Articles by Steven


Steven has written 523 articles, Page 15.

Topography Troubles

Coding and Web Design

I recently upgraded to Chrome 8 and ran into a minor problem. The text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; CSS option now causes hyphenate.js to display the hyphens in some words all the time. This, obviously, isn’t the desired effect I was going for. Because of this I turned off the optimizeLegibility option. I haven’t found any bugs or mention of this on the various sites yet. I did some more testing and found that there is subtle kerning going on, but little in the form of ligatures and other font improvements. So, for now, I’ll leave this option in my tool box to come back to at a later date.


Pardon the Dust and Debris

ZX81 Computer

I’m in the process of updating the old flat design of this site into a more dynamic one. The original site was designed in the nineties for use on GeoCities and its various requirements and stipulations. Now that GeoCities is dead and the content has been moved to better hosting, I’m taking the opportunity to migrate the site to WebAPP.


6803 Space Patrol

6803 Space Patrol by Steven Reid, on Flickr

Ran across this 1983 Class Space set while perusing Peeron. It is a pretty simple model so it was nice quick project to build and render. Unfortunately, I didn’t have part 4360 (Black Minifig Accessory Camera with Side Sight) already. Fortunately, the piece had been modeled as part of the LGEO library so I used it. Some days I think I should just give up modeling my own.


Reliving Childhood: Macross

Mind the Gap

Much to my surprise, I finally figured out one of the other cartoons I used to watch when I was Italy. Along with Daitarn 3 I remembered watching another show with a ship that accidentally pulled a city with them. Sadly, searching for such a broad term was a bit harder than I thought.



Fun with Fonts

Coding and Web Design

I decided to play around a bit and try a different font for my site. My original goal was to use something with better kerning and ligatures, but most browsers don’t seem ready for that yet. I settled on using Trebuchet MS as my new site font. It has a bit more character than Verdana and better reflects the style I was looking for. It is a generally web safe font supported by most platforms.


Halloween LEGO Fun

40012 Halloween Pumpkin by Steven Reid, on Flickr

Ran across these great seasonal models perusing Brickset. They are simple yet effective, really showing how LEGO models can shine with such few bricks. The Jack’o’lantern is just perfect and I love the use of the cheese slopes as teeth. I liked the yellow eyes of the bat. I didn’t bother modeling the ghost. It is a good model, but not enough to model.



Waterfall v2 (Updated)

Waterfall v2 (Updated) by Steven Reid, on Flickr

Okay, I went a bit overboard creating an updated version of my Waterfall with more accurate bricks and logo. I even randomly rotated the bricks to break up the monotony of the the logos. The first version with the LEGO logo was a bit too uniform.


Topography and Hyphenation

Coding and Web Design

I’m a sucker for topography, something I really enjoyed in college when using LaTeX to get really cool looking printouts. A lot of that fun was lost with I started using applications like Word that do a pretty good job of kerning and hyphenating text without you having to do anything. Using (X)HTML I often just let the browser do what it does, even if it leaves a lot to be desired. This changed today when reading A List Apart’s wonderful article The Look That Says Book.


Waterfall

Waterfall by Steven Reid, on Flickr

This is the second version of my simple waterfall experiment. I limited myself to a 4x4 plate and the bricks and colors available in LDD. I added a bit more foliage and color variation to the cliff.




Having a Few Words with Wordle

Wordle of Reid's for Fun by Steven Reid

I ran across Wordle while pursuing other Flickr photos. I was intrigued and decided to give it a whirl. I’d been avoiding installing Java on my machine due to my distaste for the poorly coded apps that tend to use it, but my desire to give Wordle a try overcame my desire to remain Java free. I ran it against my site with interesting results.


Watermelon

Watermelon by Steven Reid, on Flickr

Here is my take on LEGO Stores Watermelon Monthly Mini Model Build for July. This model screams Summer and one just didn’t seem enough. Playing around with better lighting, fog to soften light and JPEG artifacts, and a bit of focal blur thrown in for good measure.





344 Bungalow

344 Bungalow

I found a number of old models from 1969 and rendered many last year, including this one. I finally got around to rendering larger a larger version with a better background (originally it has a seam in the back). If you search for this, you'll find that I fudged the trees and used something newer.


Fun with Z-Code (aka Inform)

Mind the Gap

Okay, I’ve been a fan of adventure games, and specifically Infocom games, for most of my life. I have fond memories of playing great games such as “Planet Fall” and “Zork” when I was in high school on my C64. However, even before playing those games, I was playing and writing games on my ZX81 using a very simple adventure engine.


Fun with iOS 4

Mind the Gap

I’ve been waiting patiently to upgrade my iPod Touch to iOS4 today. Now, as a long time network engineer, IOS has always been Cisco’s CLI. So, it was a bit weird installing iOS on an Apple product. But in the end, it was worth the wait and the install. Some common issues I had with the previous


357 Fire Station

357 Fire Station by Steven Reid, on Flickr

I rendered this a couple of weeks ago and thought I’d share. This is LEGO(R) Model 357 Fire Station with Vehicles from 1973. I’d like to create a more “action oriented” version in the future, but it is pretty nice to begin with. I personally like the middle engine with the two yellow rounds. It was the reason I rendered the model to begin with.


Making My Blog CO2 Neutral, and You Can Too

Making My Blog CO2 Neutral, and You Can Too

Here’s an interesting idea, plant a tree and offset the carbon emissions produced by your blog. And, even better, you can make it happen for free! That is the premise behind Mach's grün's Carbon Neutral campaign. Just blog about their initiative and the “Arbor Day Foundation,” their partner in the US, will plant a tree in the Plumas National Forest on your behalf.


Are You a Nerd or a Geek?

Are You a Nerd or a Geek?

This funny article was tweeted by Major Nelson and it was too rich not to pass on. FINALLY: The Difference between Nerd, Dork, and Geek Explained by a Venn Diagram provides a visually comprehensive way to determine the correct usage of those oft hard to pick social epitaphs you are bound to throw my way.