Crikeymiles.com

Mmmmm… Monsters…

London-based engineer, music editor and producer, Simon Changer approached me to create him a professional CV website. It is a static site, built in PHP, HTML and CSS, with plenty of images to browse. The result is here:

This is my new hobby. Spending about the same as I would on a normal retail game, but six months before it’s been printed!

The Thumpermonkey site needed an overhaul ahead of the new record (which is definitely going to be released in 2012, I’m assured). Also Drupal seemed to be misbehaving on the shared hosting they have, so the decision was made to scale the site down to a WordPress thing, with mostly static content. I made them a shiny new theme, starting with the excellent BLANK theme, and using some photos taken by The Chaos Engineers.

If this gets printed, I get my name in the rulebook…

EDIT: They got the funded! Chicken-related board games for all!

I don’t normally blog on these sorts of topics, (in fact I don’t normally ‘blog’), but I’ve been using OSX since 2004, when I bought my little eMac for university, and ever since then I have been routinely frustrated by the “missing” keys in OSX. I previously only used Macs at home, and only composed long documents for work on Windows machines, so it never became a real issue. However, I recently switched to a MacBook Air for work, and it suddenly started bugging me: where the hell is the delete key? How do I navigate text properly with my keyboard!? Why the HELL doesn’t application window switching work in Microsoft Office??!!?

Switching windows in MS Office

The cmd + ` shortcut to switch windows does not work in Microsoft Office. This is annoying, but there’s an easy fix. I remapped the “Move focus to next window” shortcut to “alt + tab” (like in Windows, you can use whatever you like). This can be done in System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Keyboard & Text Input.

Delete is not backspace

fn + Delete

Delete (rather than backspace). This is great! I’m loving having the delete key back. However, there are also some options to it, which get really weird. (This is probably because I don’t come from a Vi world or something…)

alt + Delete

If you are inside a word, this command will delete from cursor to start of the current word. If you are in a space, it will delete from cursor to start of the previous word (even if you are on a following line). And it doesn’t treat punctuation as a separate word, just as the following text navigation keys don’t. (EDIT: this doesn’t work in any Microsoft Office application. Boo.)

cmd + Delete

This should delete whole line from cursor to start of the current line, but it doesn’t seem to work everywhere. (For example, it doesn’t work in the WordPress form that I’m composing this post in).

Navigating Text

These commands move the cursor around, and you can add shift to any of these to select.

cmd + <-

Home (move cursor to start of line).

cmd + ->

End (move cursor to end of line).

alt + ->

Start of previous word.

alt + <-

End of current word.

alt + up arrow

Start of current paragraph.

alt + down arrow

Start of next paragraph.

Moving Around a Document

These commands just move the viewport around, rather than the cursor.

fn + up arrow

Page up.

fn + down arrow

Page down.

fn + <-

Home (viewport, not cursor).

fn + ->

End (viewport, not cursor).

ctrl + left/right

I also recommend going into System Preferences->Keyboard->Keyboard Shortcuts->Mission Control and disabling the ctrl + left/right commands to move from space to space, or you will have a tiresome animation taking you away from your document if you ever hit the wrong modifier key. I’m on a multi-touch trackpad so I don’t need the key shortcut, but if could be remapped to anything.

Thanks to Lifehacker.com for the delete keys. A full list of Mac keyboard shortcuts from Apple is here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1343.

… And for what will sadly be my final gig with Todger, due to the move to Canterbury:

I joined the mighty Todger on rhythm guitar about two years ago. Since then we have been playing in every toilet in London, perfecting our set for our new album: Last Of The Juggernauts, available now! Thanks to Mo Panella, and “Smokey Joe” Suarez, we got a really ace sounding record. To complement the music, I wanted something equally childish rocking, and so I set about making a custom devil truck, complete with succubi and zombies. I’m going to write a little more about that in a bigger blog post soon. Here’s the artwork:

The album is done, I’m frantically throwing artwork together, and this is where we are launching it. Facebook event is here.