Spooks Props, originally uploaded by RWDave.

Given their penchant for using Macs on “the grid” on Spooks, It was really only a matter of time before they used an iPhone or iPod Touch…

I’m always entertained by far-fetched tech on TV shows, and so when I saw this “tool” for cracking a computer’s login details, I thought I’d do a version myself!

It’s just a video, nothing cleverer than that, but the effect is exactly the same!

You can get the .m4v video file here

In the process of re-designing my room, and after a month of living in an empty box, I’ve finally got my computery gubbins set up again.

Also, this is posted direct from flickr… which I may do a bit more of in the future!

I tried two methods, one without a lightbox, and one with a home made light box, both seem to work well, although the lightbox has a distinct advantage.

Without a lightbox

You need to find yourself a window with a good amount of sunlight coming through (easier said than done in England!)

Attach the negative to a sheet of plain A4 paper and fix this to the window, I used selotape and it left a little adhesive behind, masking tape should be fine though, blue tack is better still.

Set your camera up to take macro shots, or super-macro if you have the facility and get as close to the negative as your focus will allow and take your shot(s).

How To make a lightbox

Using a lightbox has the advantage of not needing a bright day, infact bright light may be more of a hinderance than a help!

As the name suggests, a lightbox is no more complicated than a light… in a box.

The box I used was a wine bottle box with a cheap external flash unit at the bottom connected to the camera’s sync output.

A sheet of A4 placed over this with the negative on top is perfect.

Set the camera to manual mode and turn on the external flash trigger, shutter as fast as possible and with as small an aperture as you can.

Processing

These instructions are for Photoshop, I’m certain that GIMP has a very similar tool though.

The photo you import should look like the one above.

The first thing to do is to invert the colours using cmd+i (ctrl+i for windows)

Next we need to adjust the colour balance, bring up the colour balance panel with cmd+b (ctrl+b)

For Mid-tones and shadows, the numbers you want are +45, -45, -45.

For highlights, I use 0, -45, -45

The end result should look like this

That’s really all there is to it!

flickr set

I’ve uploaded a new widget a dashcode creation, naturally! The new beta is far better than the old one, and seems to be much more like a finished program.

The widget is just a styled RSS reader for the Saints news site which I thought I’d do seen as they’ve finally put a feed on their site (The only reason I like RSS is so I can read headlines on the dashboard!)

It’s in the >>Downloads<< section of the site.

The Video is a first year Uni creation for a Multimedia Authoring Software module. I’m quite proud of it, it’s possibly one of my favourite pieces of work I submitted!

In other news, I got an NIP for doing 38 in a 30mph limit country lane

I’ve also been put in charge of the local church website, which I’ve wordpressed (is that a word?) to bring it into the 21st century, so over the next few weeks I’ll probably be doing a fair bit of experimenting here, and anything that works can go on there

I’m Famous!

I’ve installed Coppermine to replace the flickr album plugin too!

The hardest part is ignoring the parts of the interface that suggest they import thing into the .wdgt package, they are clearly there to infuriate and confuse the user. The best way to change (for example) the icon, is to delete the Icon.png file in the well hidden file browser, and replace it with your own, very easy and straightforward… of course, not as easy and straightforward as clicking on the “widget icon” section, then importing what you want and the software doing all of the resizing, renaming, “regenerating” and whatnot. It feels more like you are ripping off someone elses design, rather han modifying a template. I have, thus far, left the “created in dashcode” image on the back side of the widgets I’ve played with, as I wouldn’t have bothered making them without it, but I may change this to something more suitable if i do much more, perhaps “Created in despite of Dashcode”, we’ll see!
Anyway, just another countdown timer that nobody else has bothered to do, perhaps because of the niche-ness of the market, is available on the downloads page

So, how hard can it be? If there’s a tool to take the ballache out of coding that can only be a good thing? Right? hmm….

The actual making of the widget is straightforward; you have a template for most things you’d want a widget for, and they all seem to look perfectly functional. The problems start when it comes to personalising the template, using your own images and whatnot, primarily due to it’s beta status, it has no real manual to speak of, and secondly because it suffers from many of the same flaws that make me loathe iWork, or more specifically, keynote.

The first thing i wanted to change, naturally, was the layout. I made a new background in Photoshop the same size as the one already in the template (for simplicities sake). In dashcode there is an item in the sidebar called “Default Image”, belting, change that using the helpfully marked “import” button.
Now… does that change the background? It certainly looked like the background before i changed it, I took a look at the preview of the widget and no, it doesn’t change the background. Oh well, maybe I missed something, so i go back to “default image” and my image has gone… maybe i had to “regenerate” it… fair enough, re-imported, regenerated, done much? apparently not, but atleast it’s
still there when i go back, a partial result i suppose!

It turns out, that the “default image” is what the widget shows when it’s loading, too obvious to call it a loading image i guess, don’t want any old monkey being able to design these things do we?
So eventually, after tricking the user interface into accepting a new image, I have a widget with the background changed, This is where the demons of the inspector get unleashed.

As with keynote, the inspector is only capable of editing one field at a time, which i understand if one is an image and one a text field but when they are both text, in the same font, colour and size, why can’t I just make them all 4 points smaller? And black? It can’t possibly be that difficult to code that in!

The final thing I needed to do was make the icon for it, so that it matched the theme and the
content of the widget, again, there was a sidebar icon for this, so that makes it easy!

Not so much

I ended up having to transfer it in as a file after deploying the widget as no matter how i tried, dashcode refused to understand what i wanted to do! Nevermind, where there’s a will, there’s a way, I’m sure the release candidate will work properly, maybe it’s just a different type of learning curve, who knows?

My final widget is here, I’ve submitted it to the Apple Developer Connection to see if they want to put it on the database (even if it does only have a relatively short lifespan), but I wont be offended if they tell me to cock off!
Dave

The best part of it all is that it’s not cost me anything! It’s my annual getting older day in under a month and so I have managed to get myself a present advance… only I can’t really unwrap it, but it should prove to be a great investment, so thanks Mum!