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Spex84

Chris Drysdale
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Taking a break

1 min read

Since I haven't been uploading much in the way of new art and have not been using DA much, I decided to turn the page on my years as a budding artist, and put all my old works into storage.


Thanks for the faves and llamas, folks. It's been fun. I may return.

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Lazy Nezumi Pro

2 min read
For years I've struggled with trying to get decent lines in Photoshop. I had discovered that Paint Tool Sai had line stabilization and generally better brush behavior than PS, but it was a pain switching between the two. The way Photoshop's brush tool leaves little stubby ends (the "shoelace effect") was driving me nuts. The lack of stabilization meant a lot of re-drawing lines and wasted time.
  I had searched previously for a tool or plugin that would give me line stabilization in PS, but didn't find anything. Finally today I discovered "Lazy Nezumi Pro" and am ecstatic with the ability it gives me to do clean lines with proper tails in Photoshop..AND...and this is the big one...ellipses with freehand line-weight, but constrained to an ellipse guide, so they're always perfect. I mean, dang. That's something I've struggled with for many years. If I draw an ellipse over and over again, I can generally get a near-perfect one, but it wastes enormous amounts of time. Creating ellipses with the pen tool and using "stroke" doesn't give me the line weight I want, and it can be very slow and tedious. Nezumi Pro takes care of that. Awesome.

I might update if I find downsides to this software, but right now I'm very happy.

Clean lines in Photoshop for like $35, woohoo!!

So..why in the f*ck does photoshop not have functionality like this right out of the box? I mean, for the price, it should (I don't have CC, so forgive me if the newest versions of PS have this and I'm not aware of it yet).
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Fury Road

1 min read
Was pretty much what I expected from the trailers. Loved it, even if it wasn't quite what I was expecting (not sure what I was expecting).
In a world of car franchises that have lost touch with their automotive roots (cough, Fast and Furious), the characters of Mad Max still worship the mighty V8. And superchargers. Nitro. Necker knobs. Flame-spewing exhaust. Temples erected to the glory of guzzoline.
The film is gleefully insane without lurching too far into cheesiness....I was worried it might bring 80s camp along with some of the 80s visuals, but thankfully, no. Well, maybe a little bit. But in a good way.

 It's a wild ride!
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So recently I decided to try resurrecting my faulty Dell XPS 1210 laptop. It worked well for a few years, but got very hot. Eventually it developed an issue where the screen would change colors, almost like it was reverting to 256 color mode or something, kind of a watercolor effect. Then it would switch back to normal, and repeat every 10 minutes or so. Needless to say, it rendered the machine useless for photoshop work, and in 2010 I replaced it. It had been sitting on my shelf ever since.
  I had done some research on baking motherboards in the oven in order to re-flow the solder connections, but decided it was rather a lot of work for a computer I didn't really use. But a few weeks ago I found a recent Gizmodo article about a successful bake on a Dell XPS 120, just like mine. That decided things...I was going to try.
I stripped the computer down to the bare motherboard (and was careful to remove the CPU!), shielded the whole thing with foil except for the GPU (apparently it's the Nvidia GPUs of this time period that overheat and fail, similar to the Xbox 360's red ring of death failure). I removed all the stickers from board first, so they didn't burn in the oven.
I propped the foil-wrapped board up on some foil balls atop a cookie sheet, then baked at 350C for 4 minutes, flipped it over, baked for another 4 minutes, then shut the oven off, opened the door, and let it cool slowly.
After half an hour or so, I pulled the foil off. Or tried to.

Pro tip: if you wrap the whole thing in foil except for the target area, the stickers probably won't burn, so don't bother removing them. If you pull off the stickers (as I did) AND foil wrap it, the foil will STICK to the remaining adhesive on the board. You will then have a godawful time trying to remove shreds of stuck aluminum foil from your motherboard. Arghhhh.

After laboriously scraping off the stuck foil, I re-installed the board and all the other components, and to my surprise, the laptop fired up. I have not run it for very long yet, but the display problem seems to be fixed!!
The whole thing took me a few hours, including disassembly and reassembly.

So if you have a computer that is truly on its last legs, or won't even display anything on the screen...a motherboard bake might be worth the effort!
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...

1 min read
This journal entry was a little too ragey in retrospect. Tired of looking at it. TLDR version: To remove the annoying banner ads in Skype, you can find instructions below:
www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/c…
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Lazy Nezumi Pro by Spex84, journal

Fury Road by Spex84, journal

On baking motherboards... by Spex84, journal

... by Spex84, journal

Anyone paint on Ipad? by Spex84, journal