Divine Aesthetics: The Blog

DrawPlay

In the " This is a waste of time so why can't I stop playing?" Department:

It's a Flash based platformer, with the exception that you have to draw your own platforms.

Sound easy? Well, it does get more difficult as you play it.

Cooking with Movies

Kelli and I watched The Protector this evening.  What follows is my best guess for the movie's recipe.

• Five parts martial arts mayhem
• Two parts gratuitous explosions
• One part corn
• Two parts random CGI dream sequences
• One part cheese and/or cheesecake
• 81 parts windows jumped/kicked through without any scratches
• Three parts condensed Deus Ex Machina
• Five bags of thugs who will attack the protagonist with lightbulbs, knives, or bare fists after watching the hero break the legs and arms of the last 25 people who tried the same thing.
• Three whole elephants
• A dash of Jackie Chan cameo
• One part unevenly mixed dubbing and subtitles

Mix thoroughly and pour into a pan resembling an old video game from the 80s.  Allow the plot to rise to the top, then skim off as much of it as possible.  (A little will still remain, but it'll be just enough to make the audience wonder what the heck is going on.)

Add several gigantic musclebound caucasians just before pressure cooking at 450 degrees with Quentin Tarantino for 15 minutes, then use Baa Ram Eue (A REAL company - I LOLed for a while when I saw that...) to produce it until golden brown.

Serve as a late night movie in a few months, since the fight scenes are fun to watch but the movie isn't worth any kind of monetary investment.

And FYI, this is coming from someone who owns a copy of The Flying Guillotine.

I reject your reality...

Mythbusters is one of the few things on tv that makes cable worth having.

House and Simpsons don't count, since I can get them with rabbit ears.

Wolverine kicks everyone's butt.

Kelli and I saw X-Men 3 last night.

Now let's see ... how to describe the movie without spoilers...

Um ... It's kind of like this.

Yeah, I think that's a good description. It had it's moments (The lady locking her car door), but it just wasn't as good as the first two.

Repeating Itself?

Whatever side of politics you take, the story of USA's first "real" election (14.5 MB mp3) should be interesting to you. (Deja vu?) If you like the format of this recording, you might want to check out History According to Bob. He's got some interesting stuff on his site, which is built around his podcast.

Ask A Ninja.com

This has got to be the funniest video podcast I've seen. Ever. I've been subscribed to it for a while, and it continues to provide nonsensical humor in bite sized chunks.


But don't just take my word for it, go check out all of their fabulous episodes.

Parrots.

I was going to post another video blog today (because no one has yet to complain), but something came up.

Today a coworker loaned me a DVD called "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill." From the start I doubted I would be interested, but I smiled, nodded, and promised I would return it the next day.

"If you don't like it," she told me, "I want to know why."

So with that burden of responsibility I took the DVD home and watched it, totally prepared to return it the next day with the explanation that "It just wasn't my kind of movie.

Then I watched it.

This was a movie where I did not even want to hit the pause button.

It's not because it's a feel-good movie. There's no real action/adventure scene, and most of the romance is between birds. Some parts were happy, but other parts were melancholy or simply blah.

It was like watching life, and that's why I think I liked it.

Your Corporate Network and the Forces of Darkness

I was listening to this short story mp3 (WARNING: file is 12 MB and NSFW due to language) from Escape Pod and I laughed and laughed. Remember that Undead Help Desk email from way back?

This is better.

If you like science fiction short stories you should really subscribe to Escape Pod's RSS feed. My favorite story so far is the Charlie Brown parody they did for Halloween.

Animation and Music Videos

I would have posted this earlier, but Sara's uploading files from The Sword That Cuts Things 5 and she sent me a preview link which I just had to click on. I think this is her best one yet, as evidenced by the fact that I laughed so hard I actually hurt myself. GO WATCH IT! NOW!

All done? Good. Now go watch all of her other cool animations.

I'll wait.

...

Ok, now for what I was going to post earlier.

-=-=-

I came across this music video over on imakethings.com. I find it unusual that Bre Pettis would post such a link in his blog, but the song is a catchy J-Pop tune and some of the choreographed scenes are actually quite interesting.

Some questions do come to mind, however...

1. Does Yuki know that her blue dress looks like she has a plastic bag wrapped around her neck?

2. How many of the backup dancers are there because dance is a media for which they must suffer in order to achieve true artistic expression?

3. How many of the backup dancers are internalizing the mantra of "I'm doing this for the paycheck, I'm doing this for the paycheck..." while trying to keep straight faces?

4. What the heck is she singing?

An exploding ... what?

One score and 15 years ago something happened in Florence, Oregon that would change geek culture as we know it.

Onlookers didn't know that at the time they were witnessing an event that would then enter the annals of history, but nevertheless that's exactly what happened.

I am of course talking about the exploding whale, as mentioned in Wikipedia. This was not a hoax, and sadly it wasn't a joke or prank either. This was a real event, and you can check out footage of the original news story (including the actual explosion) on Google Video or on TheExplodingWhale.com.

That's right, someone purchased a domain dedicated to a dead whale raining blubber down on hapless bystanders over a quarter mile away.

Oh, how I love the internet. They need to do a Mythbusters episode on this story.

Hometown Tales

While looking for more video content for my new iPod I came across this nifty website that happens to have a blog, podcast, and videocast (vidcast, video podcast, whatever you want to call it).

The goal of this site is to document legends, urban legends, ghost stories, and tidbits of local history from pretty much everywhere. When they discuss their stories they also go into the factual origins of the tale. By that, I mean that if it's based off of a true story they try to get as close to the truth as a couple guys with a camera can get and if it's just fiction they try to explain why the story was made up.

Overall I'm finding their stories to be entertaining, and I think that's the whole reason they're doing this.

They claim to be rather low budget and to be honest there's some evidence of that (some of the media is hosted on a .Mac account and I think I could duplicate most of their editing tricks except for parts of the opening sequence). That being said, the rest of the production is anything but amateurish.

While the equipment might not be extravagant the writing and videos appear to have been put together by people experienced with working in television. This is, no doubt, because Hometown Tales has in fact appeared on TV in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

While those are the states to which they cater they appear to have stories from all over the US, and their podcast covers world news as well.

If you've got broadband you should check out the videos. Otherwise, take a look at the stories and see if there's a cool one near you.

http://www.hometowntales.com/

Stanford sets the music free

Ok, so it's not putting the songs under a Creative Commons License, but Stanford has been collecting tracks from students, faculty, alumni, and resident artists and distributing them for free among the students.

Don't go to Stanford? Fear not, they're also free downloads on iTunes.

I feel the need to warn you, however: Like most organizations that give things away, there is a tendency for the quality to be worth every penny paid. I'm not saying all the content is bad, only that you might only want to download some of the songs provided.

Lawrence Lessig Rocks

Believe it or not, there's actually a lawyer who doesn't put me to sleep, and this guy has even argued in front of the Supreme Court! (He lost, but oh well...) If you're involved in any kind of creative media (audio, video, visual art, etc.), you should really check out some of his stuff.

One of his books, Free Culture, is even under a Creative Commons license so you can get it for free. (Click on the "Remixes" link for different downloadable file formats.) The book itself gives a decent history of Copyright Law, including the good, the bad, and the ugly details.

Fun with Browsers

For a while now my favorite browser's been Camino, which is a side project from Mozilla.org. Essentially, it's like a combination of some of the best things in Firefox with some of the best things in Safari. There are some things that Safari does better (built in spell checker), and some things that Firefox does better (extensions), but I think Caminoo really is a good compromise. It's faster than Safari and it looks nicer than Firefox.

There's that, and the fact that it also has a built in ad blocker in addition to the standard pop-up blocker. It doesn't work for ALL ads, but from what I've seen it handles Google ads and almost every banner ad I've seen so far, regardless of what company has embedded it and where the ad has been placed on the page.

The Incredible Zombie Machine

Now this is amusing. This little interactive Java applet simulates a zombie infestation in a town.

Stuff On My Cat

http://www.stuffonmycat.com/

My mom sent me this. It has a huge archive filled with lots of cats with lots of stuff on them. Dresses are only the start of it - you would be surprized at the kind of crap some people are willing to put their pets through.

FF VII fan song

I've been a fan of Nellie Melton's art for a while now, and every now and then she does some work with Flash that's equally high quality. Why don't you go see for yourself?

Fatboy Slim is my Oxymoron of Choice

This leads to this. Both have been around for quite some time, but I recently REdiscovered the video and now I can't get that crazy song out of my head.

Another Waste of Time

Chaeval recently hopped onto the WOW bandwagon, and that got me thinking about trying my own hand at a MMORPG. Of course I'm cheap, so instead of shelling out the cash for WOW I decided to look in on the free alternatives.

I've settled (for now, at least) on Oberin, a Mac only game that uses a lot of the concepts you'd expect to see in an RPG. This includes leveling up, developing skills, adventuring solo or in parties, using skills to make and sell your own equipment, and so on. The graphics are low quality, but that means that even people running Mac OS 8.5 can join in on the fun. Besides, it's FREE.

I have to say that the best part about this game is the trust that exists among the players. I've died a few times in the game and not once did anyone loot my corpse. In fact, the other players were more than happy to help out a newbie such as myself.

I just started playing last night so I'm still at the "trying desperately to level up so I don't die instantly against a giant ant" stage, but if you happen to see a character named Blake Emrys online feel free to say hi.

The Postal Service

Recently I've seen several psychedelic M&Ms commercials with slow, hauntingly familiar music playing in the background. I couldn't place it but I knew I'd heard another version of that song somewhere before - and as I hardly listen to the radio any more I doubted it was from there.

Lo and behold, I found it by searching through my iTunes library. Apparently it's one of the free songs I got from indiefeed. The original version, by The Postal Service, is a bit faster and has a more electronic edge, but to me it still feels soft and relaxing - not something I'd listen to in the car, but nice for after I've gotten home.

A quick search shows that they've also got a website and are available on the iTunes Music Store as well.

Books Books Books.

I just finished Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead not five minutes ago, and I already feel like I should go out and buy another book in the series. Although Ender is still the main character, this book is NOTHING like Ender's Game. Still, it's a good read and it actually kept me off of the internet. That in itself is a measure of how much I liked it.

Still, I won't be reading any books in the Ender series any time soon. I haven't even cracked the spine of the new Harry Potter book (Curse you, Stana and Kim! How could you finish so fast?!), and then there's those three books that Paul loaned me.

Heh - it's amusing to think that last year I was beginning to worry that I wasn't reading many books as I used to.

Historic Tale Construction Kit

I found this to be amusing, but I couldn't play with it without thinking of Monty Python.

Free RPG Stuff

I posted a while back about 1000 Blank White Cards, a free game that, now that I play tested it with a few people (Kelli, Paul, Kim, & Fatt), I like even more.

Now that I'm working on starting up a BESM d20 campaign I'm trying to collect more resources to help me out. Since I think I've spent enough money on RPGS recently that can only mean one thing.

Find free stuff online.

My first stop was the Guardians of Order website. They have a nice selection of free downloads, including a complete set of the rules for BESM d20. I don't regret getting the book, but the downloadable version is a nice plan B.

My next stop was to the official page for Wizards of the Coast. They have a nice sized selection of downloads as well, and to be honest I'm still going through them. I'm most likely going to take bits and pieces of their free adventures to round out my campaign, since I already have a strong idea for how I want the plot to go.

My last stop (for now, at least) was to RPG Now. True, it's a commercial site, but they do have a section for free downloads relating to a variety of games.

So, now that I have all the pieces, I just have to put them together. BWA-HAHAHAHAAH ... um, sorry.

Masamune Movie

Way back when I was just barely starting to find out about anime I came across a cartoon by Masamune Shirow - an artist who, in my opinion, is one of the best out there. Like any artist he's had good days and bad days, but I recently picked up a new copy of Appleseed and I'm really glad I did.

Now I've read the first few books of the manga and seen the original movie, so I had a good idea of the characters and setting for the 2004 flick. The plot was different enough to keep me guessing through the whole thing, however. (I expected that as well, since Masamune Shirow was once quoted as saying he never wanted to tell the same story twice.)

As for the animation quality ... I've seen my fair share of cartoons where the animators got their hands on some computers and said "Hey, let's see what we can do with these!" This of course led to many cartoons where the CG graphics and traditional animation blended like oil and water. This was not one of those cartoons. There was enough of a CG feel in the characters and enough of a "hand drawn" style in everything else to help everything mesh well.

If you like anime, sci-fi, or philosophy, you should check this one out.

1000 Blank White Cards

This sounds like a cool idea. Sparksol posted a link to this game, which encompasses creating a deck of cards before and in some cases while you're playing it. It doesn't actually entail creating 1000 cards, unless of course you want to do a marathon game session.

Sound like it could get unbalanced fast? The came creators thought that too. I quote:

Q: Is winning important in this game? A: Absolutely not at all. The whole thing is pretty arbitrary and random; in fact, it's almost impossible to win intentionally. Sure, you could make a card that says "+ 1 Hojillion Points" and play it on yourself, but how long do you think it will take another player to make a card that forces you to eat it? Aggressive play simply doesn't work very well. The real object of the game is to draw silly pictures and have fun. Cheesy, yes, but true.

I really want to give this game a try now. Anybody have some index cards?

[EDIT: Looks like there's also a Wikipedia entry on the subject.]

Anna Mae? Arr Pee Gee?

Attention, all random philanthropists:

I want this.

Thank you.

In other news, I found a nifty little gaming comic that for once does not mean the characters are obsessed with video games. If you play RPGs at all I recommend it - the art is great and it focusses on humor in the (various) games as much as it does with humor among the players.

Jonathan Coulton's MP3s

A lot of the music I listen to nowadays comes from indiefeed, which exposes me to several genres of decent music that most people have never heard of.

The first of Mr. Coulton's songs that got sent my way was "Ikea," and I was immediately struck with combination of the fanciful Weird Al/They Might Be Giants style lyrics and the lack of a nasal singing voice. When I heard his song "Mandelbrot Set" and liked that as well I knew I had to visit his web site.

Jonathan Coulton has several albums you can buy, but if you're operating on a tight budget you can at least download some of his songs for free. At the very least you should do that and, if you like his stuff, pass the link on to someone else.

Pomp and Circumstance and New Toys

As of this week I have finished all the course work I need to graduate ... again.

That's right, I'm going to have another degree under my belt, making a grand total of ... two. This time, it'll be a Masters of Education in Curriculum & Technology.

Me like playing with shiny things.

Of course this means that my student loans will be coming due. We already dumped our federal tax refund (That's right, we filed early and got it back already. BOOYA!) into them before interest could accrue. The refund isn't much compared to the total amount owed, but every little bit put towards principal means less interest for me to worry about later.

To celebrate, Kelli and I are spending money. Yeah, dumb idea, but we can't help ourselves. Kelli's getting a 256 meg MP3 player while I'm springing for the drool-worthy 1 gig model (We got a discount for buying both at the same time). They're not iPods, but if you compare them to the shuffle (The only way to compare apples to apples here) they have a lot more features (built in FM tuner and microphone for voice recording) for the money spent. They can't play stuff from the iTunes store, but most of my music is ripped from CDs or uploaded by indie bands anyway.

You can be sure I'll be talking about them again when we've had some time to play with our shiny new toys. I myself am personally looking forward to playing around with the recording features. If the microphone's halfway decent I might even start doing podcasts. Maybe.

Snow Day Comics!

Due to circumstances beyond my control (Snow on Thursday + Snow on Monday x Marylanders can't handle a little snow on the roads = 5 DAY WEEKEND!) I have a little time on my hands. I could use this time wisely, cleaning the apartment, taking out the garbage, doing school work, etc., but instead I think I'll start off by reading webcomics.

I've already talked about some of my favorites, but I've discovered another one (I dare not say it's "new," as it's been around for years...) by a very talented photographer / illustrator who's also done his time in the trenches of substitute teaching.

Wapsi Square, as it's called, is the story of a woman who works in a museum and her close group of friends. A lot of this 5-days-a-week comic is influenced by real life, although there's just enough fantasy and mythological gods thrown in for good measure.

As I read through the archives I found myself laughing out loud and showing comics to my wife on a regular basis. In my mind, this is an excellent barometer for how funny a comic is. Still, it's not something I would expect to see in a newspaper.

Nor should it be. While there's no nudity, there's still a little swearing and a regular attention to subjects that, while not profane, are more appropriate for an adult audience. Still, if you're a mature, laid back person, this is a great read.

HyperEngine-AV

iMovie does everything I need it to do, but it still has a new competitor. The good people over at MacMerc.com recently discovered that a company named Arboretum Systems is giving away some Mac video editing software for free.

In their words: "...lets you capture, edit, arrange together and process video, stills, audio and text to create DV-quality movies and slide shows."

Has anyone tried this out? I'd like to know if it's worth a download when I already have iMovie to play with. If not, I'll just have to venture forward in the name of research.

Two more webcomics

I found these comics one right after the other, and wouldn't you know it I had to read all their archives as quickly as possible.

Paradox Lost makes me think of Megatokyo in regards to the plot line, although the art style is quite different and nobody is stranded in Japan at the moment. Aside from the aforementioned similarity, it's still a funny, original comic that's worth a read through. Alas, it seems to update only once a week ... when it's on schedule, at least.

Seraphic Blue could almost be considered a sister comic to Paradox Lost, what with the number of references I found between the two in the rantspaces. This futureistic sci-fi comic has wonderful art and a developing story line that makes me wish they would update a little more often ... say, maybe 3 times a day. Alas, the real world often interferes with comic creation time, so I must be content to wait.

Camino

Ok, this one's for the Macintosh users out there eager to jump on the Firefox bandwagon, but missing the Aqua interface - there is an alternative, and it's name is Camino.

The best way to describe Camino is to imagine that Safari and Firefox had a kid - the resulting infant (it's a public beta, after all ...) has traits from both, both good and bad.

First, the Aqua interface rocks. It's not that noticeable when compared to Firefox, it's just ... smoother. You can also use it to import your bookmarks from most other browsers just like Firefox does - INCLUDING Safari.

According to the Mozilla Project you can also download plugins for Camino, but not all of them have been tested yet.

As for load times, I've seen Safari work better for some pages while Camino works better for others. If there's an error loading a page when surfing BlogExplosion in Safari, I have to go back and start over. With Camino, I just need to click on the right number again. I liked this so much that, because of this and the fact that Camino refreshes it's browser cache more often, I decided to dump Safari for a while and made Camino my default browser.

Alas, all is not a bed of roses. you see, underneath all the ease of use there are some problems as well. First, I can't sync my bookmarks up with my .Mac account. That's not too mad, since I can still use Furl to do that. It's a little more work, but oh well.

The biggest problem is the reason it's still a beta browser, I'm sure. You see, it crashes.

A lot.

Sometimes at the most inopportune moments.

So, long story short, I'm using Camino for things like Furl and BlogExplosion, but for most other web sites Safari is still the way to go on the Mac.

At least until Camino hits version 1.0

Kappacino

I just found out that my friend Sara has moved Kappacino to http://www.kappacino.com/.

This is of course a good thing, since it's a shorter URL and that may very well mean more traffic. Better yet, she now has downloadable icons (Mac & PC) and desktop pictures. Of course her flash animations will always be the site's main draw, but it's cool that she finally caved into me bugging her about the extra stuff. ^_^

If you like Homestar Runner/Strongbad, you'll love Kappacino - non-sequitur nostalgic gamer parody animation at it's finest.

The thing about blogs.

O.K., so getting all this extra traffic to my site through BlogExplosion is cool, but I can't help but notice some common trends that bug the heck out of me. If you have one of the items listed below please do not feel insulted. Rather, please accept it as constructive criticism from a college educated artist who's been making web pages since @1996. I don't know everything, but trust me, I know what I'm talking about and I'm not the only one who thinks this.

1. Blogs should load in 30 seconds or less. (Photo blogs are naturally exempt from this.) If you're using BlogExplosion, and chances are that if you're reading this, you are, then you move on to a different blog every 30 seconds or so. For those of us on dial-up modems, sometimes the pictures haven't even loaded by then! A few pictures are fine, but if the focus of your blog is on what you WRITE, then don't put half a meg of pictures on it. If the focus is on photos or some other form of art, then a thumbnail and a link to the larger image is the way to go.


2. Blogs should not include everything under the sun. Yes, I know a blog is a form of personal expression and you are free to put anything you want on it (assuming your employer doesn't catch you), but just because you can use anything does not mean you should use everything. Phases of the moon? Fine. A java clock? No problem. Web cam? Good for you! All of these plus half a dozen other things, each requiring a separate plug-in that the viewer may or may not have? Now you're overdoing it a bit. My advice is to pick your one or two favorite things and stick with them. If you have to, there's a way to steal borrow some javascript code and have only one of them show up on your screen each time it reloads.


3. Be different, just like everybody else. I've seen some very creative, original blogs out there. I've also seen a lot of them that used the exact same template. Sure, my blog uses a (modified) template as well, but you know what? The first time I see a blog using the same template, I'm changing mine. I don't care who was using it first, but I don't want to become another cookie cutter scenario. If your host and/or software doesn't let you customize your blog's appearance in some way, then in my honest opinion it's just not worth using.


4. Where's the title? Whether it's something snazzy or something simple, your blog should have a title. If nothing else, it'll help people to remember your site. This problem is exaggerated for BlogExplosion surfers, since at the top of the window the blog's title is replaced with "Surfing - BlogExplosion.com" (as if we didn't already know we were there). If someone sees your blog and wants to plug it on their site/blog/whatever, they should know what to call it, shouldn't they? Please, please, please, whether it's just text surrounded by an h1 tag or a totally spiffed out image, put a title at the top of your page. Thank you.

Is there something you see online that bugs you a lot? Something that you think was designed perfectly? Drop me a line and tell me about it.

Look both ways before blogging

They're apparently building a list of "organizations that have fired, threatened, disciplined, fined or not hired people because of their blogs."

One more reason for me to love my job: it's not on the list.

http://www.aoinamida.com/kappacino/

Lightning Dogs, hoooo! Duck the baby! Cats in dresses!

Don't know what I'm talking about? Well, why not?!

Cheap laptop doesn't do Windows.

Ok, I think I'll still stick to Macintosh products that cost twice as much, but even people who dislike Walmart with a passion have to admit that a $500 laptop is a good deal.

True, it's not the most powerful laptop on the market by a long shot, but for the casual or business user it's a more than adequate machine, especially wen you think about the added security feature -it's not Windows.

Simple Spider

This cute little animation is interactive, but not for those with irrational fear of spiders.

Or maybe it is for them, since you can shake the spider around. It's good clean fun, for maybe a minute or so.

My favorite Podcasting sites

I think these all deserve a plug, so here it goes:

The Laporte Report and The Tech Guy on KFI
Both of these are run by Leo Laporte, one of my favorite tech gurus on the net. If you used to watch TechTV before G4 ripped out it's heart out and sold it's soul, then you may have seen Leo before.

The Laporte Report provides tech news summaries while the KFI page posts Leo's radio show.

Engadget

Another tech news site, but NOT just another tech news site. The podcasts here are hosted by a guy named Phillip Torrone and while I don't always agree with all of his opinions, he's one of those people who actually THINKS about his opinions before he just talks and puts his foot in his mouth. I can respect that.

The Webmaster Cookbook

Father and son team ChefTD and Jowl broadcast their show live every Friday, then stream it and post it on their site. The ongoing plot revolves around Jowl's development of his site, Orting.com. ChefTD offers Jowl his expert advice with coding, images, and tons of free stuff to which you can subscribe.

lookANDsee and Will Simpson

Both of these sites are combination text/photo/audio blogs, with lookANDsee updating every day as a sort of photo diary and Will Simpson updating less frequently but with more attention paid to technique. If you're into photography, these are great places to go.

Central Lutheran Church

Ok, they don't exactly support RSS feeds, but they record their sermons and post the mp3s every Sunday. They're other Lutheran Churches that post ther sermons, but they're all Missouri Synod. This one's ELCA, just like me.

OOoFf (OpenOffice.org & FireFox)

Looks like Microsoft is going to take another, albeit small hit to their monopoly. It seems Linspire (That company that named their Linux distro "Lindows" so the resulting Microsoft lawsuit would give them the kind of publicity that money just can't buy) will be offering OpenOffice and Firefox in retail stores.

Am I all for it? Yup. Do I use either of these products?

... No.

OpenOffice is a great alternative to Microsoft Office - you can do almost everything with that FREE program that you can do with MS Office with very few compatibility issues. I downloaded it and tried it out for a while, but I just didn't like the feel of it's interface. I would have kept using it anyway, but I already had a copy of MS Office so I just went back to that.

Still, if you don't have MS Office you now have very little reason to buy it.

As a browser, Firefox is all that AND a bag of chips. Pop-up blocking, 90% compatible with all the web sites out there (I'll explain why that 10% was a good thing), almost no security issues (Compared to Explorer having several problems discovered every month or so) and free for all platforms, what more could you ask for?

As for it not having complete compatibility? Only Explorer has ActiveX built in, allowing web sites to access your computer as if they were programs on your hard drive. This can be a good thing or a bad thing. When it's good it's so-so, but when it's bad, it's VERY bad. No browser can have ActiveX compatibility and be considered secure.

As good as it is, I don't use FireFox either. As a Mac user, I just stick with Safari. It's quite similar to FireFox in every way that counts, and I can sync up my bookmarks with my .Mac subscription.

Of Crap and Bunnies

Been a while since I plugged something here, so I thought I would mention two comics I found recently.

Crap I Drew on my Lunch Break - A nice little comic that follows the "I'm writing about things in my life that I'm finding amusing and the main character is ME!" format. Doing this can be risky, but Jin pulled it off very well.

Updated Tuesday and Thursday.

Bunny - OK, if you read AppleGeeks then you already know about this one, but I'm plugging it anyway. Whereas "Lunch Break" has a perceivable plot since it's about the artist's life, this comic is non-sequitor, nonsensical, full of references to just about anything, and just plain funny. My wife and I went through the whole archive the other day and we both enjoyed it very much.

Updated every day.

Thingamablog

As you may or may not know, I like having things in a somewhat centralized location when I can. For that reason I switched to a program called iBlog when my .Mac account was giving it away for free. Alas, a year after I started using it the program inexplicably died on me and I came back here.

Now I've found a cross-platform program called Thingamablog and it's showing some promise. It doesn't integrate with .Mac as well as iBlog did, but it allows for customization and RSS feeds - two things that I was really looking for in a blogging app.

Best of all, it's FREE!

I'm currently giving it a trial by fire to see if it's worth my time, and aside from the learning curve of getting used to a Java app I've only noticed one glitch. Apparently if you try to add 30 or more entries at once without closing the program it begins to run veeeerrry slllooooooowwwwwly. Other than that, it's spiffy! :)

Programs that have sucked away my soul, er, I mean bandwidth.

Hello, my name is Blake, and I'm a tech junkie.

(Everyone else says: "Hi, Blake!")

I have a few programs I've been enjoying lately so I thought I would share them with you.

NewsFire - Free RSS reader for the Mac
RSS is pretty cool, since it means those of us that get our news off the web don't have to actually load a whole web page (complete with ads) to get the news. There are RSS readers for every platform, but I like NewsFire because it's free.

iPodderX - RSS reader for audio - and more! (shareware)
Ok, apparently this guy had the bright idea that since RSS format supported attachments it shouldn't be too hard to write a program that downloaded mp3 files and moved them right to your iPod, or iTunes, or any other mp3 player you might have. (If his name sounds familiar, it's because he was one of the early MTV VJs.)

The idea took off, and multiple versions of his original program improved by 3rd parties (for all platforms) are linked on his website. I learned about this killer of bandwidth from Leo Laporte, who uses RSS and Podcasting on his website now.

I've one more thing to plug, but it's an art museum so I'll talk about that on my DeviantART page.

Random Generator

Ok, this is neat - this guy made a bunch of random [fill in the blank here] generators for various uses. I mention this because several of them were inspired by Les Miserables and I think I know someone who watches my LiveJournal who might be interested in those.

Bow, BOW to the silly cucumber!

I apparently woke up with a cold this morning, as I was quite congested and my throat was sore from my chronic post-nasal-drip acting up. I'll speak no more on the subject except to say that 12 hour Aleve Cold & Sinus works for no more than 4 hours.

While picking up the aforementioned medication I saw this and bought it without hesitation. Childish or not, I've been a VeggieTales fan for years. (Although Chaeval was watching them long before I was.) I even managed to get Kelli hooked on it as well. The DVD is still sealed, as Kelli and I will both be watching it tomorrow in the hospital. I love the fact that laptops have DVD players in them, don't you?

N, the bouncy, exploding stick ninja!

There's a free game out there called N. It's for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

They say:
N - unique 2D puzzle / platformer
Play as a ninja trapped in a world of well-meaning, inadvertantly homicidal robots.
version 1.3 includes tons of levels (300), organized neatly into 60 unlockable episodes. your progress is now saved as you play, and you can compete with N users worldwide in the online highscores. nice!

I say:
Download this game and become addicted like me. Now.

Wingnuts

I just got my hands on a copy of Wingnuts from the good people at Freeverse Software. The concept of the game is simple enough - fly your jet around in a 2D fashion shooting a bunch of robotic planes while the head bad guy yells funny insults at you.

I give you a warning, however: this game is VERY addictive in the "I'll just play one more level" variety.

Last I checked Freeverse offered a demo version of the Wingnuts game along with plenty of other free programs for both PC and Mac. You should really check them out.

Temporarily evicted.

I've been using iBlog to do my blogging for a year now, thinking it was a pretty neato program.

Last night it decided to stop saving entries in HTML format for me. A reinstall did not fix the problem, nor did my Disk Utility.

So now I'm in the market for another blogging program that is customizable and saves as HTML. I would just stick with LiveJournal, but I like having most of my stuff on a single account.

Ack, they found me!

The following is an e-mail sent by Stephen Heintz, creator of Acid Zen Wonder Paint. Apparently he read the write-up I did about AZWP in my Web Site Reviews section.

-=-=-

--- "Stephen H." wrote:
> Hey, thanks for the nice write-up on your bloggy thing! Criticisms
> are
> totally boss, they help me grow as a person.
> I appreciate the link, and I'm glad you like my crap to any degree.
>
> Just thought I should mention about the atrocious spelling-- I almost
> never
> update before three in the morning. And by that point in the night,
> I'm so
> damn tired I can't be bothered to type into MSword and see if any of
> my
> disjointed yammerings turn up underlined red.
>
> If it's worth anything, it bugs me too, and I'll probably go through
> the
> archives with a fine-toothed comb and straighten my words out one of
> these
> days.
>
> G'day!
> -Stephen H.

-=-=-
My response follows:
-=-=-

I assumed your late-night updates (or early morning, depending...) were the reason for much of your humor and spelling. In fact, I think that's what helps make AZWP work so well.

I'm a big fan of kitschy humor on par with the "Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey" skits that used to be on Saturday Night Live, so when I saw the link to it in Return to Sender's forums, I just had to read all of them and enjoyed the fact that there are other people out there doing stuff like this. (It's too bad I read most of them at work ... oh well, deadlines were meant to be broken, I guess...)

This is also evidenced by the movies I make from time to time.

By the way, how did you discover that I had linked to you? Are people actually READING my blog?

-Blake Emrys

Posted by Blake Emrys at 6:07 PM
Categories: Rants, Reviews
|

Acid Zen Wonder Paint

Stick figures ... from HELL!

Ok, so this site has all the ingredients for failure .. nothing but stick figures drawn in MS Paint, the spelling is often atrocious, the text is disjointed and non-sequitur, and that blue background is just so ... blue.

... so why can't I stop laughing? Because it's darn funny, that's why!

Acid Zen Wonder Paint: http://snipehunting.rydia.net/

Kappachino

If laughing at cartoony foxes & monsters from ancient Japan is wrong, then I don't want to be right.

Sara is one of the best artists that I have ever met. She can do in 30 seconds what would take me 30 minutes to do, and that's on a bad day for her and a good day for me. You MUST see her site and you MUST laugh at it, or Satan's Angles (That's not a typo) will hunt you down and bleep at you.

Kappachino : http://www.aoinamida.com/kappacino/ (It's all flash animation, so it might take a little time to load on a 56k connection)

StyleCam DV100

It's a cute little digital video camera that is both a step forward and a step back from my old camera.

Ok, I needed a new camera since my old one was stolen along with my laptop. I've been looking for a while, but most of the cameras that looked like they were worth getting were too expensive. I knew I might have to settle for less, but I think I found a good compromise here.

Good points:

* CHEAP! It was around $80, which is a lot less than the still cameras I was looking at.
* Video, audio, & still images. This camera does it all.
* Small. This thing literally fits in the palm of my hand - it's even smaller than my old camera.
* Tripod mount. This is a must for me when I want to digitize artworks too large for a scanner.
* Takes AA batteries. Sure, I intend to buy lithium AAs, but in a pinch I don't need to buy a $13+ battery.
* LCD screen flips closed. I don't have to worry about getting it scratched up when it's in my pocket.
* Uses SD Media cards. I've already got a Palm PDA, so I'm already using these cards. I don't have to go out and buy new cards.
* Simple & intuitive menu. I haven't even cracked open the manual yet, and I've played with most of the features. Most of them I can get with my thumb on one directional button.
* Still images look alright in low light. This is a must for me, since I don't always take shots at high noon outside.

Bad points:

* Still images are 1.3 Megapixels. My old camera was 1.4 Megapixels, so it's not THAT noticeable ... but still, it's there.
* Video looks like crap in low light. Even at high quality settings the sensor isn't big enough to get a lot of detail.
* No flash. I didn't use the flash on my old camera much, but I still did sometimes.
* Feels cheap. This thing is light and it makes a slight hollow sound when you tap on it.
* 2x Digital zoom. I've yet to own a camera with a GOOD optical zoom - digital or film.
* No regular viewfinder. It's LCD or nothing, not that I ever used the viewfinder on my old camera.
* No AC cord. I can get it to run off the USB cord, but it likes to turn itself off when I'm using that.
* The manual can only be read in Windows. They made the darn thing an .exe file, when they could have easily saved it as a .pdf or html document.
* The built in microphone has almost no range and picks up the sound of the camera MOVING at times. Lucky for me I would rather add my audio in post production.

Overall I'm happy with my purchase. Sure, there are much better cameras out there - but for $80?

Flash! Aaaa-aaaah!

Shockwave Flash gaming, that is.

I have too much time on my hands. Well, not really, but I'm good at procrastinating at least. Here, play these games:

Penguin Baseball: http://alec.at.tut.by/penguin.swf

Bloody Penguin Baseball: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/pingu2.php

Make your friends exercise: http://moveyoassets.com/index.html

Escape from the crimson room: http://www.datacraft.co.jp/takagism/index_e.html

Weather Channel, thy name is MUD!

Precipitation may vary.

According to Doppler radar, we are in the middle of a snow storm. This is a big surprise to me, considering I haven't seen snow falling since Friday. What's up with that?

Hubble

I admit it, I'm an eye candy addict. If I'm not finding aesthetically pleasing shots taken / made by others, then I'm making them myself. In this case, I stumbled on to a nice set of Hubble photos while looking for pictures of mice.

Yeah, you read that right. Mice.

And I found pictures of planets, stars, and galaxies. Thank you, google!

Seriously, they had one image named "mouse.jpg" and it sorta snowballed from there.

If you're looking for some nice wallpaper or even to find more information about the Hubble, check this site out.

http://hubblesite.org/

Archive.org

They've got it all. Literally.

Ok, with the death of MP3.com many of us have been looking for other sources for free yet legal MP3s. I've found a few places, some of which are listed on About.com's mp3 page, but one site deserves special attention.

I'm referring to Archive.org. This site is maintained in an attempt to record the entire internet, and they're doing a great job. In addition to archiving every web site to ever be indexed by a search engine, they have a variety of film clips and audio files. Believe me, it's worth checking out.

http://www.archive.org/

Gaia

A web site that threatens to suck up all of my free time.

Gaia may be in alpha testing still, but it's still just plain cool. You can post art, hang out on the forums, or check their copious amount of links. The whole time you earn "gold" for the cute little avatar that you've customized. The gold can be exchanged for items of clothing for your avatar. Sound girly? Not really, especially when you end up patterning your avatar after some of your favorite anime characters. The whole site is really for anime otaku, but normal people might like it too.

http://www.go-gaia.com/

Me like free stuff

PH33R M3!!!1 ... or not ...

I've finally figured out how to run Gimp, which is essentially a Unix version of Photoshop Elements (No affiliation to Adobe, it just does the same stuff, is all...). There's one major difference, of course - Gimp is FREE! Free, I tell you!

I have emerged from my first sucsessful dive into a unix interface since college. I won't go into how long it took me to get Gimp to run on Mac OS X, but I would never have done it without Apple's release of X11 for Mac and the good people at MacAddict Magazine. Don't mind me, I'm power trippin'

Bwa-HAHAHAHAHAAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!