Use Your Scanner as a Magnifying Glass

I was working away when my wife comes in and says there is a bug in our son's hair and she can't get it out. I go take a look and see what looks like a watermelon seed with legs. I figured it must be a tick although I had never seen one before and I thought it was really big for a tick. So I covered it with Vaseline (don't do this. It doesn't make them pull out on their own.) After that I grabbed it by the tail with some tweezers (Again, don't do this. Get as close as you can to the head.) and pulled it out.

Now we didn't know what a tick looked like, and weren't sure if we got the head or not. I looked at pictures on images.google.com but when looking at the tick I pulled, it was so tiny that we couldn't make out the head. We worried that the head was still embedded in my son's scalp. We couldn't see anything but a red spot where it was attached.

I tried to look at it with some cheap toy magnifying glass that we got with a kids meal, but it didn't help enough. Then I got a bright idea to put the tick in a sealable plastic bag and put it on my printer/scanner. I fired up GIMP and selected Create from...Scanner/Camera(or something like that).

In the scanner software I cranked the resolution up as high as possible (19200 dpi according to my printer's specs) and then selected the area just around the tick itself for the final sca

n. If you select too large an area, you may eat up too much of your computer's memory and either hang the system or crash it. So, keep it as small as possible.

Once you have your resolution maxed out and your area to actually scan minimized, go ahead and accept the scan and it will import into GIMP or Photoshop or whatever you are using. Then you can zoom in and get a nice closeup (or not so nice, in my case. Who wants to look that closely at a tick if you don't have to?).

So that's it. Pretty simple actually, but maybe it's a use for your scanner that you had

n't thought of before.

Halloween Mix CD

A couple of years ago I made a mix cd to play for all the trick or treaters that come to our house. We get a lot due to the gated community we live in with all the houses close together and being realtively flat. Well, except for last year, when the homeowners association put a guard out and turned away anyone that didn't live there. A total of 97 cars from what I hear. Lots of the neighbors were disappointed at the low turnout we are accustomed to and our kids made out like bandits. They got one or two handfuls of candy at each house.

Anyways, here is this year's take on the halloween mix cd:

The titles of these songs makes them obvious picks:

Black Cat by Janet Jackson

I Want Candy by Bow Wow Wow

Ghostbusters by Ray Parker Jr

Dead Man's Party by Oingo Boingo

Did you know there were ghost stories masquerading as songs? Now you do:

Ghost Radio by Brian Setzer Orchestra

The Legend of Wolley Swamp by Smokin' Armadillos

Downright funny:

re: Your Brains by Jonathan Coulton (give a new meaning to the term, "corporate zombie")

Has Anyone Seen my Corpse? by Electric Funstuf (ok, this one is a stretch, it's really about EverQuest, but skeletons are mentioned)

This one didn't make it onto my original CD only becuase I didn't know what the name of it was. It's that classic organ piece you hear when you think of Dracula:

Tocatta and Fugue in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach

The new Space Mountain Music: Ghost Galaxy

TV theme songs. Yeah, too much TV as a kid, I know, I know. I like to throw in a pinch of nostalgia. Alright, "pinch" is an understatement:

The Munsters

The Addams Family

Bewitched

Batman

I was tempted to add "I Dream of Jeannie" but there is already too many TV theme songs on the list.

Represent

Men In Black by Wil Smith (aliens)

Thriller by Michael Jackson (more zombies)

Weird Science by Oingo Boingo (mad scientists)

So there you have it, a mix of classic halloween music and a hefty portion of songs you wouldn't think of until you hear them and go, "oh yeah! That totally fits Halloween!"

Disneyland and TWEWY are mutually exclusive?

I took my DS lite to Disneyland with The World Ends With You in mingle mode during Thanksgiving week, to find some other players. I was hoping to exchange friend cards. I tried to prepare well ahead of time by stocking hard to get equipment and pins.

Aside from 4 "aliens", I came up empty. This was not wholly unexpected, but I was hoping for better results. I thought Disneyland was implementing some Nintendo DS park service application, but I didn't pick up any signals for that either.

Is there any interest in a player locator (I've been toying with a Google Maps layer) with common meeting places like the nearest GameStop and point of contact to set up times?

WoW Cleanse and Redemption Macro

I play World of Warcraft. Currently I'm working on a level 43 Blood Elf Paladin that is a part of a Tuesday night raid group with friends. I spend some time making macros and revising them to make gameplay easier.

Problem:
Need to quickly remove debuffs from raid members. Figuring out who has the poison or other debuff and targeting them is a pain (especially the targeting).

Solution:
#showtooltip
/targetraid
/cast [nodead,nomodifier][modifier,target=player] Cleanse; [dead] Redemption
/stopmacro [nodead]
/s Resurrecting %t

Notes:
This macro changes to the next person in the raid, and tries to cast Cleanse if they have a debuff on them. One can effectively mash this button fast and it will jump from one raid member to the next and cleanse if necessary. I added Redemption (the Paladin resurrection ability) to the list so it can also be targeted and cast quickly. Dead and nodead qualifiers take care of what to cast when. I found I had to add a modifier to this macro so that I could "Cleanse" myself when needed. Targetraid is a little spotty. Maybe targets have to be in front of your character's field of vision to be selected. Stopmacro is there for the resurrection announcement.

I put up a simple web page a while back, detailing some of the things I did or made, but I feel it is too simplistic and I need to re-explore those projects and go into more detail. In future posts, I will go into each one individually and explain what I was thinking as I put it together.

Maybe I will improve my communication skills along the way...