Space Stamps!

When I launched FF X my gimmick was "dragon coins," laminated cardboard coin pictures which I hid around a convention site, and gave a copy of the FF X distribution disk to anyone who found all the designs.

This time round I ought to be launched by Dragonmeet (yes, I know that's later than I thought - hopefully it'll be at least a couple of weeks earlier), but that's a shorter one day event and not a good place to play that sort of game.

So I was wondering what to do for a launch thing, when I had to make a label for something. And I thought to myself: "Hey, this is a nice label. I could do something with that..." From there it was about a 20-second jump to "Space Stamps!" and about five minutes to make a prototype.

Basically, they'll be 24mm wide shiny clear adhesive plastic strips - currently I can only do blue on clear (or white on clear which is pretty useless for this sort of thing), but they look so nice I might spend a few quid for another couple of rolls of tape - red for Mars, of course, and possibly green for Earth. The obvious limitation is that it's an all or nothing monochrome print process, so colours and grey scales are dithered. Also not very high resolution.

Here's the design as seen on screen - this is magnified slightly:



And here's what they actually look like - they are about 24mm (1") x 75mm (3")



They look white here because they still have the backing tape, of course.

I'm not sure how I'll be doing things this time, maybe a very simple questionnaire, you get a stamp for each right answer:

e.g. Whose Science Fiction is Forgotten Futures XI based on
1 - Robert L. Fanthorpe
2 - Robert A. Heinlein
3 - Stanley G. Weinbaum

I'll probably do four or five designs, in two or three colours if the tape hasn't got too ridiculously expensive.

Good idea?

Later looks like the tape has got too expensive, e.g. £12 a cartridge. If anyone sees this tape on sale really cheap anywhere - Brother TZ tapes for a P-Touch 2420PC printer - please let me know.

Heresy!!!

Following on from the previous computer threads, I now have a dual-boot Linux / XP computer up and running, with monitor rotation under XP (doesn't currently work under Linux because the graphics driver that allows it doesn't support acceleration, which makes it useless for a lot of programs I want to use. Eventually, once FF XI is finished, I will move the useful stuff over from my existing machine, leaving behind e.g. drivers for about fifteen scanners and cameras I no longer use that don't seem to be easily deleted, and eventually turn that into a dual boot box too.

There's one small problem - I installed Ubuntu after Windows this time, and as a result it defaults to starting Linux if I don't use the menu in the first 15 seconds or so.

Is there any way to change this so that it defaults to booting Windows?

now sorted - there's an optional program called Startup Manager which lets you edit this without having to worry about messing things up.

later Except it turns out it messes up the ubuntu "splash" screen even if you don't deliberately change it. Not sure why, and it doesn't actually matter, but annoying.

Sorting this eventually needed me to manually edit two or three files! See

http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-Fix-the-Big-and-Ugly-Plymouth-Logo-in-Ubuntu-10-04-140810.shtml

for the horrific details.