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November 6, 2010

Phoenix – Round 2

I call this: On the Road Again,phones,tech,theatre — Posted by KP @ 1:23 am

We’ve spent this week in Phoenix, AZ, where we spent a week two years ago with Henry V, playing at the Herberger Theatre, presented by Arizona Theatre Company (who will also welcome us to their other venue in Tucson next week).

One of the highlights of the Henry tour, it’s once again great to be here with Romeo and Juliet. Here’s our set, as seen from the spot booth.

Last night was our official opening here. We had done three morning shows for school groups, performing for thousands of students, but last night was the first show open to the general public. The artistic director of ATC, David Ira Goldstein, welcomed us and introduced himself to everyone before the show, and then provided champagne and conversation in the greenroom afterwards. Here’s a picture of him with the cast and crew (I’m in the middle in the green shirt).

It’s always nice to get such a warm welcome and personal interaction with the presenters who have brought us in.

Here’s a shot of our upstage crossover, looking from stage right to stage left. There’s so much room that we have a full-length black traveler between the back of the set and the crossover, with just a little hole in the middle for entrances within the set. This allows the crossover to be fairly brightly lit for quickchanges and general hanging out. You can see the line of chairs set up and draped with costumes. Behind them are the workboxes for props and carpentry, easily accessible.

And finally as a bonus, I have a new iPhone wallpaper. The booth that I call from is also the audio booth, and the console sits right next to me (unmanned, since all the show sound is run from our console backstage). The venue’s console is a PM1D, which is very pretty when it’s lit up in the dark. I found it made a very nice wallpaper. Click on the thumbnail to see it full size (it’s big enough for the iPhone 4’s retina display). Enjoy, use, steal, but please give me credit if you share it!


September 18, 2008

iPhone Wallpaper

I call this: mac,phones — Posted by KP @ 1:20 pm

I’ve created a wallpaper for my iPhone that I’m liking so much, I might as well share it.  Here it is.  I have no idea what it is.  I guess it’s some kind of rainbow laser beam, which as far as I know is a physical impossibility.  But it looks kind of cool as a lock screen wallpaper (especially when an alert pops up in front of it).  If you have a jailbroken iPhone and use Winterboard to customize your home screen, it also looks pretty cool as a background behind your icons.  It’s a good fit for me because I like the default look of the home screen, so I don’t want to customize it with something too crazy.  This keeps the basic appearance the same, but just adds a nice extra touch (see below).

If you like it you can click on the thumbnail above and get it in full size. If you want to post it somewhere feel free, but please link to this site, and don’t sell it or do anything stupid like that, and that’s fine with me.

UPDATE: 8/31/10

I now have an iPhone 4, and decided to dig up this file and make a Retina Display-compatible version, in 640×960 resolution. Click below to get it full size.


March 25, 2007

Something cool I once did with my desktop

I call this: computers,gaming,mac — Posted by KP @ 8:00 pm

While my desktop these last few days is the highly-original default Aqua wallpaper that came with OS X Tiger (shown here), I did once do something pretty cool with it.

I’m a big fan of the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and I’m kind of fond of having little bits of NES nostalgia in my life (like this USB NES game controller), so of course I occasionally like to decorate my Powerbook’s desktop the same way. So this one time, I decided that I would go all out. The result was this:

What you can’t see from the image is that all of the “?” blocks are clickable buttons (using DragThing) that are actually hovering over the image on the wallpaper. They launched various apps, the pipes opened commonly-used folders, and the picture of Mario in mid-air launched a NES emulator, so I could play all those classic games on my Mac, with my original NES controller, of course.

The Details
The wallpaper itself I adapted from this one, resized and rearranged to fit my needs. The dock being squished over to the left side can be done with any number of utilities that can access those sorts of hidden OS X features. If I were doing it now I would use Cocktail, but I’m sure there are free apps that do it as well. I changed a number of icons to look more Mario-like. Unfortunately, I have acquired them over years and some may no longer be available, I don’t know. But I like InterfaceLIFT for a lot of my desktop customization needs now. For changing some of the system icons like the Finder, you need a separate app, Candybar. In brief, the green mushroom is the Finder, the red shell is SpamSieve, the flower is Photoshop, although I really wanted it to be a Fire Flower, I couldn’t find a decent Aqua-like icon of one, so I made do. The music note block, as you might have guessed, is iTunes. I made that one myself in Photoshop. If you’ve always wanted one, here it is. The piranah plant is the trash of course, and when empty it’s just the pipe. I made the pipe and added the plant from a very nice icon I found somewhere. The clock is a regular ol’ dashboard widget. And if you’re curious, the instant messaging app showing is Adium, which I highly recommend. I also designed the icon you see, of the Adium mascot as a stage manager, which you can download here.

The whole thing was a lot of fun, but eventually I just got tired of it, and it wasn’t as useful as you might think. I felt really bad changing it because of all the work I had put into it, but it was time to move on. I kept it a lot longer than I keep most of my desktop looks, and I still have some pieces of it, like the mushroom Finder icon. I’m still intrigued by the idea of having a desktop picture with clickable elements that do things. This was my first attempt at that. Maybe if I think of a good way I’ll try it again someday.