amsterdam for IBC this year, I thought I might just give a quick heads up to all you media types that my old pals from RT Software are exhibiting again this year. RT Software’s tOG 3D system is the technology behind some of my virtual studios and many of the real-time election graphics that appear on my site.

RT Software at IBC (RAI Amsterdam) : Hall 3 (3.A59)

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Be sure to watch The Hairy Bikers’ Food Tour of Britain. It’s a 30 part series that starts tonight on BBC Two at 17.15 and is broadcast every weekday over the next few weeks.

Just putting the finishing touches to the graphics for the last few episodes.

See : Broadcast Design for Hairy Bikers’ Food Tour

Read the BBC press release

In response to requests, I’ve created a new set of Weather Icons based on the popular first set. These symbols are essentially the same but are now all PNGs with transparency, so the icons themselves can be used more easily on maps and other backgrounds (the low-res image below shows the icons on some suggested colours).

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Over on the right there you should be seeing a little widget-like thing showing the weather forecast for Lovely Leitrim. It’s using my own TV graphics-style Weather Icons which you can get here.

I don’t know exactly (yet) how to make it into a downloadable widget that other people could use on their own sites, but if I get time I may investigate how to package it up. At the moment it’s just hard coded into a regular text widget. And it’s also hard coded to pick up the weather forecast for Carrick-on-Shannon, so I expect the appeal might be… er… limited.

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