Megalune || Tim King
Design-Sketches-Articles-Bio

Illustrator Twirl Tool

September 25th, 2007 — 12:30 pm

A nifty little tool has some hidden little tricks to it. The standard tool is a circle that will twirl an object’s edge counterclockwise.

If you hold alt before using the tool, you can reshape the ellipse, and like resizing most things, holding shift during this will transform it uniformly.

Holding down alt after you have begun holding down the mouse button will reverse the direction of the twirl.

Have fun twirling!

Cinema 4D Texture Mirroring

September 20th, 2007 — 12:33 pm

Fixing the texture in Cinema 4D.

This is one of those simple things that you stress out over and wish there was some easier way to handle the problem and you spend time coming up with alternate solutions, only to realize there is a very simple solution right in front of you, almost.

C4D texture menu.Many a times I have brought a texture into Cinema 4D and applied it to a wall or some such object, and it has been upside down. My solution has been to just go back into Photoshop and mirror the texture there and reimport it. I got fed up with this today, and went looking for a solution within Cinema itself. Turns out it is really easy to do.

In the Objects Manager, select the texture. Under the Texture menu, you have the option to mirror either horizontally or vertically. Very simple, yet not so simple to find. At least for a goober like myself, since it seems like these functions would be in the Attributes Manager for the texture… But hey, what do I know?

IE6, DocTypes, and CSS Horizontal-Align

September 18th, 2007 — 4:05 am

So I was working on a fairly simple site today, and it is looking mighty fine in Firefox and IE7 and Netscape and such, but then I saw it in IE6 and it was rubbish! Instead of having a fixed width and being centered horizontally in the browser, it filled the browser from edge to edge.

My first couple of attempts fixed the width problem, but it would always align itself right on the left edge.

Turns out IE6 is pretty quirky. A simple change to the DocType info fixed the problem and it all looks as it should now.

What I had (which was causing alignment problems in IE6):

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”iso-8859-1″?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>

<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en” lang=”en”>
<head>
…

What I have now (and works everywhere):

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224″>

<html>
<head>
…

Windows Defender Error 0×800106ba / 0×80071b90

September 7th, 2007 — 11:04 am

If you are getting Windows Defender Error Message 0×800106ba when starting XP, try opening your services (select Run in the Start Menu and type services.msc) and starting Windows Defender manually.

If this does not work, you might get Error 0×80071b90. If this is the case, you can fix this by downloading the newest version from Microsoft. This should fix everything up nicely. Microsoft Update.

This (hopefully) helpful item was learned here.

Windows File Colors

September 5th, 2007 — 1:17 pm

XP File Colors

This is one of those simple things that I can never remember. Sometimes some of your files appear blue, they aren’t sad, this just means they are NTFS compressed. The green ones aren’t seasick, just encrypted.

To turn all this nonsense off, in Explorer click Tools and Folder Options… Click on the View tab. Checking/unchecking the third option from the bottom (Show encrypted or compressed NTFS files in color) will toggle these colors.

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