This could turn into a real series. My office chair went a little kerplooie. It's an old wooden office chair with casters. The casters are new, but one of the caster sockets had been chewed away by an errant collar. We've got two other similar office chairs around the house. It's a sickness, I admit: bags, pens, gadgets, chairs. All three were in need of some loving.

The mechanism underneath the chair is so simple, and rock solid. I really feel sadness at all the plasticky knobs and levers in a modern chair. Steel and wood for me. So, I set up my workspace down in the basement (yes, it's sitting on top of an empty keg).

I used a two-part polyurethane epoxy to fill in the entire space and belt-sanded it close to flush. A detail sander brought it flush and took care of the overfill around the edges.

I reused the collar, bending each of the teeth back out to better grip the polyurethane, and I forced a tight fit by adding a sliver of bamboo to each socket. I used a mallet and a piece of scrap wood to drive each of the casters in place, and all are very firmly attached, but turn effortlessly.

Back in the office, none the worse for wear.

Thumbscrew's been making some rounds. Thanks, everyone!

Switchblog

FreeMacWare: "This is a great way to make a thumbnail if you are going to post the picture online. It’s fast too."

which was picked up by TUAW and Mike Power

The Apple Blog "ThumbScrew rocks my world, and I'm so happy to hear that it's been updated"

Random Murmurings tried to tie it together with flickr.

Hit Any Key: "Thumbscrew is one of those handy little photo tools that can make you look good, and fast!"

pedersondesigns: "My new favorite application."

Stability of Our Times: "One cool Mac app: Thumbscrew. Great fun and ease!"

MacReviewCast: Right around the 24:22 mark, listen to Jeff Powell. "Real small, single purpose app, very well done. ... One of those apps that tries to do one thing, and does a pretty good job of it."

ReelSmart: "makes a very cool thumbnail image instantly"

And those are just the sites in English!

Italian: ZeroNáve and inblogtecno

Korean: Heaven2 and AppleTree

Spanish: Applesfera, Comando + Q, and Think Wasabi

Japanese: Smantou, Pisces, and Slowpoke

We were tidying up the downstairs office yesterday (wow, two offices), and I stumbled upon this gem, straight from my childhood: An Apsco Giant. Just sitting there in a drawer! Unused!

So many memories of school. The familiar buzz and whir of metal on metal. The smell of graphite and wood shavings. The tidy bouquet of sharpened pencils.

Now, it's mounted neatly on the wall next to my desk, forever at hand to refine a supreme writing instrument.

Have at it. Includes GIF support for thumbnails.

I'm changing the whole Web Page output story, and it's partially underway, but it's not finished yet. Basically, I'm making it possible for you to do whatever you want (hopefully) with the end product of each batch run. For the curious, look in /tmp after a batch, and you'll see an XML file describing all the images processed in that run. This file will be passed to a script that you choose (or write!), so you can do anything you want with the results.

Download 1.0b12

[Update: Fixed the sidebar link. Thanks, Lorne]

It's been a long time coming, I know. Thanks so much to everyone who waited patiently. But it's back, and it's good. Thumbscrew 1.0b11

It's Universal now. The problems I ran into with running subprocesses using a bundled Python are gone. I reimplemented the thumbnailer kernel using ObjC with the help of Scott Stevenson. Huge thanks, Scott.

It's got Growl support. We'll let you know bit by excruciating bit how Thumbscrew is doing, and when a batch is done.

Web page output is currently suspended while I evaluate the best way to generate output. I've used a variety of means in the past, and want something that is approachable by lots of users. Zope PageTemplates are pretty easy, and the syntax for developing new templates is pretty straightforward. XML and XSLT are maybe a little more universal, but I really don't know.

Take her out for a spin and let me know what you think!

Download 1.0b11