Nik's Life (UHNTSS)

Hourly Comic Day

2012-02-02T11:17:00.001-05:00

I participated in Hourly Comic Day this year.

I got my camera.

2011-12-30T16:04:00.002-05:00

I'm pretty excited about it.

Currently I don't have any lenses for it (though I have one I may be able to jury-rig for it), and I can't yet actually boot the included Kubuntu operating system which comes pre-installed with all the necessary software to interface with the camera. However, it's here. Enjoy some pictures.

Everything provided: Camera, lens mount adapter, cap, power adapter, POE cable, 15' ethernet cable, and allen wrenches with which to open the camera.

This is the camera. Look how small it is. It's heavier than I thought, though - that's a metal body, not plastic.

That's the back. One Ethernet port. Also, the /*source is inside*/ I like very much. As you can see with...

That's right, it came with allen wrenches so that I can take the camera apart if I want. Not weird funky triangle screws or other stuff I can't open easily. Allen bolts, with included wrenches.

And finally,

This funky thing - Power Over Ethernet adapter. Put power (12-36 VDC) in one plug, plug my computer into the other, and plug the camera into the third.

Woo woo! It's here!

The Good King Himself

2011-11-29T20:40:00.000-05:00

I got a breakcore song done. Good King Wenceslaus is the base. I had a bit of fun doing this. It's happy music. It's posted to ihatebreakcore.com, as well as my bandcamp (link on righthand sidebar).

<p><p><a href="http://awesomedelicious.bandcamp.com/track/the-good-king-himself">The Good King Himself by awesomeDelicious</a></p></p>
Enjoy! I should be getting some more stuff up on bandcamp relatively soon.

True HDR Video

2011-11-15T21:16:00.002-05:00

The Elphel camera, which I'm probably going to buy, shoots JP4 Raw video. RAW VIDEO which can later be tonemapped, making it the only affordable way to shoot raw video that I know of.
I played with some footage someone else shot:

MIPALIAT Studio

2011-09-22T21:22:00.001-04:00

The name of this here organization will hereafter, sometimes, when the mood strikes, be referred to as MIPALIAT Studio. That's the name I'll put on movies I make, for example. I don't yet know about music, if I ever get around to making any.

MIPALIAT stands for "Make It Perfect And Leave It At That," a phrase I hear occasionally while working, and one that pretty much sums up how things should be done in general. It basically means don't underdo it, don't overdo it.

ALSO the first Delta License (BY-DO) is up.

Music Review: All the Homestuck music

2011-08-26T14:21:00.002-04:00

I recently purchased all of the Homestuck music. It's so great. No, it's not creative commons or any other type of copyleft. However, it is hosted/sold on bandcamp.com, which means you can listen to it as much as you want as many times as you want, full songs, and never have to purchase it. Purchasing, thought, gives you options for what type of file you want - good mp3, bad mp3, alac, ogg, flac, etc. I opted for FLACs, which meant it took me a LONG TIME to download all the albums (a total of 311 tracks). (FLAC = Free Lossless Audio Codec)

Some of the songs I don't like so much, some of the albums are a little hard on the ears (favoring 8-bit emulation a bit much), but some of them are fantastic - Prospit & Derse, for example, is great. And all of the albums have great tracks in them. And there's extras all over the place - PDFs of sheet music, SWF video, PDF of the album booklet (which I want to print out, and also burn all of these to CD but I probably won't), and almost every song has art. The album has art, which is put in the folder, but almost every song has DIFFERENT art embedded in it. It's so great.

Music Review: Asfast

2011-08-12T16:54:00.000-04:00

The best breakcore. No really, the best. The dude plays guitar, piano, and drums, in addition to using software to make music. Also, it doesn't sound like there are any loops at all. None. Not even drum loops. Drum samples, but each measure is different. This is breakcore the way it should be done. Often, the non-breakcore, calm intros are half of the song - occasionally, there is no breakcore in a track. My favorite track is "I Thought I Caught A Bird" from Satan, though I think "Shabby But Lovely" is a better album overall. Also, all three albums are licensed under a Creative-Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license, which is a pretty good one. You do have to refrain from using the works in commercial manners, but you can use the work derivatively and you don't have to Share-Alike, which in itself doesn't really matter, it just means you can release it under any license you like, and therefore use any other type of Creative-Commons licensed materials with it. Seriously, awesome music.

Music Review: BrunoXe

2011-07-29T14:27:00.001-04:00

I've had an album by BrunoXe for a while, and after hearing it a few times, I decided I like it. There's some triphop but also a little breakbeat thrown in, but not purely either of those things like a lot of groups are. The drums are NOT the entirety of the music. There's string, horns, some electro synth, etc. It's really a lot of different types of background music, excellent for use in movies where it would truly be background music, not music that dominates a scene (which I also like). Also, all ELEVEN (11) albums are released under a Creative-Commons Attribution-Only license, which as I have mentioned is the best, because you can do whatever you want with works releasend under it, as long as you say where your source material came from. Listen it up.

Cookies fixed

2011-07-29T14:20:00.000-04:00

I've been unable to update for a bit because of cookie issues preventing me from logging in, but now I'm back up and running.

I haven't been making as much progress as I'd like in "The Other Place," but I'm planning to finish the storyboard this weekend. In addition, I was delighted to find flacs of L'autre endroit, as well as flacs of Silence's previous album, Encre.

I'm continuing to learn blender, albiet slowly. I really need to get on that.
I'm just being slow and procrastinating about getting things done, and I really need to stop.

Projects

2011-07-02T10:22:00.000-04:00

A couple of things I'm working on. I've storyboarded the first two songs of L'autre endroit. The third should be easy, because that's the one that told me I should make a movie from this album. I'm using Pencil animation software, an open-source program for making hand-drawn animations. This makes it great for storyboarding - put song in, the whenever I want, make a new frame and sketch it on my wacom. It really words very smoothly - the smoothest beginning to any video project I've ever had. No workarounds necessary, just works.
I plan to make this movie entirely in Blender, using some (many) models from blendswap and Motion Capture of me (and other people, when necessary), quite possibly using a Kinect.

First, to get experience with Blender and motion capture, I'm going to make a video to go along with this song.

I like the song, and I've started making models in Blender. I'm starting with this because the characters will be easy to model.

After that project, I have a couple of Synfig projects I might do. The "L'autre endroit" project is a long-term thing. It'll take a while. But the storyboarding is coming along.

Music Review: Silence - L'autre endroit

2011-06-24T21:00:00.001-04:00

I just put L'autre endroit (translation: The other place) in the title of the post so no one would think I was writing a review of lack of sound. The band's name is Silence. This album is fantastic.

It's not like it would be good accompanying a movie - a movie plays in my head when I listen to this album. It's a post-fascism-takeover revolution. This entire album is awesome and worth listening to. It has a number of things that work well together. There are good underlying basslines, ambient backgrounds, and semi-industrial triphop beats, all of which make for good listening. But the wow factor appears in two places. First, the ability to do breakcore without breaking the triphop. The triphop beat stays, extra drums fill in - but not too fast. Not speedcore or anything like that. The second factor, the one that creates total baddassery on this album, is the guitar (or sometimes, other secondary instrument). It appears not in the beginning of a track, but usually after the middle, and usually makes all my hairs stand up. Listen to and download this album.

Synfig Animation Artblock

2011-06-03T11:12:00.000-04:00

Here's what we got done in my artblock.

Changes, news, etc!

2011-05-14T15:54:00.002-04:00

I've gotten a Vimeo account, so videos I make that I own all the necessary rights to will go there from now on. Likewise a bandcamp account for music. Anyway. Demoreel of effects on Vimeo here.
Untitled from Nicholas Lockwood on Vimeo.

Synfig Project Finished

2011-04-06T08:52:00.000-04:00

I made a video with Synfig Studio.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCTJOAC3E44&feature=channel_video_title

I'm pretty happy with it. I might make a couple changes at some point, but it takes 24 hours to render, so I'm in no rush. It came out well.
Full info at http://nikolardo.deviantart.com/art/Homestuck-You-Only-Live-Twice-203606067.

Music Review: Mattias Westlund

2011-04-01T08:07:00.000-04:00

Today's review: Mattias Westlund's albums Chronicles I, Chronicles II, and Chronicles III, all released under the Attribution-Only Creative Commons license. These albums are full of soundtrack and filmscore beauties. A lot of them are a little more filmscore than I like - the background music to normal scenes more than the foreground music for dramatic scenes - but they're all well put together, and many are sufficiently intense to be foreground music. Occasionally they sound a little empty, like an orchestral score played by half an orchestra, but on the hole, these are go-to albums for many of your dramatic, filmscore needs, especially if your film is medieval.

Music Review: Keffy Kay

2011-02-28T20:28:00.000-05:00

Today's music review: Keffy Kay's album Angel, licensed under an Attribution Only CC license (the best kind). It's super awesome. Great downtempo beats, but a lot of cello and piano in there too. A little jazzy without sounding too much like jazz. Some of it is definitely good dance music. All of it is music I would put in a movie.
Cello is my favorite instrument, period. There just isn't any better single instrument as far as I'm concerned. The next best is the piano/drums duo (though drums is plural, and therefore not really a single instrument...but kind of is). Keffy Kay uses cello and piano/drums.
Most of this music is downtempo and suspenseful - or at least, the kind of music you might use before an exciting scene in a movie (I think of music, in a large part, by where it would go in a movie or what I'd feel awesome doing while listening to it). Some is sad. Some is happy. All of it is fantastic. I'm going to have to listen to Beautiful Way, the first album. We'll see how that goes.

Music Review: Tryad

2011-02-27T09:19:00.000-05:00

Today's review is of Tryad, or rather, their misleadingly-named album, Public Domain. It's not in the public domain, it's licensed under a CC Attribution-Share-Alike license. I don't keep track of the version numbers because the differences are minimal, besides, I can always go back and look it up if I need to. A word on licenses - I my favorite CC license is the BY license - no share-alike necessary. Also, it's compatible with BY-SA, BY-NC-SA, etc. The thing that bothers me about SA licenses is their incompatibility. I can't mix BY-SA and BY-NC-SA licenses in a work, because I can't license it under both. This is super frustrating. Another annoying one, as far as new words is concerned, is BY-ND (attribution-no derivatives). Like, why? I license my works, when I can, under the WTFPL.
I keep track of the licenses all my music is under by filling in the "comment" tag with the license - in this case, "by-sa" is all I have. Clementine is my current music player of choice, because I liked Amarok 1.4 a lot. I have used Songbird often, but always find it to heavy for what I'd like. Too slow. I've also used Banshee, Rhythmbox, Amarok 1.4, Amarok 2.0 (only for a few moments), XBMC (also momentarily), and probably others which don't come to mind right now. Clementine is pretty darn good. I might try to switch back to Amarok 1.4 at some point, but right now it's not worth the trouble.
Anyway, this is a review of Tryad's Public Domain, not music players. I like this album. Obviously, otherwise I wouldn't download it. Many of these songs are lyrical, and well done at that. Beautifully airy and echoing voices over the triphop beats, with some synth and piano backing. I am a firm believer in the triphop beat + piano backing formula, and Tryad pulls it off very well. The lyrics are a bonus, especially in songs like "The Final Rewind" and "Peace on Earth (Same Place)." Occasionally, such as with "Our Lives Change," the deep and awesome-scene-in-a-film (which is one of the ways I judge this type of music) sound disappears. There is still a nice beat, but the background emotion of synth and piano is traded for an acoustic guitar. It's not bad, certainly, but it's not the same. Some of the other songs also feel empty - not particularly fleshed out by any instruments other than drums, for example. There are also tempo variations - some of these songs are not triphop. But overall, this is one of my favorite triphop albums. Most of it is good, listenable triphop, and as far as lyrical triphop goes, it's the best I've ever heard, in the few songs with lyrics. Really, the album's worth downloading for those songs alone. Hey, it's free.
Next review: Keffy Kay.

Music Reviews, Creative Works

2011-02-27T09:01:00.001-05:00

I've decided to do a couple things here. First off, as I mentioned earlier, I've eliminated all pirated music from my music collection and started downloading a lot of Creative-Commons music from Jamendo. I'll be writing reviews of the music I download. Second, I recently went through all the old schoolwork I had around from ever, and set aside most of my creative writing pieces (especially the elementary-school ones), which I'll post on here from time to time. The old ones are pretty good. Mostly they're murder mysteries (or just murder stories). ...I was a pretty weird kid. Still, there's some good writing in there - my more recent writings are not as much fun to read, not nearly so much. Also I've been working in Synfig a bit, as well as Kdenlive. I made a Homestuck tribute video to John Egbert/Heir Transparent/Blue Collar Man:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63a_XLUqY8k

I also wrote lyrics to "My favorite things" for Vriska, "Vriska's favorite things," which I sung (poorly) and edited in Audacity and Kdenlive (and LMMS). If you would like to sing it better than me, please let me know so I can get my voice off the internets.

That's about all for now. I'll post a music review sometime soon, I hope? Also, once I get this Synfig thing figured out that I'm working on now, I'll post that like crazy. Other parts of the demoreel are coming along well.

Things

2011-02-22T23:18:00.000-05:00

They've been happening. I've been reading Homestuck. I'm caught up. It's probably the most amazing thing I've ever read. I've been dabbling pretty hardcore in Synfig. Awesomeness will come of it. Some in Kdenlive, some in LMMS. Also, Jamendo's pretty badass. I got rid of ALL of my pirated music, but what with all the CC music I have, I've got a total of 483 songs left (227 of which are under some sort of free license, and 100 of which were free but no license, such as from ihatebreakcore). Just sayin' some stuff. I should update more. Not that anyone reads this. Thought not.

Money?

2011-01-22T12:49:00.001-05:00

I've made some things. They are for sale.
http://www.artfire.com/users/Nikolardo
They are arm-(or at least elbow-)length fingerless mittens made from the sleeves of felted wool sweaters.
They are awesome and should be bought.

I'm also getting a lot better at working in Synfig Studio. I can do good lightsaber effects, as well as some other miscellaneous effects which I have yet to post online (I want to have a longer demo reel - currently I have 36 seconds of demo reel, 19 of which is the lightsaber), one of which will also be an advertisement for the defensive properties of the fingerless mittens I am selling. I'm also going to sell (or at least put up for sale) hammocks similar to the one in my treehouse.
EDIT: it's up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4if-vEysRw

By the way, Synfig Studio is awesome, and I've started work on an I-don't-know-how-long-it-will-be-only-that-it's-long film, which I think will be perfect, as the characters and backgrounds are all relatively simplistic, at least at first, an the things to be animated grow in complexity as the story goes on.

Also, Avidemux is my favorite video editor, period. Yes, Kdenlive is pretty bitchin' (though it does crash occasionally), but there are some things that Avidemux can do so perfectly and simply that it's awesome - i.e. "copy" video information, so when you turn a video into jpegs, it takes approximately no time at all, and when you turn a sequence of jpegs into an MPEG video, it also takes no time at all. This is handy, as Synfig Doesn't like to export things with image backgrounds (like, a live-action video with effects on top) as video, but it will do fine if they're jpegs, and then Avidemux is like whoop, it's a video. I do have to admit that Kdenlive is the only program I use to add audio to video, and to do non-linear editing in general. Anyway, more bulletins as events warrant.

Money

2011-01-09T22:19:00.000-05:00

So I'm looking to make some money somehow. I'm not a big fan of the whole idea of having to have a job and make money, but I need to have a small income. It does need to be small - I'm not interested in making a lot of money or in the problems that come with said amount of money. However, I do need to start generating a little bit of an income somehow - enough to feed me, perhaps. I'm having trouble finding anything that is awesome enough to travel to or close enough to not be awesome - in fact, I'm having trouble finding anything at all that (a) I can do and (b) is not a scam. If anyone reads this (unlikely) and has an idea for me (even less likely) then let me know.

Heartless Better Faster Stronger

2010-12-26T10:32:00.001-05:00

After watching Heartless: The Story of the Tinman, I heard Kanye West's "Stronger" and I decided I needed to put them together.

Here it is:

Heartless Better Faster Stronger

I worked in Kdenlive, but found that it operated frustratingly slowly, so I half-sized the video in Avidemux (down to 746 by 420 or something like that, still plenty large) and then chopped it up into segments about two minutes long to make it easier to work with.
After this, Kdenlive worked just fine. This process also led me to develop a method I have not yet tested or used for working with clips in low-definition but exporting the finished video from Kdenlive in high definition. It is recommended for everyone who, like me, wants to edit a little video but doesn't really have the system to support it.

Step 1: Cut video up into whatever clips you'll want to work with in Avidemux (Kdenlive also cuts clips up fine, but it's nice to be able to load shorter clips into it so you don't have to search through 20 minutes of video every time you want something short.) and save them somewhere (preferably with names and numbers, i.e. 01Intro).

Step 2: Dumb down the resolution in the following manner: if you are going to want to export at the resolution of the original video, ignore this next sentence. If you want to export your finished project at a lower resolution than the original, then resize (Mplayer resize) each clip in Avidemux to the resolution you'll want to export at when you are all done, and save these clips in a different location but with the same name as the clips they came from. Now, everyone: resize the clips to something much easier to deal with - say, width of 400, maybe even 300. As low as you can really see what you're editing is how low you should go. These smallest resized clips you'll save in a third location.

Step 3: Edit your video in Kdenlive. Kdenlive should work much more smoothly with small video sizes than it does with large ones. Get everything the way you want it. Render it and watch it to make sure it came out well, albiet small.

Step 4: There are a couple ways to do this step, but I'll just mention the safest one. Copy the .kdenlive project file and paste it somewhere else, say, in the folder with the clips which are the resolution you want to export at (it doesn't really matter where, it's just more organized that way. Now, open the .kdenlive file in your favorite text editor. I use Kwrite. Change the paths pointing to the small set of clips so that it points to the set of clips of the correct size. That should be all you need to change, and with any luck it will work. I'll test it out on something and post back results (if it doesn't work, I'll change it so that it does.).

Step 5: Open up that new .kdenlive file of yours in Kdenlive. It now points to the larger clips. Careful. They're big. Don't try to edit them here or anything. Just render that project. It'll take a long time. I can't help you with how to render it well, because that still gives me trouble. However, if this trick has worked, when it finished rendering, you'll have a high-resolution video with all the edits you want it to have, without the trouble of editing high-resolution video.

Short Films

2010-12-26T10:08:00.001-05:00

So I've been watching short films lately.
Some of them made in Blender, which I'm currently teaching myself from the Blender 3D: Noob to Pro wikibook.

First the Blenders:
Elephant's Dream

This one is actually a few years old, but I saw it before Big Buck Bunny.
Features people, and is also very, very strange.

Big Buck Bunny

Very impressive. Animals outdoors, which means realistic fur and grass.

Sintel

The most recent from the Blender Foundation. Very cool. Only a couple things you can see that look weird. Super sad.

Meischeid
This is not so much a short film as much as it is an animation to a song. Very neat to watch though.

Murnau the Vampire
This is a remake of the classic Nosferatu done by one person in Blender over a period of six months. It is very stylistic - entirely black and white, except where it's red. It's very neat to watch. Also, it's 22 minutes long, whereas the other blender shorts are only around 10 minutes in length.

Non-blender now (live-action):
Expendable
A movie about being a henchman in a big evil corporation. Very funny. Put together by David Malki ! of Wondermark, where I caused trouble.

Heartless: The Story of the Tinman
This is the story of the Tinman from the Wizard of Oz. It's actually from one of the Wizard of Oz books - it's not a recently invented backstory. It's very well done and also very sad.

Watch some of these.

Flying Tesla Stove

2010-11-14T22:45:00.001-05:00

I made a piece of art, which I will turn into a Threadless submission in a day or two. Or maybe a few more. It's on deviantart. It's Tesla flying through the air on a stove. It uses two public domain pictures (I love the public domain). This picture exists because Tesla was working on a flying machine which he discussed as such:

"You should not be at all surprised, if some day you see me fly from New York to Colorado Springs in a contrivance which will resemble a gas stove and weigh as much. ... and could, if necessary enter and depart through a window."

Another shirt

2010-11-14T11:00:00.000-05:00

This was the shirt I was designing when I pumped out the Ribcage shirt (now updated). It can be called Hearts, or Sleeves, or Hearts on Sleeves. I like it. Another background color would probably be better, though. It can be found here, and here's the picture:

Just Kidding!

2010-11-12T23:47:00.000-05:00

There's going to be a post in between Almond Macaroons and Death. This is because I have designed a shirt for Threadless and submitted it for critique. It can be found here. In case you're only mildly interested enough to look but not enough to click, here's what it looks like:

It comprises two images of a ribcage, both from Gray's anatomy and therefore in the public domain, which I ran through Inkscape's trace function. I like it, but it's not something I'm exceptionally proud of. It's something I did mostly to reacquaint myself with GIMP and Inkscape, as well as test out the whole Threadless upload and submit and critique process. I don't have particularly high hopes for it, but hey, if it get's printed, that's awesome. If not, that's expected. I have higher hopes for my other shirt that I was working on before I did this one.
Anyway, I continue to post things here like someone's reading this - if anyone's reading, could you leave me a comment or something? I'm just curious. I post because I like to, but it'd be nice if anyone else was enjoying this, too. Anyway. No promises on what the next post will be. Sometime in the future there will be a post titled "Death" and it will be amusing.

Almond Macaroons

2010-11-12T11:48:00.001-05:00

Unconscious

2010-11-12T09:04:00.000-05:00

As someone who is only hit with conscious creative impulses occasionally, I have decided to act on all (or at least most of) the creative impulses I get - including those I get either while dreaming or just after I wake up.

Expect many of them to not be very funny. Some of them will be. The first update is titled "Almond Macaroons" which is a webcomic my brain decided exists at www.abandonedfarmer.com (there's nothing there). I read the entire comic in my dream, so my brain was forced to come up with panels leading all the way up to a punchline, which in my dream was amusing enough to remember. The illustrations were definitely inspired by Hyperbole and a Half.

The second update will consist of a story which I have not yet written but I have a concept for. Having been recently reading Machine of Death, which I highly recommend (there's a machine which can tell you how you are going to die, but vaguely enough so that you'll still be surprised), I came up with what I considered a good idea for a story when I woke up in the middle of the night. It is titled "Death" in the manner of most of the titles in Machine of Death being the reading of how one will die.

I am posting this information here because I want the actual posts to be unadulterated, i.e. the Almond Macaroon post will consist of a title and an image, and the Death post will consist of a title and a story, and neither will have explanations. I hope they're enjoyed.

Life goes on.

2010-10-25T12:45:00.001-04:00

I made it to Washington, visited Liana, went down to L.A., and visited Tajian. I'm home now. All in all, it hasn't been too bad. I don't like driving in cities at all. I'm not earning money. But most of it hasn't been city driving. And I haven't been spending very much money either (except on gas - I don't know how much there yet). I'm having a perfectly content time. No great adventure (probably because I'm driving all day and not really stopping places), but no great desire for great adventure either. Just chilling my way across the country.

Pictures available here.

Damn.

2010-09-14T17:57:00.000-04:00

So I tried leaving on rollerblades, that didn't work. I stuck around a little longer, then drove to Maine, met a friend, and saw Jason Mraz. He was cool. I stayed the night and left the next afternoon. Drove some, and slept at a rest area. Next day, drove right along the coast for a while, which was nice. Stopped at nice places. Enjoyed myself. Then got hit with rush-hour traffic through the city and my exhaust fell apart. Slept at another rest area. Fixed exhaust (kinda) and did more city driving, which sucks. I also don't really trust my car anymore. Also, sick of driving and pretending I know what I'm doing. I am simply not able to come up with any realistic direction for my life, which terrifies me. I am unwillini to let go of the past or do anything but make up fantasies for the future. Looks like I'll head home again, I don't know how much for that reason, but certainly because of my car. Concerning life, I don' desire to be home so much as with friends - that's the fault of the Maine trip. But I don't really want to bus. Looks like I might anyway, but not aimlessly - to visit my amigos on the west coast, and probably up in Maine again. Anyone with advice for remotivating my life, or giving me some sort of purpose, let me know please.

Right!

2010-08-22T12:05:00.000-04:00

So I've decided to leave before September. This gives me relatively little time left. I've put my car and motorcycle up on craigslist, with my laptop soon to follow. I bought an Archos 5 Internet Tablet (w/gps, android) and I'm going to get a camera to go with it. I'll be going south, then west. My mode of travel will remain undisclosed for a while, while I test it out. The idea is, everything I've told people about future plans hasn't really worked. Maybe if I keep them a secret, it'll work better. Mostly, I don't really know yet. So we'll see how it goes. It'll be interesting, to say the very, very least.

I'll probably pack a lot of the same things I went hiking with, but not all of them and with other things added. I might bring a machete. Just because. It's not necessarily about what is really usable, but what you feel comfortable with. Things you like having around. I may also bring a single comforter-hammock, which would fill the positions of both hammock and sleeping bag. I'll figure it out.

Anyway, here is the place I'll post stuff.

Blender

2010-03-06T18:21:00.004-05:00

Blender is like a jackknife. No, Blender is like a leatherman. No, Blender is like this Swiss Army Knife:That's right, Blender is crazy. Crazycrazy. Not only is it comparable, or nearly so, to commercial 3d rendering and animation software, but it is pretty tiny in size and also does all sorts of other stuff. For example, Blender appears to be the easiest, best-results way to rotoscope (trace over frames of live-action footage with something else, such as a cartoon) a lightsaber. Given the lovely tutorial I link to in the description of my video, I made this video of myself wielding a lightsaber. It took me a few hours, as 13 seconds at 24 frames per second is over 300 frames that I placed points on: four points, one at each corner of the lightsaber. I think it came out rather well. Not only that, but Blender, being meant for making movies (generally from animation done in itself), also contains a non-linear video editor. So far, it has crashed infinitely fewer times than any other video editor I've used on linux. And I have used Avidemux (linear), Kdenlive, PiTiVi, Openshot, Lives, and Cinelerra. Most are fairly simple and crash a lot, Cinelerra is insanely complicated to the point of not being usable. And while Blender is also a little scary-looking at first, it is very easy to learn how to do simple tasks. I juxtaposed all the clips in my video using Blender. Oh, it's also used to make 3d games. And it's quite awesome.

End of the Semester

2010-01-10T15:05:00.002-05:00

Here it is, the end of the semester. Using this howto and this idea, I will be making a foot-controlled mouse utilizing a wiimote underneath a foot for control, and buttons around the other foot. This way, the control foot will only have to tilt, rather than move around as with the instructables howto. This will also be an exercise in working under deadline, as the last day of the semester is Friday. I'll make it work.

Multitouch Plans, Chainmaille

2009-09-08T20:21:00.003-04:00

At the moment, I'm making a chainmail shirt from soda (and beer) tabs, with the pattern seen here. I have nearly 200 tabs so far, and only a little rectangle of material made from them, so I will be putting a notice up on the high school's bulletin board in the vestibule requesting them. I will also be putting up a voting sheet for what type of multitouch form factor to put the screen I will make on. I may even integrate these projects, with one pop tab equalling one vote, so that whoever brings be the most tabs gets the most votes. I don't know. As far as the multitouch goes, I have decided on a different type of technology, one which is simpler in concept, easier to build, works better (except for one certain thing, which is unimportant: object recognition), AND uses lasers. It will work well in bright sunlight, even. The form factor deal is this: it can table-height and horizontal, with a fairly small screen; tilted like an easel, somewhat larger screen; or vertical, as a wall, with the largest size screen. We'll see what the public wants.

Wireless Working, Multitouch Somewhat

2009-08-20T14:02:00.002-04:00

Much to my dismay, I had to install a gnome package (the gnome-network-manager package) in order to get my wireless up and running. It's now up and running fine, no problems. Oh well. In addition, I built, out of a bucket, piece of spare acrylic, piece of paper, and ancient webcam, a working multitouch device known as the MiniMt. It uses the shadows your fingers make on a piece of paper (suspended by glass) as inputs, with the camera in the bottom of the bucket the paper is on top of. This does not have linux drivers that I could find and so I had to do in on an old, slow windows laptop with the old, slow webcam, and as expected, it kind of sucked to use. However! It worked. I (somewhat) successfully resized and rotated photos and made smoke come from my fingers. Now that I have proven to myself that It will work, I can start on a multitouch screen. Which will work much more better.

Waterproofage

2009-08-03T21:30:00.002-04:00

So, in the whole waterproofing scheme, there's not a lot of electronics out there. I'm going to change that, at least a little. I have succeeded in waterproofing the internal bits of a spare wireless mouse, as well as the USB drive. The mouse doesn't work perfectly because I accidentally polyurethaned one of the buttons down, but other than that, the waterproofing works perfectly. (I dropped it in a bucket of water and then used it.) There is a keyboard in the process of drying at the moment, which I will then test.
My hope is to attain a fairly good computer and waterproof all of the various internal bits of it and then fill it up with water for water-cooling on the next level. I'd like to then get this computer set up outside at my school, with a screen of the type I've already messed with, one without a backlight. It'll be good.
Then I'll steampunk it like crazy.
This'll be a good project.

Whoops...

2009-07-27T19:07:00.002-04:00

One thing leads to another, you know... I wanted to get the facebook-chat plugin for Kopete, as Kopete is KDE and supports video and Pidgin is not and does not (both are IM clients). In order to do this, I upgraded my system (partial upgrade, I believe) to Karmic Koala, which is currently in some stage of alpha and set to be released for real in October. After a restart, my X server wouldn't start, so I had command line and no GUI. I googled a bit, found that it is either impossible or very difficult to downgrade ubuntu, it's only made for upgrading, but then I saw something worth trying. I hit esc during startup to get the grub menu, and when I select an older version of the kernel, it boots fine. There's some amazing work that has been done, even in KDE (which I'm running) and I've heard that it's an entirely new version of Gnome, so I might have to look at that.
To list a few awesome things:
The desktop background. It's awesome. I'm still using the slideshow setting, which now has nice transitions, but you can also have it display weather, have it show a virus which eats whatever wallpaper you use (albiet slowly), or you can have a pattern, image, or color. I've saved the best two for last. You can have your background be a globe displaying: sattelite, earth at night, street maps, precipitation maps, a historical map, an atlas, a temperature map, or the moon. These are either interactive flat or spherical maps (interactive meaning you can move them around and zoom in on them just by dragging and scrolling on the empty desktop). And, in my opinion, the neatest, we have the MANDELBROT SPIRAL. You zoom in on any place you'd like FOREVER and it keeps going FOREVER. Similarly, you can drag yourself around. All my other eye candy is working fine, the footprint on my CPU is less, and there's only a few glitches (which I feel I can take part in because I can post the bugs!)

Instructables and Me

2009-07-11T19:55:00.002-04:00

So I joined the website instructables.com, which is awesome. It houses instructions with pictures, and sometimes video, of how to do neat things, often technology-oriented. There is a contest going on, the "art of sound," which is simply interesting instructable you post involving sound. I posted instructions on how to waterproof a speaker cone, pour water in it, and become entranced. This instructable, which I entered in the contest, appears to be featured! Oh, and here's the link. http://www.instructables.com/id/Music-Visualization-without-Computer/ Awesomeness.

Projector, Coke

2009-07-05T15:58:00.005-04:00

So my mom found a pull-down projector screen at the dump. My uncle happened to have a projector he'd bought at a state surplus auction and never tested, so he brought it over and we tested it. It works. It's an InFocus LP400, for those interested. After finding out that it worked, I proceeded to make a ceiling mount for it. The screen is hung in a similar way. And this projects a lovely image for watching movies on. However, my mom gets a sore neck. So we need to also be able to use the TV. After a couple days of switching cords behind the VCR, I decided to make it so that that would be unnecessary. I did. I went to radioshack, bought a little bitty board with 4 RCA inputs, took it home, and connected all the inside pieces to each other and the same with the outside pieces. Then, so that the wires wouldn't show, I hid it. It's not a little box that will take input into any and gives output to all the plugs, so if I want to use the TV, I turn it on, and if I want to use the projector, I turn that on. Both receive the signal. (The can sits way back invisibly in the space beside the VCR. The red wire is from the VCR, the gold is to the projector, and the yellow is to the TV. Oh, by the way, it works.) And, as a side note, the projector takes RCA audio and video (it has a little speaker), SVideo, and CableWizard inputs. I'd never heard of CableWizard and don't have that cable, but the RCA all works, and as I discovered this morning, the SVideo works too, from my computer! (Plug it in, the NVidia program says there's a 1024 x 768 TV attached, output? and it works no problem. It's actually an 800 x 600 projector, but it will take up to 1024 x 768 and take care of it on its own, so it's okay that it told the computer that's what it was.)

Songbird

2009-07-01T14:51:00.002-04:00

So I've downloaded and installed the newest version of Songbird, the Mozilla-based music player/web browser. It worked quite swimmingly after I removed a conflicting package. All of the addons seem to be working, with the exception of MediaFlow, which does nothing. The only real problem I have is with a bug in Songbird which has not had any attention in the couple years it's been around and seems like it would be easy to fix. What happens, is when one imports a playlist, every item in the playlist gets added to the library, whether or not it's already there. This leads to a library full of duplicates. There is an addon to remove duplicates from the library, but when one does that in this situation, all the playlists become empty. However, other things are working well. In addition, an addon that I'd only seen for Songbird but I recently found for firefox, called Foxtab, is no longer a piece of crap. Seriously, it used to suck. Now, it works amazingly. It allows for switching tabs using 3D OpenGl-type (or maybe it is OpenGl, idk) switching, like my alt-tab. It has six different 3D setups to use, and supports both keyboard and mouse switching. You really should try it out, everyone.

Mogo Mouse X54

2009-07-01T14:47:00.002-04:00

So I got my mogo mouse, the one that fits my computer. It works quite well. Pairs, all the buttons work, the scroll pad is a touch pad and takes a little getting used to, but works fine. Multimedia mode also works fine: I can pause, play, and go previous-track and next-track. And it hides quite nicely in the slot.

Mogo Mouse

2009-06-20T16:21:00.002-04:00

So I bought a Mogo Mouse off eBay, and it came today. Thing is, in my excitement to get the cheapest one (it was quite cheap), I bought the one that works in a PC slot, not an Express54 slot. So, I can't charge it in my laptop, but I have a laptop here with a PC slot so I can charge it up and test it before I sell it back. And, having tested it, I can say that I like it. Bluetooth pairing with Kubuntu 9.04 works like this: Unfold the stand and click the "connect" button on the bottom of the mouse, click the Bluetooth icon on the computer and say "new device." It finds it, says it's a Mogo Mouse, and lets you use it. Shut off the mouse by closing the stand. Turn the mouse back on by opening the stand up again (DON'T click the "connect" button). Click either the left or right mouse button, and KBluetooth4 (bluetooth program) will pop up saying "This things wants access. Either 'trust now', 'trust always', or 'don't trust'. Click "trust always", and new every time you turn the mouse on by unfolding the stand, it works with the computer. It is paired. To pair it to a different computer, simply click the "connect" button. This will break the old pairing. In addition, I like the way the mouse works. It's heavy enough to feel real, it moves well, the buttons work, it's good.

DVD burning

2009-06-19T19:30:00.002-04:00

So I had this DVD, Banlieue 13, which would not play in a standard DVD player. I ripped the video off it, grabbed the subtitles online, and did my best for a couple days to get it to burn to a disc so that it could be watched in a standalone DVD player. I didn't like todisc GUI very much, and I didn't want to use the todisc command line as I prefer GUIs. DeVeDe looked like it would work perfectly, but no...it went through all the steps, then either froze my computer or said it had an error. K3B burner looks excellent, but only if you already have the files in DVD tree format. I didn't. However, ManDVD works perfectly. I wasn't really sure about all the settings, so the subtitles are a little big, but I now have a working DVD with a "menu" (one option), video, audio, and subtitles. Yay!

Neatness with an LCD

2009-06-10T09:16:00.005-04:00

  So an LCD screen as found in a laptop is
composed of two things:  the screen itself,
which displays color, and the backlight and
all its associated junk which is responsible
for distributing its light evenly behind the
screen and so that you can see the color.
 In bright light, the screen will reflect
its colors whether or not the backlight is on.
 If the backlight's on in bright light,
 sometimes you will get a double image.
  I thought it would be interesting to
use a source of light from the back other
 than the backlight, namely sunlight.  To
 do this, one merely needs to remove the
 plastic, aluminum, and funky materials
 from behind the actual screen and place
 the screen in such a way that light will
 shine through the screen and at you.
 It's pretty cool.
This picture shows Windows 2000 loading
on a screen which is backlit by a lamp. 
You can see the lamp's bulb at the top,
with the post going down on the rightish
side of the screen.


















This one shows my hand behind the screen, while
you can still see icons on the screen and the
lamp behind it.  I'm going to take a non-laptop
LCD screen, do this, waterproof it, and set it
up outside.  Normally, it's difficult to use a
computer outside, whereas this type of screen
would make it useable only outside.

OMG teh MoGo Mouse!

2009-06-04T21:50:00.005-04:00

Ok. So there's this mouse you can buy, the Mogo Mouse. It's a bluetooth mouse, which makes it handy for starters, because it doesn't necessarily require an extra adapter, as do many wireless mice. Then, there's the fact that it looks cool and fold up flat when not in use. However, more amazingness to come. It folds up flat because it STORES IN YOUR EXPRESS 54 SLOT. Yes, the mouse stores inside a space that already exists in your laptop thhat chances are, you're not using. As a matter of fact, it does more that store, it charges in there. A 30 minute charge gives you 8 to 10 hours. I don't know about anyone else, but for me, if I keep it in there until my computer is turned fully on and put it back while my computer's shutting down, that should just about keep me charged whenever I'm actually using the computer. To recap: a mouse that lives, hides, and charges in your Express 54 slot, connects via bluetooth, and has all the normal mouse capabilities (oh, and also multimedia mode, and if you get the better ones, presenter mode and a laser pointer). Awesome? Yeah, pretty much.

Kubuntu, Xubuntu

2009-05-22T11:15:00.002-04:00

I'm downloading the kubuntu-desktop and xubuntu-desktop packages (and all their dependencies) as that will allow me to try using a KDE and XFCE desktop instead of gnome, to see if i get any performance differences. All other settings will remain the same, but I can choose my window manager (Gnome, KDE, XFCE) on login. I will remain with gnome, I think, as the apps I prefer using (nautilus, for example, the file browser) are in Gnome, but I'd like to compare them.

xhtml

2009-05-19T10:42:00.001-04:00

Finished off the xhtml tutorial from the same site. Pretty much looks like html only done correctly. Like how in python, good practice (correct tabbing) is mandatory, in xhtml, good practice (closing tags). Moving on to a quick javascript tutorail.

html

2009-05-12T10:54:00.000-04:00

I finished off the HTML tutorial and am looking through the XHTML tutorial, which is the prerequisite for the Javascript tutorial, which I need to know some of before XML.

blah

2009-05-11T14:33:00.003-04:00

Haven't posted in a while because no one READS THESE. Have messed around with screenlets, which are like widgets. Have stopped using gnome-system-monitor because if its resource intensiveness, am now using xfce4-taskmanager and ring screenlets. Have continued reading the HTML stuff on that site, think I'm almost finished with it.

Jaunty Jackalope

2009-04-23T21:23:00.002-04:00

So I got the new Ubuntu release installed.
I got most of the new packages downloaded at school, then I had to stop.
However, upon getting home, they resumed where I'd left off!
Yay!
It all got installed, took about an hour and a half after downloads finished.
The new notification system is great.  It is less intrusive than the former one, and quite nice to look at.
I also like the new alt-tab effect.  It's just a little different and nice to look at.
The only thing I didn't like was that Amarok (my media player) was upgraded to version 2 from 1.4, and it didn't work.  It looked kinda nice, but the music didn't actually play.  So, after only a couple google searches that showed me that lots of people had similar problems, I found this, which is instructions and the appropriate links for removing the newer Amarok and reinstalling the older one which works.  I did it, it all works.
I'm happy with jaunty so far.

Even Better Wiimote

2009-04-17T20:39:00.002-04:00

So I've been messing with my Wiimote button config file, which is pretty self explanatory so I'll just post the relevant contents (things pertaining to only the wiimote, not just including nunchuck or classic options, which I have commented out). ~ Wiimote.A = BTN_RIGHT Wiimote.B = BTN_LEFT Wiimote.Up = KEY_UP Wiimote.Down = KEY_DOWN Wiimote.Left = KEY_LEFT Wiimote.Right = KEY_RIGHT Wiimote.Minus = KEY_BACK Wiimote.Plus = KEY_FORWARD Wiimote.Home = KEY_ENTER Wiimote.1 = KEY_PAGEUP Wiimote.2 = KEY_PAGEDOWN ~ I'm absolutely open to suggestions about how to make this work better. (Forward and back refer to web browsing, btw.) A list of possible action to bind to the wiimote buttons is found here, but I cannot use ALL of them, some do not work. I would like, however, to experiment with a number of different setups, so what should I use?

Wiimote NOT Whiteboard

2009-04-16T21:09:00.002-04:00

So, using the tutorial found here, I managed to do the joystick/mouse thing, and I can now use my Wiimote as a mouse using the tilt/acceleration data. It's all good and all that, woohoo! Worked no problem. I've also followed the instructions to switch the default left and right buttons, and I may switch more of them around. But, here's a blog post with accomplishments!

Ya ya

2009-04-13T10:37:00.002-04:00

So my independent study progresses just fine, HTML is pretty easy but pretty neat. Right now, I'm at doing stuff with images. On a neater note, I don't know if I've before mentioned devilspie here, but I have found that I don't need it any more. Devilspie is a program to put windows on whichever desktop or viewport you want when they open, or to maximize them upon opening or to make the appear on each viewport, many different functions. However, I have found that using CompizFusion's "Place" and "Window Rules" plugins, I get better functionality. I also like the idea of using CompizFusion for more things instead of going to many separate programs. In addition, I have started using one of the coolest plugins, functionality-wise. CompizFusion has many plugins, but most just make it look good. "Group and Tab Windows," which lets you do pretty much that. You can take any applications running in windows, group them, and tab them. You will then have just one windows (whichever app you're using at the time), but you can switch to the others by shortkeys you can assign (I use and ) or by hovering the mouse over the top bar of the window, upon which the open applications will appear in thumbnails you can click on. It's rather hard to describe, but very handy to use. There's a good video which shows it here (as well as how awesome CompizFusion is to work this well on an eeepc).

Wiimote Whiteboard

2009-04-11T20:16:00.002-04:00

Using the code found here, I have the issue found here, namely that upon completing calibration, the program crashes. It just closes. The suggestion is to set the "nice" level higher, which did nothing except make the program unresponsive at higher levels of niceness. However, my pen works wonderfully. It even makes a nice clicking sound. So I'll probably see if I can get it working in Windows 7 Beta and wait for a fix to the Ubuntu version (darn it).

VGA output confirmation

2009-04-09T19:31:00.002-04:00

So yeah, I had to use my VGA output today (because I'm the only one who can stream youtube) and it worked sans glitches. Plug in, press global hotkey O, click "detect displays," click "configure," click "twinview," click "ok," click [iforgetwhat], click "clones," click "resolution" (for my screen), change to resolution of projector, click "apply settings." That's it! Ok, so I need to write a script to do something like that and a hotkey to take care of it for me all in one step, but I'm proud that it works!

New Quarter

2009-04-08T16:00:00.003-04:00

Well, the fourth quarter is upon us, and my independent study has smoothly changed from Python and programming to markup, being HTML at the moment, the Javascript, and those so I can fully comprehend XML, which is the idea. I'm using tutorials at www.w3schools.com, which I find to be very good. HTML seems pretty darned easy to me, and it is also aiding in my understanding of programs, though programming and markup are quite different. The making items with attributes and values and such helps me understand classes. I'm also going to finally get this whole wiimote thing off the ground. I have a program installed that should take care of me, but I need to get the infra red led pens working. If I can get a good pen made that's easy I may look into selling them, or doing something similar to irpens.co.uk, which sells the pens, the wiimote, the software on a memory stick, and a nut you can glue onto the wiimote for mounting on a tripod. I'm also going to get a little tiny cute tripod for starters for myself, and start demonstrating stuff with the wiimote (like amazing flames).

VGA output works

2009-03-21T20:18:00.002-04:00

I figured out my vga output! almost entirely. It works happily, first off. the only thing that's a little odd (might be because i'm outputting at the moment to a screen with greater resolution than mine) is that things at the bottom of my screen are only partway down the other screen. This does not go for everything, in terms of desktop backgrounds and web pages and such, the screen with greater vertical resolution displays more at the bottom than my screen. however, the panels, both on the bottom of my screen and on the side, are only most of the way down the other screen. it's a bit odd. but whoohoo!

Resetting

2009-02-24T15:55:00.002-05:00

Being tired of a bunch of my stuff on Ubuntu not working together perfectly, like my vga output, some of my sound shortcuts, etc (I think mostly because I installed/uninstalled packages and messed with config files without knowing what I was doing), I am going to reinstall Ubuntu. I have backed up all the files I want to my iPod, I'm downloading the install disc ISO, and I will reinstall probably overnight tonight. It will then take me a little time to get things exactly back the way they were (firefox addons, booxmarks, certain preferences), but afterwards, with any luck, it'll all work nicely.

rockbox!

2009-02-20T08:18:00.004-05:00

So I got my iPod 5.5g in the mail Thursday night, charged it, and Friday morning, I installed rockbox on it. Rockbox is an alternative firmware for a number of mp3 players which increases functionality. For example, it can play more types of media (ogg, more movie files), has more games (doom), and is all around expandable. There are two steps to installing rockbox; first grab the correct make of it from the website (www.rockbox.org), unzip the file, and put the .rockbox folder in the root directory of the player. Then, install the patcher thingy, which just changes the bootloader so that rockbox boots. I did the first bit there in ubuntu, but I had to switch over to windows for the second part. Alternatively, you can download their full installer, which will do everything for you, but this did not work for me. However, everything else does. Whoohoo!

Inkscape rocks.

2009-02-16T20:22:00.004-05:00

Inkscape, an open-source vector graphics creator/editor, http://www.inkscape.org/, absolutely rocks. It's awesome. It's much more intuitive than a program such as the GIMP, which I don't mean to say is bad, it's just much more complicated and takes longer to get acclimated to. Vector Graphics, for those of you reading this who don't know what they are (no one fits that bill) is a way of saving/storing/working with images very different from files like bitmap and jpeg. A bitmap image saves what colour every pixel is. Vector graphics save what an image is made of: The curves that make it up, the shapes in it, and any gradients. For this to work very well, the image must be created in a vector graphics program (LIKE INKSCAPE) and saved as a .svg (scalable vector graphics), but it is possible to convert a bitmap to a vector image. One of the many practical upshoots of this is that you can zoom in infinitely on an svg file, without getting blurry (unless there's blur in the image) (although it could soon get boring). Another, as far as creating images goes, is that if you draw a curve and decide that it's the wrong shape, you don't have to erase and redraw, you can just grab the nodes of the curve and move them. This goes for pretty much everything. You must try it.

ShowMeDo

2009-02-10T09:45:00.002-05:00

ShowMeDo is an excellent site with how-to videos and an emphasis on linux and python. I've been watching these videos, and the audio along with the visual really helps me make it all click.

AAARGH!!!

2009-02-08T18:42:00.002-05:00

So I had everything running all nice and smooth. And I decided to do something that's been bothering me for a while, a couple of seconds at a time. I took on my login screen. I copied the contents of a theme folder (minus the background, ubuntu logo, and screenshot) and placed it into a new folder for the new theme. I changed the file talking about the theme to be accurate (author = Nik, etc) and put in three new pictures, after saving them as the correct file type (png) and renaming them (background, ubuntu, etc). Now I have all my nice fancy pictures making a nice fancy login. All was well. Then I decided to change the login screen sound from the default ubuntu drums. It didn't work the first few times, but finally I just replaced the default file with one with the same name that was just a different WAV file, and the login screen now has the sound I wanted it to. Yay! ...Except that now I don't have sound anywhere else. The login screen plays its sound, which I don't want to give up, but nothing else would play sound after the computer started. Attempted to reset/repackage/rebuild my ALSA drivers (advanced Linux sound architecture) some of which worked and some of which didn't. Got audio to play. Whoohoo! Restarted. Had the login ready sound, no further audio is forthcoming. rrg.

The Weekend

2009-02-07T17:11:00.002-05:00

So far, the weekend (Friday and Saturday) has been fairly productive computer-wise. I downloaded and burned the 32 bit version of Windows 7 Beta. I installed it, no problem, over the partition on my laptop that had contained Vista. After this, Windows would boot, but I could not access Ubuntu. I found that this was because a Windows install knocks out the GRUB bootloader (the thing which lets me pick which operating system to boot), so I could not gain access to Ubuntu at all. So my uncle came over with a live CD (of Mint Linux, but any would have done) and from there I edited GRUB to include Windows 7, reinstated it, and it all works just like it used to: I automatically boot into Ubuntu, but I have the option to go into Windows. The program I installed Windows in order to run runs, and Windows 7 isn't all that bad. The closer it gets to not looking like a classic windows taskbar, the better it is. I disabled my desktop in Ubuntu so that I could enable different backgrounds, so I now have 12 different wallpapers, one per desktop. There are no desktop icons, but I can access those through nautilus, just as any other folder. The File Browser Launcher in AWN (my taskbar) is also quite excellent. And, to top it off, my touchpad started working in Ubuntu again after I reinstalled Windows, and my webcam is also working with the program I prefer it to work with, which it has not since I upgraded Ubuntu to 8.10. And the weekend is not even over.

classes

2009-02-03T10:33:00.002-05:00

still don't seem absolutely necessary to me but the explanation at http://pytut.infogami.com/node11-baseline.html is actually pretty good, just saying this is how a user feels like grouping things. i don't like them all that much, but i can see why they exist.

hrm.

2009-02-02T11:02:00.002-05:00

well i'm having problems with the wxpython, it won't run most of the time, and when it runs and i close it, it closes IDLE, the IDE i'm using. it's bothering me a bit. i'm watching the tutorial at http://showmedo.com/videos/video?name=pythonShawnTkinter1&fromSeriesID=58 which is nice, because it's a person explaining it, not just a tutorial written up by a high-level programmer.

wxpython

2009-01-30T11:05:00.001-05:00

So i made the program in Tkinter, now i'm using wxpython the program has 3 widgets (pieces on the frame) a textbok, a label, and a button and i made it all through code, no nice gui to make it whoohoo

GUI

2009-01-27T10:40:00.002-05:00

So i'm working on a gui program, following the instructions at http://sebsauvage.net/python/gui/#our_project and it's going pretty well. i had to copy and paste at one point, as what i had written didn't work, even though i had thought it was the same. and i'm starting to get an understanding for how it works. mreh.

For

2009-01-22T10:30:00.002-05:00

I've decided that I like for loops a lot. I haven't used any yet, but whereas I used to do a while loop with a variable to keep track of how far along in the loop, or list say, it'd look like this: while howfaralong < len(somelist) do some stuff to somelist[howfaralong] howfaralong += 1 and that would be it. Now, a for loop is designed for this scenario, executing whatever code for each item in a group: for item in somelist do some stuff to it and that's it. I like.

Semi-Un-Related

2009-01-21T18:57:00.001-05:00

I finally got my wireless working! Took a few tries and messing around with various posts by various people on what to do. So I probably have a setup that's different from everyone else's. But it works!

Day One

2009-01-20T17:23:00.002-05:00

Read up on Wikipedia about a number of things, including classes, information hiding, inheritance, relational databases, and tuples. I read http://www.poromenos.org/tutorials/python , quick and broad tutorial, and most of http://hetland.org/writing/instant-hacking.html , another quick and broad tutorial. I used the IDLE IDE to try out the things on the pages.