SteelSkin.net - The Ramblings of Chris Nutt

Whilst it has it’s detractors I really like Cleartype, Microsoft’s Sub-Pixel Anti-Aliasing  system. Personally I prefer my text to be sharp and readable in most applications. The exceptions being DTP, Illustration Apps or print previews where font accuracy is of the highest order. Shown left is a screen shot of Opera 9, Firefox 2, IE7 and Safari 3 Beta. Personally I like Opera the most, FF looks a bit heavy, IE b0rks on the ‘'’ and Safari well just looks awful. Safari behaves nothing like any windows app, it feels like running IE in Parallels Coherence on OS X. Whilst I don’t deny that OS X does many things better, more intuitively and accurately than Windows I do find it annoying when companies just up and ignore application consistency. Again the very application I am writing this post in, Windows Live Writer, ignores any pretence of consistency. Really anything above a widget or mp3 player should stay inline with the host OS by default whether the author agrees or not. One of the key reasons Linux keeps failing to win the desktop market is everyone doing their own thing in applications. It’s hard enough to learn one new OS interface, let alone some sort of shape shifting chimera. Then again Linux isn’t alone now increasing Windows and Mac Apps just ignore consistency for the fun of it.

I am in very sunny and hot Alaska! it is freaking awesome. Jeremy and Iris are great hosts, Jeremy’s lovely parents (Loren & Linda) are putting me up. I went to UAF today and visited the Museum. They have a really beautiful place, that cost a lot, but I personally think is a great testament to the Alaskans.

Photos can be found here.

I’ve been on DA for around 2 1/2 years. It is a great source for inspiration and one of the few web communities I have really stuck at. There is a lot to like, but an awful lot of really dodgy work. Hence why it has such a reputation. If you are new to it, you might think everyone is a sexually perverted 14 year old. There are however an awful lot of very talented people and here are a few you should visit:

Belldandies Great vector artwork with a retro twist.
ArtGerm Game inspired and widely skilled digital painter.
Antifan-Real Concept Artist extraordinaire!
ResidoLancin Top class photographer.

Check out my Favs for more…

p.s. the image top right is my most popular deviation.

I recently shifted to Flickr, my gallery can be accessed either from the topbar or the recent photo on the right hand side.

Flickr I find is a very useful reasource if you want to see what product looks like in real life, get insipiration from others using the same camera or just finding cool stuff.

Hay folks, as you may have noticed I’ve been kinda quiet on here and DA. Well work has been kinda busy. I’ve managed to upgrade to the latest wordpress and tinker about with bits, but really my creative thirst was being full quenched with work so I didn’t have the inclination to blog or fart around with graphics. Things are getting back to a bit more normal as Easter is slowing things down some what. Thanks to my good friend Jason I am now reading Death Note, it’s tense interesting stuff and well worth a read. Ta ta for now.

As you may or may not know I really like the G-Shock Polygon.  Well guess what I just received one through the post. I think I just prefer the black one a bit more than this, but I like this one very much and considering I got it for a quarter of the UK street price I am a happy man.

It’s all very tech and comes with a thick multi-language manual. Luckily I just had to set my city to LON and all was fine.

Urgh, I have to remove by hand so many second spaces from word documents, in order for the hidden extra space to not be encoded into a junk character in HTML. So many people are taught when learning to type that you should use a double space after a sentence. This was correct in the past when text was manually typeset and typewriters were the standard. Even latter when DOS based Word Processors were the norm this was correct. Why not now? you may ask, simple we no longer use monospace fonts, proportional fonts are the standard and old school hacks around the inadequacies of monospace spaces are just that HACKS. So unless you are using a monospace font, please for the love of all that is good in the world STOP DOUBLE SPACING AFTER FULL STOPS.

Thank You.

I grew up with my Amiga and I still have fond memories. I always loved watching Demos, not game demos, but Demo Scene demos. Classics like State of the Art by Spaceballs and 242 by Fairlight gave me insight into computer art. They used to a way of seeing cutting edge realtime effects, in all reality that is no longer the case and in a way I like that even more. The concept is now king. I really like Conspiracy’s work. Here is a classic 64kb demo by them(I’d recommend running the real thing):