Rasterbation gives me that warm fuzzy feeling

One thing that I have a love-hate relationship with is software that has about a billion options, gizmos and features that require virtual monastic retreat to study and perhaps if you are worthy, eventually master.

OK, I’m from a generation where your new toaster didn’t come with an instruction manual – you put bread in it and out popped toast... unlike the over-teched modern one smugly lurking in our kitchen, with its three LED lights, three buttons, and a switch with five settings. Thankfully the good old lever is still there, though I’m kind of surprised that it hasn’t been replaced with a front-loading electronic option – seeing the bread disappearing CD-ROM style into the infernal device would be pretty cool I must admit, (as long as you use a recognizable bread format.)

That may explain why I’m really impressed with a little web-gem that I first saw mentioned in a pithy, lateral thinker’s marketing newsletter called Damn I Wish I’d Thought of That! by Andy Sernovitz, CEO of GasPedal.

The Rasterbator is a great freely-downloadable application that allows you to create rasterized versions of images from your PC or the web. It subsequently converts the image into multiple A4-sized (or custom-sized) segments in PDF format, which can then be printed.

Allow me to start over: this is a cool, free programme that allows you to make giant posters from image files that you can print on an ordinary A4 printer (some assembly required.) According to the website these can be up to 20 metres in size (the ones I’ve made so far are about 2 metres wide.)

An amazingly easy to use programme, The Rasterbator will have you rasterbating your sweaty little palms off in seconds, and has a few nifty, equally simple to use options. It can be found on a whacky, possibly Finnish website, The Sect of Homokaasu. There is also a great gallery of rasterbated images submitted by fans of the programme.

The website is also the host of The Kill Everyone Project, which had as its noble goal, the virtual killing of all human beings, one click at a time. According to the TKEP page, the project was completed on 26th of April 2007, taking 2179 days (about six years) of mouse-clicking a button simply called ‘Click here!’ Apart from my long-held suspicions being confirmed that I have been virtually dead since at least 2007, I’m also pretty taken by the ease of use of this errr... killer-app.

Right, it’s time to enter meatspace once more, as I’m flying to Durban really early tomorrow morning to talk to booksellers - back on Friday.