A windsurfing, CSS-grudging, IE-hating, web-developing, gigantic-machine-puzzling blog

Month: May 2009

The Cougar Ace tips over, Alaska

The Cougar Ace is well-known for setting a Canadian record for most vehicles unloaded from a single ship, and also for a shipping disaster that once again caught my attention primarily because of the amazing Coast Guard photos. Like the Selendang Ayu disaster, the Cougar Ace became disabled off the Aleutian Islands, Alaska — this time though, the problem was an 60 degree list due to a ballast handling mistake. Wired has a pretty amazing writeup about the salvage operation. Click photos for the full-size versions.

MV Cougar Ace
Aug. 8, 2006: towed to safer waters in Wide Bay, Aleutian Islands

MV Cougar Ace
Aug. 10, 2006: still waiting to be righted, Wide Bay, Aleutian Islands

Resize script in Paint Shop Pro X2

PSP X2 resize scriptI batch-process-resized some photos in PSP X2, & realized too late (after I had emailed 90 photos off to various relatives) that everyone appeared a little taller & thinner than they normally are. Not so bad right? Except that headshots look a little weird. The photos were taken with different cameras with slightly different aspect ratios.

So here’s an easy way to batch process/resize photos with a PSP X2 script, each to their correct aspect ratio (fixed width, variable height):

  • Open any one image.
  • File, Script, Start recording … resize the image.
  • File, Script, Save recording … save it under your scripts folder, which is generally Documents/My PSP Files/Scripts-Restricted/
  • File, Script, Edit.. browse to your scripts folder & select the resize script that you just saved.
  • click the Text Editor button
  • delete or comment out (# in front of the line) the ‘Height’ AND ‘AspectRatio’ lines. Setting them both to None works too. Make sure ‘MaintainAspectRatio’ is set to True.
  • Save & enjoy not looking warped.

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