My DVD Burner in my G5 Tower died partly. Yes! Partly, because it sometimes decided to kill a bunch of media rendering my trashbin a total DVD dump. I went to the next store and pulled a new LG Burner with LightScribe functionality. Keen on seeing my label bruned into the top coating of a DVD I headed over to lightscribe.com and got the driver package and “Lightscribe Simple Labeler”. Man, this programm is really down to basics. It lets you enter two lines of text and choose from 4 borderdesigns. Absolutely not that what I intended to spent my precious LS-discs for. No way! I want full size, self-designed, graphically rich labels, hence: pictures!

Back on the web I figured that “Disc Cover RE”, which is part of Roxios “Toast 8″ should be able to deal with LightSribe. Very expensive…. so nothing for me. Over to Simple Labeler once more, I found out that all those “borders” (as they are called) are packed into the application package and are simple PNGs. Wow! Now here we go - pimp your Simple Labeler.

1 Just take your favorite tool and start designing. Here you can download my Photoshop template: sl_templatepsd.zip

After you are done with your design, save it as PNG and name ist something like “fs00010.png” - fs = fullscreen plus an increasing number of the designs (00001-00008 are reserved by the original designs; if you don’t need’em you can use those numbers as well) .

2 Now make a little preveiw file 86×86 px, save it as 8-bit PNG (PNG8) and name it “th00010.png” - 00010 should be the same number as you gave to the fs-file. Here you can download the default blanko image: LightScribe-thumbnailPNG NOTE: This is an 8-bit image, so you have to set it back to RGB-Mode, if you want to work with PS Layers.

3 Next thing is just a little XML File that tells the program some settings. No need to go into detail here, unless you want to toy around with text color option (it is grey! remember that). I guess, it is just selfexplainable. Changing the name might be interessting for you, though (replace cahoonah.com with your designated name).

Name that file “md00010.xml” according to our example - here it has the number 00010 again.

4 Now comes the hard hacking part ;)…. Go to your Lighscribe Simple Labeler and Klick on it with CTRL pressed (right click, if you have a mouse equipped with two buttons) and select “Show package content”. Go to “content/images/borders” and copy your files like this:

“fs00010.png” into fullsize
“md00010.xml” into metadata
“tn00010.png” goes into thumbnails

Now start Simple Labeler et voilá your design is in the list. Select it, delete the textfields, if you jsut want to print your graphic, like me, hit the button and follow the further instructions. I went for a very complex design, having smoke and bad smell of burned plasitcs on my mind, but it worked properly. Completly free labeling software for you LightScribe burner, althoguh a little effort is needed.

Additonal notes:
- remeber, that LS is only capable of handling greyscale images. My PSD template file is set to that mode
- choose a strong contrast on your choosen image. It will be very flattened once on the disc.

Now it’s your turn to come up with good designs, although those over at lighscribe.com are worth a look.

If someone knows about a free label tool for mac that makes picture import easy as click load, I would be more than happy to hear of it. On the other hand, it is quite nice to have a complete programm with fixed designs, that you just install on you colleagues computer and he/she can jsut burn company branded labels right out of the box.

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A couple of weeks ago, we got a so called “heißen Draht” (hot wire). Actually it is a half baked CNC, that has instead of a rotating cutter that moves in all three axis only a hot wire that cuts along two axis. After the actual job was done, I had the chance to testdrive that humble machine. Off course the first thing, that popped into my mind, was good old Berzerk. I came up with a little layout that should fit over my arcade cab, put in all cutmarks and hit the go button. Half an hour later, it was done.

Not sure what glue to use, to finally mount it on the wall, I found a neat place today. Have a look…

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Site is still under construction and I wonder if I should go on and post the deatils here. Actually I installed WP to write down what I am currently workin on… so I guess you will find some more posts about blog creation.

Today the green sky was set to orange, with is more realistic - at least, when you are able to see the difference. (Thanx Ingo )
I added a night view of cahoonah logo above, where the letters are lit by spotlights hidden in the grass; this is espacially for all people dropping by during the nighttime. A dark header wasn’t that inviting. If you still havend found out, what’s so special about this header up there^^^: It changes the whole scene according to real daytime. So when it is 7am, the sun is about to set and if it is 8 pm it is about to vanish behind mountains. Just come back and enjoy.

The next step is to add some life…. and a preloader, as the files gets bigger and bigger.
Ahh yes and off course the monitor needs to get some content. First idea was to add just a stupid clock, ticking precious time away. Now I thinking turning it into a mooditor, showing my mood… let’s see, what happens.

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As all you M$ users might notice, the borders of this blog are still a mess in IE. IE is killing my desings - as usual - and I will have to dig into *workarounds*. Yesterday I spent half day on that and in the end I was so fed up with it, that I almost lost interested in the whole blog again.

I found a couple of scripts. The one from TwinHelix just ads a behaviour to the stylesheet - couldn’t get it to work; the other one from Bob Osola just does, what it is supposed to, but kills all positioning - after I installed it, all my pngs where on top of the page. I will need more time tofigure this out.

Many of you creative people may have experienced “Arbeitsblindheit” (workblind) as we call it in german. You spent so much time and work on something, that in the end you don’t know weather you like it or not. Today, I just came back to it and I still like what I archived so far. That’s a good indication and I can pull some strength from it, to go on and teach stupid IE transparency, that sucker!

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Yesterday I spent the whole day, fiddeling with the layout and theme of this blog. As usual when it comes to do something for myself it is hard to come up with a good idea. I wanted something special, something new… basically what everyone wants to do, when starting out in new direction. At noon I got that certain feeling in my stomach, that it will take more than a day, to come up with an idea and bad vibes arose, as I basically I got nowhere by the evening. I hat a couple of sketches, with were totally rubbish. Slightly frustrated I decided to end work for today. On my way home, I pass vast fields and sun sent its beams right through the partly cloudy sky; only the big stone head from the Eastern Islands where missing; there it struck me: Being a big fan of these heads, stonehendge and mystical stony things stuck into ground I came up with this header desing. Hughe concrete letters rotting in the middle of nowhere.

“Why is it flash?”, I can hear you ask… mhhhh… should I really tell you that or maybe you find out by yourself. So much for now: Just come back later and see….

Still some CSS work todo - specially around the footer section, but enough for now. Happy, tired and almost content with the outcome of this day.

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