Ryan Collins

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Tag: stopmotion

  • A whole lot of Apple and more – This Geek in Review for 31 Jan 2020

    A whole lot of Apple and more – This Geek in Review for 31 Jan 2020

    A whole lot of Apple nostalgia for this week. Does Apple announce every major product in January? First up is the 10 year anniversary of the iPad. I have my thoughts from 10 years ago. It’s funny reading stuff that I wrote ten years ago. The iPad was the first (and so far, last) device that I have ever pre-ordered from Apple. I miss the lines that used to form at the Apple store for major releases. The iPad release was huge. There other retrospectives on the iPad for your perusal.

    One comment that I read about the iPad has really stuck with me. It was the last big device announced by Steve Jobs, and the commentator mentioned it’s the product that has suffered the most from the lack of Steve Jobs. The iPad has not come close to reaching its potential. Apple is pushing the keyboard attachment for most iPads, making the iPad look more like a Surface Tablet or laptop than a futuristic device. I’m all for reading articles on using the iPad for productivity, but the number of hoops one has to jump through does not bode well for getting work done. There are a number of features that Apple needs to add:

    • Multiple user support
    • Copy individual text from any app. There have been a number of times I’ve wanted to copy some text, but there isn’t away to do it
    • The ability to have a multiple item clipboard. Once you can store several items at a time in a clipboard, it’s hard to go back.

    Also, 36 years ago this month Steve Jobs unveiled the first Macintosh. I don’t remember the announcement or hearing much about the Macintosh, I was too busy playing on my uncle’s Color Computer. Christmas of 1984 is when I got my Atari 800XL. Most people nowadays remember the Super Bowl ad:

    It is also the twentieth anniversary of Internet Explorer 5 for the Mac. What was amazing about IE5 is that it was anchored in technologies that were bleeding edge at the time, such as cascading style sheets. The public beta of OS X hadn’t been released yet, but Microsoft really nailed some of the features of the first OS X’s Aqua interface.

    For those still rocking an old Mac, you may have noticed that you can’t set the year to 2020. Well, there is a control panel that will help you with that. This affected me on my Macintosh SE/30 running System 7.1. The operating system supports later dates, it’s just that the default date control panel won’t let you set a year past 2019.

    The stop motion skills are strong with this one

    I can’t wait to stay in an Atari hotel. I’m hoping they install a 2600 in every room.

    If you’re going to go, then go out in a blaze of glory. The Mount Vesuvius eruption was so hot, one man’s brain turned to glass..

    And the next time you are entertaining, how about throwing up your own vj

  • In honor of The Lego Movie I present Ohio Dan and the Silver Brick of Doom

    Back in 1999, my brother and I put together a Lego stop motion movie.
    Ohio Dan and the Silver Brick of Doom. I had to laugh at the
    beginning of The Lego Movie since the beginning scene and a couple of the
    lines reminded me of Ohio Dan.

    The pictures were taken with a Sony Mavica floppy disk camera at a
    whopping 640×480 resolution, with us pretty much making up the story as we went
    along. I can’t remember what software we used though. The credits said
    Made with Macintosh, so in 1999 that would be the Avid movie software
    that Apple was bundling with Macs at the time (iMovie wasn’t until
    October of that year). I had just learned that there are pickles called
    sweet gherkins, which I thought was hilarious, so that had to be the
    name of the villain. Our protagonist was a parody of Indiana Jones.

    The resultant movie still makes me chuckle. 🙂

    Stopmotion is such a neat storytelling format, and it’s relatively easy
    to do. Especially with all the software and digital cameras that are
    available now. In ’99 we had to juggle floppy disks. Sometimes the disk
    would go bad and we would have to redo the shots. There was no frame of
    reference on what the previous shot was (no onion skinning) so you just
    kind of guessed. An old iPhone or iPod touch is enough to get started.

    Maybe someday we’ll complete the story.