frustratedpilot | Entries tagged with printer

A couple weeks ago at the Knoxville IPMS meeting, a fellow member was clearing out his closet of old periodicals and some of us got to divvying the pieces among them. When I saw that he had old issues of War Monthly and True War among them, I shamelessly scooped up as much of those as I could.

Both those magazines were influences on me, and perhaps more than I'd care to admit.

War Monthly was the product of the Marshall Cavendish publishing powerhouse, and (I felt) a good value for the combination of artwork, writing and layout work. The articles would get repurposed into volumes, and from there sometimes into whole coffee table books.

True War, on the other hand, was the product of the notorious low-budget tabloid schlockmeister and pornographer Myron Fass at Countrywide Publications. The only color content was on the cover, and the interior was made up mainly of archival or press-release photos and cut-to-the-bone prose. True to form, their presentation on the Battle of Arnhem (for an example) was slimmer in both page count and journalist prowess as the photo spread of Cornelius Ryan's book A BRIDGE TOO FAR! I got a replacement copy of an issue of True War I thought I lost in 1978 and now that I think about it, I think one of my parents could have thrown mine out in disgust.

To make a long story short, I couldn't afford as a kid to subscribe to War Monthly, and even if the option were available my folks probably wouldn't have condoned me subscribing to True War. My main go-to publisher of magazines from then was Challenge Publications (Air Classics, Air Combat, Air Progress, Military Modeler, etc.).

But I'm glad to get back these. And then I found a bunch of online sources for .pdf versions of War Monthly, so one way or another I have all the content from the get-go through to Issue 49. The series lasted much longer than that, but the later ones are very hard to find because they were subscription-only and most went to library collections.

My sister visited overday, and we gave her more of Mum's stuff and I helped replace the windshield wipers on her car.

I'm playing around with the paper model files again. I wonder about the hobby possibilities of poster printer hardware. Who can I ask about that?

I bought more Race Day packs today and it closed up much of my collection's gaps. At least the ones in the "old" set, anyway. The "new" set packs are cheaper and two of the drivers I still want are commons so I'm pretty much assured that I'll get them eventually if I keep buying packs. I'm already hitting the Law of Diminishing Returns, tho'; three of the eight cards I got today were duplicates, so if the averages keep going as seen, I'll have a load of them if I buy too many packs.

I don't so much want to complete the set as to have the overwhelming majority of the available drivers, but with a minimum of duplicates.

Meanwhile, I have to buy new ink for my printer as we need to have a lot of documents copied and run off in the near future. My unit takes two different sizes of ink cartridges (black and tri-color each), and while our favorite office supply store markets their own cartridges that are cheaper than the original manufacturers', they don't have the larger black one in their stocks. But they might have two-for-one packs of the smaller black ones.

The art of this bargain is to decide which combination of cartridges is more economic for our uses. Which means I won't just have to bring product numbers and a coupon...I'll need my calculator.

Got fresh ink in the printer now. And Office Max has a two-for-one sale on letter-sized paper of a specific type (no pun intended) so we stocked up.

Yet another chapter in the ongoing saga of taking Polish paper model scans and trying to find some worthwhile activity from them...

The aircraft carrier I acquired the other day is 1/200th scale as-is. To bring it up to 1/72nd (so I can pose my collection of airplane models on her deck) RonyaSoft ProPoster sez that by enlargening each plate to 23" wide (proportional scale) each graphics plate would take up eight legal size sheets.

If I were enlargening a 1/33rd scale plane to 1/6th (so that if somebody gave me a World Peacekeepers action figure pilot I could put him in a Hawker Tempest V fighter, for instance), that would mean a 45" wide plate and each plate would take up 30 sheets of paper.

If I wanted a 1/25th scale tank enlargened to 1/6th (so a WP tanker would be driving a Cromwell I happen to have on file), that's a 35" wide plate for 20 sheets per plate.

Whereas a 1/15th scale Volga car I've got enlargened to 1/6th (I've got my excuse) would mean a 21" wide plate and only eight sheets per plate.

I'm gonna need some ink.

Today first thing when I get up I hear from my folks that family friend Jessica is having problems with her printer and her digital camera, and she wants me to come over and help. Turned out it wasn't really a problem as such...just the usual fact that computers are very logical and sophisticated idiots. But I got her systems back running, and she gave me a glass of iced tea and a file cabinet she wasn't using.

I am taking apart a paper blob that is strangling my inbox. I'll need to get a box of hanging folders.

A sort of postscript to This Very Old Post: I've been going over Rapid Library with a fine-tooth comb since I noticed that they have a huge load of old Maly Modelarz content. The main problem is that the folks who have added these files to the Library didn't bother to identify their contents, or did so in a confusing manner. That and there's no way to sort the search results. So I've been cross-referencing what I've seen on screen versus hard copies from various sources.

A lot of this content, I've already downloaded from other on-line sites. But others haven't been seen in years and I'm wondering if I should scarf them now for future projects.

*) Dad somehow succeeded in getting the lady's analogue channels back the way they were, but still no digital success yet.

*) Another Job Fair in Knoxville--standing room only and just double the number of participating businesses as the last one. I let them have my resume to scan, so it's not totally hopeless, but I don't know if I'm going to bother with any more of these for a while.

*) Yesterday, in Morristown, Moonshine smoked a Mustang GT at a traffic light. Good going!

*) I ate the last of Sunday's Monkey Bread.

*) I'm experimenting again with the idea of home-brew DVD case covers and liner note sheets. I got a 10-pack of slim cases at Big Lots and since I already have a design template, all I'd need would be legal sized paper for printouts. But I want to design more dummies beyond the one I'd done earlier. Perhaps I'll go through my old LJ entry headers for spurious titles and concoct dummies from them.

Got my printer back from the repair shop and gave it a couple test pages. It's working better than it had for years.

So now I have some letters to write. :/

FP

Sagittarius Horoscope for week of July 17, 2008

It's like you've stumbled upon the Cosmic Lost and Found Office, Sagittarius. Whether or not it happened "by mistake" is irrelevant: It's an opportunity to recover good stuff that prematurely disappeared from your life. But keep in mind that your valuables may be mixed in with abandoned and forgotten junk, both yours and other people's. You might initially feel discouraged at the prospect of having to wade through all that meaningless dross in order to locate your treasures. Don't give up. Your diligence will ultimately be rewarded.

Funny, I was in Wal*Mart tonight and was looking over the bargain bin of DVDs and saying to myself, I'd have to dig through those all night before I found anything I'd think would be worth the effort.

(What I need is a mondo-sized e-book reader with Leonard Maltin's guidebook loaded into it.)

Instead of a movie I bought two packs of the latest expansion of the Wizkidz Pirates game "Fire & Steel". I beat the odds by getting ONE Yankee ship. (Under the laws of distribution, it should be a one in four chance.)

On the morrow, I shall sally forward and seek out the repair shop for my printer. I hope I have better luck with that than with my watch.

FP

...I finally got my 2007 Tax Refund. Not the Stimulus payment--the refund I should have gotten months ago.

Forgone conclusion #1) Fix the printer.
#2) New monitor.
#3) Get my watch checked up on. (The battery went last week. It's been three years.)
#4) If there's anything left over...another pair of slacks.

I'm still not counting on the Stimulus check. I've heard they've run their course.

FP

Today, I found a repair shop that handles printers...who told me a service call starts at around $40. Which I don't have, cause we just spent $70+ on the new ink cartridges for the printer in the first place!

We can still use my Mom's printer...and there is the option to just get a new one. But the glitch on this one looks to be a simple matter and if I knew how I could probably fix it myself.

I think the repair shop visit can wait a couple months. It just galls me that I just changed the cartridges and can't get any use out of them now.

FP

Hey.

Utility crews are at work on our road east of us. I think they might be setting DSL lines in the overhead wires. If so, then a lot of my problems with the state of my connectivity may be solved.

And I won't be visiting the library (or Stanley in Kentucky) as often. :/

Ran out of black ink on my printer today. Since the yellow had already gone from the color cartridge, it was high time to replace both, and stock up on cartridges for Mom's printer as well. We went to Morristown for those and some ledger pads and envelopes.

Once I got back, I changed the cartridges in my printer and attempted to do the alignment--twice--and the printer wouldn't respond. I think it's a mechanical problem, as there is a clicking noise when the print head is being moved about. I haven't needed to service this printer in a long time. So long that the last place I did get it worked on went out of business. So if I want it fixed either I'll have to ask around for a repair shop or learn how to do it myself. *sigh*

FP

This will be the default front cover for my personal home-made DVD case inserts. I found it in a Q.M. Dabney bookstore catalog; the artwork was made for the official history of the Naval Air Technical Training Command in World War Two.

A couple weeks ago, I made up some DVD case cover sheets for Sempai Mike, like I did for my other buddy Stanley. Over the weekend I put together the simplest of dummies for future versions.

It's easier to describe the dummy than to host it on my Yuku account, as Yuku would shrink it. Since the default with my graphics program is 72 pixels/inch, the overall dummy is a rectangle 780 x 520 pixels in size. There is a three-pixel thick border on the rectangle, and to mark off the spine there are one-pixel thick lines running vertically at pixel #370 and #409. Thus, we have a front cover, a back cover and a spinal "gutter" between them.

I'm having a fit of writer's block about forging on with making specific covers. I don't have actual cases to fill yet, or a program I really want to give tribute to. I priced slimpacks at Big Lots yesterday: ten for $4. I think I said it before, but if I could find multi-disk packaging, I'd buy them rather than slimpacks.

Just the same, I'm staring at a blank page and trying to decide what I want to fill it with.

FP

As a by-product of my usual chaotic research addiction logic chains, I found out that I couple fonts I have on my computer (and I suppose, more than just those--I just haven't looked that hard yet) will support Japanese--not just kana, but kanji!

So I'm thinking about various ways I can use these fonts to expand my know-how of Japanese writing in general and kanji in particular. As the kanji seem to be arranged in Japanese alphabetical order (niku ["meat"] is only a few characters from nichi ["day"] for an example), I might make some actual headway.

Of course, there are about 4000 characters in the set, so I doubt I'll learn all of them. I've only been studying Japanese twenty years--with no formal courses.

FP

1) A conversion of the Gear Krieg mecha stats so the pieces can be played in Flames of War. I may post my findings here.

2) I've figured out how to create and print out DVD jacket inserts! Just did a set of four for a RL friend. He had transfered some anime he had from VHS to DVD. I may make some generic ones for my own uses. I found a company over the past week that has 5-in-1 packs, and I'll want a bunch of those.

I thought that by downloading the files to my mother's computer, I could print them out any size I wanted to. I can't. The version of Adobe Reader only allows prints at 100%.

I reverse-engineered the graphics using the PRINTSCREEN function, so my LViewPro could rearrange them, and then I did a roundabout effort to get the new files on her compy...and found of that she has no graphics programming on her computer that can handle the new files.

I can solve everything by simply buying a new ink cartridge for my own printer.

I'm too smart for myself and also too cheap.

FP

Hey.

Not much to tell, other than I moved my mother's compy to my desk in order to hook the printer up to it. It's operational, and one of the first things we printed was a contract from one of Mom's publishers. Her first book is to be reprinted in 2006. More details when they become official.

For those of you who may be keeping track, or just want to buy a nice book for your girlfriend or even your mother...her titles in print (and their respective e-publishers...Print-On-Demand copies are also available of a few of these through the publishers):

* Cold Night Beauty (Hard Shell Word Factory)
* Dearly Beloved (Hard Shell Word Factory)
* Diamond in the Rough (Awe-Struck)
* Finishing Touch (Hard Shell Word Factory)
* Funny Business (Awe-Struck)
* The Hardest Step (Awe-Struck)
* Once Again a Princess (Hard Shell Word Factory)
* Time of Possession (Hard Shell Word Factory)

FP

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Stephen R Bierce

Frustrated Pilot

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Page Summary

Of Conflicting Visual RNA Genomes In My Legacy Reading Material
Recycling
Smart Shopping And End Games
License To Print
Titan At Play
Tech. Support.
Where The Paperless Meets The Paper
A Mess Of Updata
Fit To Print, Again
And This Week's FreeWill Astrology
Something I Never Thought I'd See
News Unfit To Print
At Least One Step Forward, At Least One Step Back
Artwork Courtesy The U.S. Navy
Blank Page.
Useful Discovery?
Geekish Stuff I'm Doing
Project Pitts
Computer Update of Sorts

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Pilot's Log

Where Very Little Happens

Entries tagged with printer

Of Conflicting Visual RNA Genomes In My Legacy Reading Material

Recycling

Smart Shopping And End Games

License To Print

Titan At Play

Tech. Support.

Where The Paperless Meets The Paper

A Mess Of Updata

Fit To Print, Again

And This Week's FreeWill Astrology

Something I Never Thought I'd See

News Unfit To Print

At Least One Step Forward, At Least One Step Back

Artwork Courtesy The U.S. Navy

Blank Page.

Useful Discovery?

Geekish Stuff I'm Doing

Project Pitts

Computer Update of Sorts