An Acorn Wallpaper

 
Peter Shawbury
 

When I look at my RISC PC, I continue to marvel at the cleverness of its design. That sliding, curved front flap - so beautiful. I love that it stands on it's side, tall and thin. The grey colour is elegant, and the Acorn symbol - well, I think that green acorn is cool.
 
At a recent car boot sale I came across a batch of four. Unloved, unwanted and none of them working. For a fiver, I bought them all anyway. I wanted to have some fun with the iconic 1990s computer case design.
 
After a bit of thought I stacked the four I'd bought, plus mine on the top, into a tower. Using my Canon SLR digital camera, I zoomed right out, and moved in close. I turned on the flash to overexpose the leading edge, and took the shot. The wide angled lense gave a pleasing depth, with the vanishing points of the tower seemingly only just outside the shot. However, as it stood the image was not anything special or remotely artistic. I needed to sex-it-up somehow !
 
A year or so ago I'd aquired a program called Variations but had not done anything with it. An article in a recent issue of Qercus magazine had reminded me that it was worth investigating. On-line, I downloaded the latest version from author Rob Davison's website.
 
I dragged my "Tower of Acorns" image into the Variations software. I then went crazy, clicking stuff at random. Rubbish. I tried again. Rubbish. I tried again. This one, I liked:
 

 
I added a black surround to make it 1280 by 958 pixels - the perfect size for a wallpaper on a 1280 by 1024 pixel screen as there is no point papering under the icon bar.
 
On my hard drive from way back, I had an application called PinLogo, although I've also seen it called AcornLogo on APDL's Datafile CD disc 4. It simply places the classic brand name in the correct font onto the desktop screen as a watermark.
 

 
I used this to overlay the Acorn badge on my image and then used Paint's snapshot function to retake the composite on-screen image.
 
I'm really pleased with the result and am proud to feature the Acorn trademark on my desktop. A friend is using it as a wallpaper on his Microsoft windows machine. Perhaps Acorn is becoming fashionable again.
 

 
TO INSTALL THE WALLPAPER
(under RISC OS 6)
 

DOWNLOAD the wallpaper.
(clicking on the graphic with orange arrows)
Unzip it.
Double click on your hard drive's "!Boot" file.
A single click on "Pinboard" will open it...
...as will a single click on "Appearance".
Select the radio button on "Scaled"...
...and on "Backdrop".
Drag and drop Peter's wallpaper sprite.
(onto the window in the "Background image box")
Click "Set" to close the various windows.
Job done !