HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KAREN!

Poor Karen, she has no love on social media these days.  I think I'll give her a boost by using her name as the first in, hopefully, a series of video clips, that show nothing but the phrase Happy Birthday followed by a name.  People are born every hour everyday anyway, right?  Maybe even more frequent than that.  Surely someone somewhere is celebrating birthday and in need of a video.

I made the video from a GIF, or actually, from a few GIF because I did the work in PersonalPaint on an Amiga computer emulated on my MacBook Pro.  The phrase Happy Birthday, Karen! is too wide for the screen and had to be created as three separate GIF files.  Thank goodness for EZgif.com, which let me combine multiple files to create GIF.  I discovered that the trick is to name the file sequentially and the new GIF will created in that order.  In my case, the files were called 1-Happy.gif, 2-Birthday.gif, and 3-Karen.gif.  I also typed up the final frame and held it for a minute or two.

Maybe because it's the first such video, it's quite a process.  Hopefully if I do it more regularly I can get better.  I used the Bullion animated font and there are a few more to work with.  I suppose the next video will still use Karen's name, but with all the available animated fonts.  After that, what name should I use?  Maybe I'll consult the list of most popular baby names of 2019...

Check out the video at:

https://youtu.be/YnkIB7csPys

FOND OF ANIMFONTS

At work I have no choice but work with Windows computers but at home I mostly compute with my MacBook Pro.  At one time years ago I actually got things done on an Amiga computer, or on various Amiga computers as I did go through a few of them over the few years.  It was fun and useful for a while but at the time when most people would easily get on the Internet to surf the web, with everything needed included on 3.5" floppy disks or CDs, all free, the Amiga platform would require so much more additional work.  You would have to buy the dialer, some TCP/IP stack, the web browser, the email client, argh, too much work.  I went Windows for a while, with its clunky Windows 95 and all, then went Mac, with a Wall Street Powerbook.

One thing I miss greatly, and not able to reproduce on Windows or Mac platform, animated text like the ones shown below.  They are made with the use of animfonts (animated fonts).  Based on a blog post of mine back in 2005 (http://www.qaptainqwerty.com/2005/11/amiga-forever.html ) I created some animated GIF (animgif or GIF for short), possibly on a Packard-Bell PC running Windows 95, via the Amiga Forever emulator software.  When I went over to the Mac platform, no more Amiga Forever.  Cloanto developed Amiga Forever only for the huge Windows market.  Sure Amiga Forever is based on the publicly available UAE (Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator) software but I don't have the time or willingness to muck around with Unix codes and such to make these things work on the Mac.  Every few months or years I would Google "Mac UAE" and probably tried to make MaxUAE work but failed.  Most recently I tried FS-UAE and that effort too got nowhere.  Luckily, while looking for ROM files on an Amiga Forever 2010 disc, to feed to FS-UAE, I came across E-UAE, some Amiga emulation software for the Mac, again based on UAE.  After a few hours of tweaking and configuring, I finally have the ability to generate animated text again.  Only twelve years since 2005!  Maybe someday I'll share my experience jumping through hoops to make E-UAE to run on my Mac.  In the mean time, enjoy the messages below.

ANIMATED GIF TEST FOR FACEBOOK