MORE FUN. (25/11/15)

Yesterday I was reasonably pleased with finding the PhotoSpiral thingy application but it was lacking an important command…………No it wasn’t, it was me being thick. If you look very closely you will see a tiny red dot and if you click and drag then it will shift the centre of the image. This is a necessity in any of these algorithms. Usually you have to draw a selection. Those that have had a play will have given all the sliders a shove this way and that. You will have noticed that the Magnification slider does not magnify the image but it does increase the number of iterations so your image gets smaller but with many more of them.

This is always a problem for me with any software and some hardware as many of the developers/manufacturers have English as a second language; think a person like Trump but one that has more intelligence than Trump. Most of humanity and nearly all invertebrates I suspect.

I struggle with stealing and pasting HTML and just when I think I am getting there we get HTML 5. Most things are backwards compatible but the other day I found something that wasn’t. Should have written it down but that wouldn’t have helped as I use pads of plane A4 paper, write on both sides and then rest a coffee cup on them, when there is no more space, use a biro over the pencil, coffee and beer stains. An A4 pad lasts me a year but is about as much use as my Desktop on the machine. I end up with icons on top of icons and I’ve yet to find a virtual tool like a squeegee to scrape them up to one side and spread them out again.

Back to the PhotoSpiral whatsit.

Yes it’s hard to spot but does glow brighter when you click it.  I was just playing again and this is what it made.

No use on it’s own but depending on the resolution I can get out of it I can imagine having a video title shooting from the centre and stopping on a zoomed out or in road.

Having ascertained that Adobe won’t let me use Pixel Bender I downloaded Gimp and a cracker of a filter called MathMap. I know it can eat this job as I’ve seen the results. I used to use GIMP and got seduced by a free copy of Photoshop Elements 4. Elements did me for years with annual updates and I forgot about GIMP. It is still a bit tatty round the interface but then so is Photoshop. Down loading and installing was a three click job from start to finish. It knew I was on Windows 7, It knew I was on 64bit…..It knew my grandma’s shoe size and it’s free.

I wish, Oh how I wish I could be computer literate. I unzipped MathMap and sent it to my desktop. After twenty minutes I found it and opened it. I opened up GIMP; looked in my ‘C’ drive and was thrilled to find it there. I then thought all I have to do is drag the MathMap bit into the file folder called Plug-In. No. Gimp doesn’t have a plug in folder. I created a new folder called Plug In, then noticed the unzipped MathMap had a Plugin file so just dragged that into GIMP’s list of files then popped MathMap file into there. Re-booted the bloody machine and still I can’t find MathMap Droste Effect and to add insult to injury I can’t recall where I put the bloody file. It’s not where I thought I did so that is why the blasted Gimp can’t find it in Filters. I had this trouble a couple of years ago getting fonts into Photoshop. Blender is easy it doesn’t bother loading an access path, I just type the words then click on a wee box and all my fonts show up then I pick one and job done.

There is likely to be a bit of a delay before I get things sorted, I’ve got muddled up. It would be sorted much faster if I had a clue what I was doing, were better organised, educated and a bit more non thicker. I’ll have a rest, get on t’internet and ask some bugger on a forum how you do it. If the bugger is as smart as they profess to be he’ll know where the MathMap folders have disappeared to.

I guess more fun tomorrow.