Author Archives: Brock Tice

Fixing Figures with OmniGraffle

Sometimes, someone sends you a figure or image of some kind that you need, but it doesn’t look good — the resolution is too low, the background was trimmed off poorly, whatever. You could ask them to fix it, but often they won’t know how, or it won’t be possible to obtain a higher-resolution version.

When this happens to me, I use OminiGraffle to fix it. OmniGraffle is the main thing that keeps me from going back to using only Linux. There’s nothing remotely comparable to OmniGraffle in either the Windows or Linux worlds. Now that I’ve gushed about it, here’s the general approach to fixing a figure with OmniGraffle (or an inferior vector illustration program).

  1. Load the original figure and lock it down, so that you can use it as an alignment and placement guide and draw on top of it.
  2. Load the original figure in an image editor and cut out anything useful, pasting it in over the background into the vector editor right where it was before.
  3. Draw in the rest of the figure. Often this includes coordinate axes, numbers, labels, whatever.
  4. Hide or delete the background layer and export your new, clean figure.

I also like to do fun things like snipping out sequential images and animating them to make a movie for presentations (with citations of course), but that requires different tools.

Survival Exercise

I’ve never been any good at sports involving flying objects. I used to think that meant I would never enjoy anything athletic. Of course, I was in pretty bad shape at the time, which didn’t help.

Now I’m in much better shape. I still can barely throw a football or a baseball with any distance or accuracy, but I’m passable at a few things, namely swimming, running, bicycling, and rock climbing (of the indoor variety). It occurred to me at some point that these are useful athletic activities to practice both for literal survival, and for accomplishing various tasks that are not life-threatening. For example:

  • Swimming: Life or Death – Falling out of a boat that’s moving fast enough that you can’t just get right back in. Other tasks – You dropped something really important off a dock and it’s not pointless to get it back (i.e. in the case of a cell phone).
  • Running: Life or Death – Someone is trying to kill you, or a velociraptor is after you. Other tasks – Your first of two flights was running late. The second is on the other side of the airport and will leave in 5 minutes. Go!
  • Bicycling: Life or Death – OK, can’t think of anything for this one. Other tasks – Making groceries, commuting, etc.
  • Rock Climbing: Life or Death – You were working on the roof and lost your footing. You manage to catch yourself on the edge of the roof / gutter. Other tasks – anything on a ladder in an awkward position. I used climbing techniques setting up for our wedding reception, and was a lot more comfortable on a ladder than I had been before starting rock climbing.

I suppose throwing things (i.e. spears) could be important to post-apocalyptic survival. In that case, I’m screwed.

Going Paperless and the ADF

An ADF is an Auto Document Feeder. It’s the thing on top of most copy machines where you can put a stack of paper. I’ve wanted to go paperless for a long time, and I’m finally getting pretty close. The thing that closed the gap for me is the ADF.

After Katrina, I wasn’t sure whether my printer was salvageable (it was), and anyway I didn’t have one with me. I had to scan or fax and send a bunch of stuff, so I bought an HP OfficeJet. Modern OfficeJets can scan in one of two ways. They have a classic flat-bed scanner for complicated things, books, photos, etc. However, they also have an ADF on top of the flat-bed scanner. When you use it, the scan head moves over to the far end of the printer and remains stationary as the feeder pulls documents past it. This makes it possible to scan stacks of notes or whatever with the press of a single button. Having such a feeder makes a big difference — I would never scan that many pages manually.

Combined with some sort of optical character recognition (OCR), and the temporary use of paper for taking notes (which are then scanned and recycled), I’m now able to keep just about everything digital. A major advantage of this is that I can just keep all of my documents archived on a remote storage service, and access them from anywhere.

I’ve thought about buying a used Tablet PC on eBay, but I really don’t want to have to maintain a Windows XP machine.