"To start and not finish is worse than not starting at all." It’s a saying that I came up with a few months ago to motivate myself to finish things; at the time it was in relation to a project I’d started almost a year ago to the day, but after writing those few words down on paper they’ve served me far beyond my expectations.

If you’re like me you’re full of ideas, the world is a giant oyster just dying to be taken on and whilst you have that fleeting moment of passion; that wonderment of change you could inflict upon everyone there seems nothing less important in the world. Yet as time moves by the idea and your work begins to fade, excuses are made to your own conscience and before you know it the only change you’ve made is the calendar on the wall as another year has passed by, wasted to the grinding wheel of life. That once possessed feeling of passion that consumed you at conception has blown away like the seeds of a thistle in the breeze.

For me I quite often go beyond the birth of an idea and follow it through infancy, the excitement of something new in my life, a challenge that might require research or the learning of a new skill fuel the desire to continue in a new found quest. It’s once foundations are laid and challenge becomes chore that a point far too common tips in favour of a new TV show or the latest xbox game, and with that begins the rapid decline in will. From time to time I may revive the project in small spurts but it’s never the same commitment I showed in the beginning, it’s lost that shiny-new-idea-lustre and pretty soon it will be replaced with the next big idea or just shear complacency with the world and current life situation.

Sometimes I think I’m actually scared of going through with anything from start to finish, which is odd because you would think to create, or rather to complete a creation could bring such joy, yet I see it as fear. Is it the fear of rejection? Will no one appreciate the effort, will I be mocked or worse yet, criticised? If only we could outsource our minds in the same way corporations do their dirty work of call centre duties. Let’s be honest though, that’s just being lazy, and would you really be willing to watch someone turn your idea into a reality and take the credit? I know I wouldn’t.

So how do you maintain that original feeling of passion, that yearning desire to make a difference? To be honest I don’t think there is a definitive answer that can encompass everyone. In-fact I don’t think there’s even one answer that works in every situation, but I do believe it has a lot to do with inspiration. To find one’s muse in their work is a driving force beyond comprehension. Think of what you’re doing and who it will impact, how it may help someone be it yourself or others and how that will make you feel. Regardless of your project there will always be someone to benefit from its outcome and will appreciate the effort and dedication you’ve shown to accomplish its conclusion. Talk to people about it, find someone that understands you and confide in them. There’s nothing more inspirational than sharing your goals with someone you care about and having them reciprocate your passion to achieve.

I guess when it all comes down to it I’m writing this as elaboration on my own quote as further inspiration to myself. I don’t want to wake up in twenty years time and look back thinking I’d been too lazy to have at least tried, wondering where my life had gone and what could have been had I just finished off what I’d started. It’s always easier to make excuses and lay blame but really you only have yourself to scold. So if you’ve started on something, be it a tree-house for your kids, a commitment to that special person in your life or a new satellite launching mechanism, see it through, contribute! If you get halfway, or even ninety percent of the way and stop you may as well have not started in the first place because… “To start and not finish is worse than not starting at all.”

For any of you that weren’t already aware myself and a friend, Julian, make a little video podcast called “The Cooking Show“. We’ve just finished Episode #8 where we take some left over KFC and turn it into the most delightful risotto you’ll ever experience! No, I’m being serious it really is tasty!

Check it out:
Running Time: 30mins | File Size: 120MB | File Format: .h264
iTunes | Direct Download | RSS

Hidden away in OS X’s Utilities folder is an application; Terminal is your doorway to the UNIX underbelly of Apple’s operating system. Personally I spend enough time mucking about in there that I moved the application to my dock but it wasn’t until I installed Ubuntu on a PC at work that I discovered something that can make life a little easier when working in Terminal land; colour!

Both Mac OS X (10.4) and Ubuntu utilize the bash command line interface (CLI) which has the fantastic ability to be coloured in any way you desire. Now before we get too far ahead of ourselves I’m fully aware that there is the option in OS X’s Terminal application to modify the foreground and background colours of the window itself; what we’re about to do is give different colours to files based on their type. eg. Directories in blue, symbolic links in pink, etc.

So how do we bring the wonderful world of colour to our screens? It involves setting some environment variables in your Terminal’s profile file that tell it what should be in what colour. You’ll see below a screencast for doing so but in case you want to print out the instructions here they are:

Instructions:

• Open up Terminal, you’ll find it in your Applications/Utilities folder by default.
• Edit your bash profile to add some environment variables

  	sudo pico ~/.bash_profile

• Add these environment variable lines

  	export CLICOLOR=1
  	export TERM=xterm-color
  	export LSCOLORS=ExFxCxDxBxegedabagacad

• Close and save your changes (Ctrl-X, then Y)
• Restart Terminal and now try typing

  	ls /

• It’s a different world!

The three lines beginning with “export” are our environment variables, the most important of these is the LCSOLORS. This variable tells us what type of file/folder should be in what colour. You can get a full list of the colours and how to set these by looking through the “ls” man page by typing man ls in Terminal. Essentially it boils down to every two letters representing a certain file or folder type; the letters represent the foreground and background colours and if they’re a capital it means the bold version of that colour.

The Terminal is an exciting and wonderful way to use and learn about your Mac. I highly suggest you take a look around at some introducing tutorials on the Internet if you haven’t had much of a chance to understand what it does. For those of you like me that have used it for so long and never known about this I hope you don’t feel as silly as me!

So we all spend countless hours at work home stumbling our way through the Inter-Ma-Nets while we’re waiting for that important email; granted the majority is crap but every now and then you come across a diamond in the rough…

So I thought to myself what better way for me to write quick easy blog entries perhaps some of you out there would be interested in them too.

This time we’ve got a little bit of an “Entertainment” theme…

• Tales From Earthsea (link)
  I’m not sure how I didn’t know about this one earlier! Coming out soon is the latest film from Studio Ghibli (The people behind Spirited Away & Howl’s Moving Castle). As always the the imagery looks beyond beautiful; if you’re not a Japanese Animation (Anime) person try one of the Studio Ghibli films and allow yourself to be lost in the beautiful art of story telling.
   
• High Res Transformers Pics (link)
  Keeping with the movie theme, Transformers Director Michael Bay has done the geek world a huge favour by releasing some extremely high resolution shots of his re-invented Transformer cast. Check out the link for some fantastic shots of Optimus Prime, Megatron, Starscream and more.
   
• Conan O’Brien visits LucasArts (link)
  Conan is by far the funniest tonight show host, I for one can’t wait until he takes over Jay Leno’s spot and brings some actual comedy back to the show. To give you and idea of what’s in store check out Conan on a recent visit to LucasArts’ SkyWalker Ranch; funny stuff from the carrot top.
   
• Harvey Birdman coming to PSP (link)
  Last one today sees us round off the entertainment theme with the news that AdultSwim’s Harvey Birdman - Attorney at Law will be receiving his own PSP game later this year! "I’ll take the case!"
   

For those in the world of graphic design to "raster" an image is to convert it from it’s vector roots to one represented by pixels; however for everyone else on the Internet if you’re talking raster odds are you’re talking about "The Rasterbator". Developed in 2004 by Finn Matias Arje The Rasterbator is a small web based application that takes JPG images and blows them up as big as you like. Ironically it has nothing to do with raster images, it uses another graphic technique called “Halftoning”. Halftone images replace the solid colours we see in an image and split them into a series of dots to make them appear as a solid colour from a distance. Next time you’re flipping through a magazine look closely at its images and you’ll be able to make out the coloured dots fooling your eyes, even better get up close to a large billboard and you’ll see dots as big as your head in some cases. This is the magic behind The Rasterbator and the reason that it is able to create a distinguishable picture of any size from such a small file.

The online interface to use The Rasterbator is extremely simple to use. It accepts any JPG file up to 1MB in size*, of any image size and can be colour or black & white. After loading in your image you simply scale it to the physical dimensions you’re after, select your output paper size and away you go. There are other options available to you including further cropping of your image and paper orientation but it’s all very well explained.

Once you’ve configured all of your requirements The Rasterbator will churn away momentarily and produce a PDF file for you to download. Opening this file reveals nothing more than a lot of pages with large dots that look like junk but in actual fact you’re staring at one small corner of your greater image. Now the true fun begins; after you’ve dried up every drop of ink printing the hundred odd pages of dots you’ll notice that there is a white border around each of them. Some people choose to leave this, me I was lucky enough to have a guillotine I could borrow, others well you can always use scissors but after about page ten you’re really going to regret it. To give you an idea the image I decided to create I had 72 pages to trim which took nearly 60 minutes with a guillotine! One thing to keep in mind is to never change the order the pages are printed in because if you do you’re when it comes time to putting them all together things aren’t going to look right at all!

Now that you’ve got all your pages pretty and neat it’s construction time. Depending on the size of your masterpiece some people like to tape the backs of each page together, this is fine for something about 10 pages or so but it becomes quite heavy and if you’re sticking it to a wall in the end the weight often has the picture falling off. For me I live in a rented apartment so I’m using some paint safe Blu-tak to stick each individual sheet up next to each other. This too can be a tedious process especially if you’re being pedantic about trying to have everything line up perfectly. Big tip here; it’s never going to line up perfect, just let it go before your head explodes… You can watch a video of me putting up my creation below; a process that took a good hour to complete.

The Rasterbator is a fun tool that some people have taken to the extremes (The world’s largest Rasterbation is 7 metres wide & 10 metres high using 1225 sheets of A4 paper) but in reality it’s a great, cheap way of putting up some great pictures over a large space. It’s never going to look 100% but it’s not really designed too and that’s where the charm of it comes into play. Have a play, put up a giant photo of your dog on your door or something else equally as stupid. Check out the JPG Mag Rasterbator competition gallery for some inspiration.

* There is a downloadable version of The Rasterbator available (Windows only) that allows you to use a JPG image of any file size.
UPDATE: Mac instructions here