iMac running Linux Mint from Debian

Minting an iMac

Sadly, Apple has retired my 2012 iMac, after 10 years. The iMac is still working, has a decent CPU and memory and a nice display, albeit not retina, so the retirement does feel somewhat premature to me. Apple puts things out to pasture far too quickly in my opinion, Microsoft is a lot better in this regard, and Linux is top. Due to concerns about the aging MacOS version on the machine, it limits my application upgrade path, how long will developers keep compiling for older systems 2 or 3 versions, maybe, often they want the latest and greatest version immediately, who can blame them....

10 December 2022 · 2 min · Mark

Affinity - What Next

At the beginning of this month, November, Affinity Serif announced the imminent release of version 2 of its graphic software suit. I, like many, was excited by prospect and the hype that hinted at possibility of finally seeing some long awaited features. Unfortunately, for me at least, the release didn’t live up to the hype and frankly didn’t have features I had expected. Promised features going back years, but I am not here to talk about that, though....

15 November 2022 · 3 min · Mark

Blender Class Naming Convention

Blender Class naming conventions - Python API As of Blender 2.8 the API naming requirement is for the class name to match the following convention: UPPER_CASE_{TYPE}_mixed_case Where {TYPE} is two letters denoting the class type inherited: HT – Header MT – Menu OT – Operator PT – Panel UL – UI list The class identifier “bl_idname” mast match the class name. Valid class name and identifier examples: class ADDONNAME_OT_my_operator(bpy.types.Operator): bl_idname = 'ADDONNAME_OT_my_operator' ....

19 October 2022 · 1 min · Mark

Backface Culling in Blender

Backface culling in Blender is set in two places, for solid view and for material view: Solid View In messageSolid view, i.e. Matcap, Studio etc. it is set from the topbar dropdown as shown below: Material View In Material view, i.e. EVEE is it set in the shader panel on the right, as shown below: Advantages Using backface culling allows the user to see through the backside of geometry. This is handy for looking at the bottom of objects, through a ground plane for example....

3 October 2022 · 1 min · Mark

Typora Symbolic Links Mac

Unfortunately Symbolic Links and shortcuts don’t work within Typora’s file listing. I found a work around though: Create a symbolic link to the folder you wish to add in the default Typora markdown directory, this will then show up in the the file listing, it won’t do anything though if you click on it, as it isn’t implemented or supported in Typora yet. But, if you right click on the icon link in the file list and choose Open in New Window it will load the linked directories contents....

1 October 2022 · 1 min · Mark

Long Time No Post

I seem to have let this site go unloved for a long time. The main reason I suppose is a lack of motivation in posting and a bigger lack of interesting things to post. I have been quite busy though, both with Blender and in the last month, or so, with Moi3d. I hadn’t used Moi3d in a long time and was starting to miss the little tool, so took a few weeks to refresh my muscle memory and get some practice in....

21 September 2022 · 1 min · Mark

Multiple Symbolic Links Windows

Create a batch file, for example: symlink.bat with the following content and edit the source and target locations to suit. @echo off set "source=c:\source\directory" set "target=c:\target\directory" set "exclude=%temp%\exclude.txt" ( rem exclude files/dires with these strings into full path echo .txt echo pipe.cmd rem escaped backslash and initial and final quotes to avoid partial matches echo "c:\\source\\directory\\something.txt" rem exclude thisNot file/directory from source directory echo "%source:\=\\%\\thisNot" )> "%exclude%" forfiles /P "%source%" /C "cmd /c (echo @path|findstr /i /v /g:"%exclude%" >nul) && if @isdir==TRUE (mklink /d \"%target%\\\"@file @path) else (mklink \"%target%\\\"@file @path)" del "%exclude%" > nul Original answer posted on: stackoverflow

2 November 2021 · 1 min · Mark

FrontMatter for VSC

I recently set up a addon for Visual Studio Code, for editing Markdown files in HUGO. The addon was from Elio Struyf called FrontMatter. I got it working quickly enough. Although I had problems with the media paths not showing correctly in the media browser. The reason for this was, I’d used the default setting (as mentioned in the documentation) which assumes media will be in the root static folder, where as I had media in an assets folder under the content folder....

1 November 2021 · 1 min · Mark

Git Version Control Setup

After a few false starts I have finally got my Hugo site setup to use git submodule to push the HTML output to the remote webserver. It was a little involved at first, but once I got my head around the idea of a git repo within a git repo, not being a git repo but rather just a folder marked as a submodule of some parent module… you get the idea....

25 October 2021 · 1 min · Mark

Change Mac Machine Name via Terminal

I needed to change the name of one of my Macs remotely and this is the command to do it: sudo scutil --set HostName [NewHostNameHere]

22 October 2021 · 1 min · Mark