The collected works of theinonen - Page 3

In 1987 when Acorn Archimedes came to market it actually was pretty powerful system at the time. Soon everything has come full circle and ARM can maybe again be seen on desktop computers. There allready is enough power on those newer ARM processors to fulfill the basic computing needs of most normal people.

There is no doubt about it, and it is only a matter of time that Apple will ditch Intel and abandon their traditional computer lines. Computers are currently only small business for Apple and as most of their revenue comes from the mobile systems the logical progression is to go the way of iOS in all their systems.

Those are beautiful systems. More like gigantic tower case on wheels, when the newer systems are just rack systems in pedestal chassis. I had one with maxed out processors/memory and other goodies, but had to get rid of it as it started to shutdown itself at startup.

Lost all computer storage when the company I worked was sold to another one and had to take all the systems to my small home, so had to give up on some systems. I still have AS4100 and Compaq ES40 as bigger systems, but those are nowdays rarely powered on.

I could have sent you some spares for the cost of postage, but unfortunately it is little late now for that.

People saying that have no experience with more modern BASIC languages and were probably using some of the worst BASIC dialects like the one in C64. In the more advanced BASICs there is no need to use line numbers, or even single GOTO in your program as you can just use procedures instead. Besides arrays you can find things like structures/arrays of structures.


I find BASIC very good for non programmers like me, as you can quickly get some results with minimal time and effort.

I could never get hang of Visual Basic, so experimented with QBasic instead.

I still have book called Qbasic Fundamentals and Style, which was great to learn the basics and also light enough to read for non native English speaker. I have found most books about programming to be pretty heavy to read and you can read whole day, but nothing stays in your head when you put the book back to shelf.

Problem with those is that they look great when they are down, but when they are turned up they look ugly and break all the beautiful lines of the car. Here in Finland you need driving lights even at daytime, so it is more like nice trick anyway as those lights can not be hidden when you are driving.

Somehow I doubt it.

They may get some phones sold and it can work as a short term solution, but in the long run they have nothing to differentiate from the rest and will become just another Windows phone maker. I see no reason for anybody to buy their phone from Nokia if they can get similar phone with cheaper price from elsewhere.

Why not just convert the text to shapes and no need to go hunting down any fonts?

I have never used Illustrator myself, but would it also be possible to save the file as PDF and embed the fonts in the file. PDF could be opened with many different programs, so is good format for interoperability.


I am drawing with Artworks 2 / ProCAD+ on RISC OS, and is it works with so little resources it almost qualifies drawing vectors with embedded system.

As I really like living, am not actively seeking out the kind of places I would die after. With so little things I have seen and not really been in places outside of Finland I should live long and healthy life.

I see no problem here.

Just keep your image in some lossless format when you are working with it and when you are finished, then save it in any format you like that is suitable for the intended purpose.

I have RISC OS box as my daily driver now and can do most of the things I want just fine. At least zillion times better than I ever could do with Linux, as the quantity of Linux software hardly can replace the quality of available software. Then again I do not do anything with video or work with photographs in RAW format.

For those things I do not want to do but sometimes have to, like paying bills I still have an x86 laptop as a back up plan.

Ok, I confess. Also use it to play a game or two on some rare occasions.

You need to try some of the RISC OS software like: ProCAD+, Artworks 2, Compo, TechWriter, Photodesk and many others to see how easy it is to work with different applications and how well everything works together.

I mostly toy around with 2D graphics for fun and there is no better software to draw those than ProCAD+. Those drawings can then be brought to ArtWorks 2 to get some colour and you can later combine things and put everything together in Composition.

For example if I wanted to make animated GIF, then I could draw the shapes in ProCAD+ with very little effort and strain to mousehand using different snaps. Then I could finish it in ArtWorks 2 and drop the finished image to Compo. After that I could just modify one of the example CompoScripts to do all the hard work for me and use InterGIF to combine all the images into a single animated GIF file.

To me javascript on NetSurf is not a big problem as actually prefer simple web pages more. Javascript seems to be a work in progress feature as there is some experimental javascript support in development builds. Though I have not really noticed anything different other, than Gmail is not anymore defaulting to simpler view of things and you still have to select basic HTML view manually.

Only thing really missing that I would like to have on RISC OS is some modern 3D modelling application. I have a version of Top Model, but it is not working properly even in Aemulator and crashes when doing almost anything. Modelling part would easily be doable with this system but the actual rendering would need lots of patience.

I still have this monster Soviet system but it is a work in progress project that I have not really had the time to properly get into.

It now has floppy drive replaced with regular disk drive to more easily transfer disk images, but not sure if the drive is really working or not. I can format disk in disk drive and it will verify OK, but I have not managed to transfer any disk images to disk and read those with the system.

Maybe I need older PC-system for transferring those.

I had a sports injury some years ago that stresses the arm when using mouse for drawing. All the drawing aids, like zillion snaps and other clever features make drawing accurate pictures very easy and fast with minimal work. So at least it works for me and every function of the program can be configured to work with wanted keyboard shortcut.

I only need to export the drawing to RISC OS vector image format Draw and then can drop it to ArtWorks 2 to have more realistic colours with transparency for the image.

The last real desktop RISC OS computer was IYONIX and all the newer systems are just boxed Raspberry Pi, BeagleBoard and PandaBoard systems. RISC OS 5 has ROM images for IOMD (A7000, RiscPC), OMAP3, OMAP4, Raspberry Pi and IYONIX.


I am still using old and trusty IYONIX that has slow with modern standards 600 MHz X-Scale processor. It has 512 MB RAM that could be maxed to 1 GB and IDE hard drive. As for expansion cards there are Nvidia FX5200 graphics card, gigabit ethernet and USB-card in PCI-bus. In IYONIX there is also support for old podule type expansion cards with the 2-slot riserboard, but almost no 32-bit drivers exist for podules. I have a MIDImax2 MIDI podule with 32bit drivers that never got working.

The only tablet currently working fully I know of, that has proper drivers is cheap and chearful PaintPal tablet. I have it and it works as expected. I believe some Wacom tablets work in emulated mouse mode, so can be used without pressure support. Only application I know of currently fully supporting tablet with pressure sensitivity is Photodesk. After working drivers the support has to be also implemented to software to take any real advantage of tablet as an input method.

In my personal opinion software patents are from ass and too easy to abuse for killing any competition.

And competition is always good as it prevents prices going too high for normal people to be able to afford things.

I have not tested that myself, but pretty much looks like another AutoCAD clone.

First AutoCAD version I tried was AutoCAD R13 and it really was painful to work with. Later in school there was AutoCAD 2000 and it really was much nicer to use, the snap facility particularly. Luckily we did most of the work with CADS, so did not have to use AutoCAD that much.

Does Lightroom even give any additional benefits to just using dcraw to decode those RAW images?

This is where the current direction we are heading with software is going off the rails, as people need superfast computers and SSD drives just to use some modern bloated buggy software.

I have seen the future and very much prefer the past.

Another phone.

This is actually made from my own phone without reference picture, so not 100% accurate but pretty close I would say.

Comes straight from a CAD program without any fancy shading and just light+shadow added in Compo. (Screenshot of Android was taken from internet and was the first picture returned by Google.)

This was drawn in ProCAD+ and saved in Acorns Draw vector format. It was then dropped in ArtWorks and just saved there in Artworks vector format to get smoother image because antialiasing.

Finally the Artworks file was dropped to compo for some cheap effects, basically white sphere composited on top of screen and shadow added with shadow tool. Nice thing is that vector images can be automatically masked and you can work with them without any quality loss (scale, rotate, etc), as after operation image is rasterized again from the vector image. You can bring those also as vector images but then lose all the fun stuff, like blending and so on.

I used to do some 3d modelling when was younger but sucked on things like texturing and setting up lights/views, actual models were not that bad though. In fact those modelling tutorials that I read back then are still useful even in 2d work, as can translate flat picture into perspective and just pull/copy the details from it to get the 3d view of object.

I love Compo as there are some things that can not be done or are hard with just a vector program. I can add that stuff later with Compo by just experimenting and stacking things over picture.

Some wise man once said if you can not make them just fake them. Below is a quick example to demonstrate adding lighteffects later. (Image used is the iconic ArtWorks/Xara Midget.)

Just type http://www.apple.com into you browser and press enter if you want to look at the biggest marketing bullshit in the world. Even in Holy Bible you can not find as many praise words and everything new is presented like the second coming of Jesus. It would even be pretty funny if someone who wrote that was not serious when he made all that.


And do I like the look of the new mac Pro?

Not really, as it looks too much like some cylindrical subwoofer for my taste.

I grabbed this picture of a wine cooler from the local Apple userforum and it looks strikingly similar to that new Mac Pro.

Holy Bible is the last book I would take anywhere with me.

When finally get away from useless things like religion, then why take it with you then?

Yes, it is a free world and nobody is claiming otherwise. No need to get upset...

Holy Bible itself is not necessarily bad as some people may find some comfort in there. Only when people read and take it too seriously there is danger it can wrongly be used for bad things. Every book that is not to be taken literally is easy to interpret so that it advances someones own purposes.

I am not religious, so Holy Bible is just another book to me and I find a god that helps only those that help themself worthless. Maybe that says it all.

I have never seen backlit signs here in Finland, only the ones that reflect light.

I just watched this at local theater and it was pretty good with some nice effects and good music. Always good to see a movie that is not spoiled with horrible rap/hiphop music that seems to be so popular nowdays.

As an added bonus this time nobody was talking through the whole movie like the last time I was in the movies. I really hate that as not that hard to stay quiet and just let everyone watch the movie.

Mathematics is one of the rare things I have found useful after school. Specially geometry/trigonometry have some uses in real life.

I was thinking of a way to make accurate teething around circle without cheating like I have done before. Luckily in ProCAD+ you only have to know the number of teeth and r of the circle to get something like that done. Then just move reference point of teeth at the amount of r and copy it around the reference point with number of teeths wanted.

Easy and 100% accurate

With accurate I mean only the placement and amount of tooth, so no need to fill the gaps later manually. (Teeths itself around the circle do not withstand closer inspection as they are loaned from real gearsymbol just slightly modified. Yes, I confess I am too lazy. )

There is little utility that makes gear symbols if more realism is needed, but I was just interested how it would be done manually with own hands.

Shape of gear seems pretty complicated, so better for everyone if I just stick to drawing decorations.




Does Pro/E do things like that automatically, or is there still some creative thinking required?

Only negative point is that if you have no javascript then what you see is little limited.

First tried with NetSurf on RISC OS and all I got was the contact information part of frontpage. Tried again with Firefox on Windows system out of curiosity and it was much better there.


Clean informative website without any useless bullshit, just the way they all should be.

Very painful it is also and that sizzling sound is very scary.

Happened to me once but at least now I know to cover my ears when doing gaswelding in ankward positions.

Actually it is a separate little program just for making gears available from the website of ProCAD+ author. Online manual is here: http://www.dsnell.zynet.co.uk/PS/ProSpur.html

You can use other pressure angles than 14.5 or 20 by editing the parameter file of program and then unticking both radio buttons, it will then use the value in file. You can change values for addendum, dedendum, fillet and some other things also from there.

I have been very much left behind on this whole web thingy.

NetSurf supports HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1, so that explains it. Otherwise pretty nice lightweight browser that works on many platforms, including RISC OS.