December 28, 2009
Now that my baby girls’ birthday has passed and Christmas has come and gone, it’s time to start looking toward the new year. I am engulfed by a mountain of trash and toys. Over the next week I’ll likely be putting many gifts together that posses those 3 dreadful words; Some Assembly Required. Even some of my own gifts have come with that same price tag, like my new charcoal grill. I am thrilled to have it and have wanted one for a while now, but I am going to wait until my health returns before tackling any outdoor assembly jobs. Oh yeah, I came down with some nasty Sinusitis and had to pick up some anti-biotics the day after Christmas.
On a slightly related note, I decided to collect some random pictures I take on my phone for personal amusement. (more…)
December 21, 2009
This old question popped into my head as I watched my 64bit quad core behemoth cry like a baby as it processed some video clips. I know, it sounds like a stupid question. Given that HD TV’s are selling at an all-time high over the last couple years and most gaming consoles are resting pretty on the HD era. Personally, I don’t see any problem from the users’ perspective. After all, they just have to plug in their TV’s and make sure they have an HD signal from their cable provider. The weight of HD is soling on the shoulders of the content providers. (more…)
November 15, 2009
I recently bought a new camcorder and discovered upon transfering my first recording that the video is in MP4. Are you kidding me?!? Of all the formats, it had to be the least supported codec in the history of popular formats. Not only that, but HD video is clocking in at around 52MB per minute!! Not bad, until you realize that the image is interlaced. Seriously, why call it “Full HD” when it’s only half the image? I can understand if the video was bloated because the format was old or lower quality, but we are talking about MP4 here. I would have preferred to see an AVI coded in DIVX, XVID, OGG, MKV, or any one of the dozens of formats used by the rest of the freaking world… I’m not terribly happy right now, but this is my first digital camcorder, so I’ll keep it as training wheels. I could go on about the grainy image, the lackluster auto-focus, or the fact that it’s so small it cramps your hands and your finger pass clear over the buttons unless you are a 7th grader, but does any of that matter when you are stuck with a final video format that doesn’t even play inside of Window Media Player?
Samsung SIO “Full HD” – you get a 2/5. I would have given it a 1, except the interface and touch screen are fairly easy to use and mostly intuitive. For the price I expected something better than a Flip.
May 1, 2009
I did some digging around and couldn’t find a really helpful tutorial on making textures tile easily. There are some really complicated ways to do it that will likely produce better results than what I am about to show you but this is a nice quick fix that is sure to work 90% of the time. This technique assumes that you’ll be using some kind of noisy texture like dirt, tree bark, gravel, wood chips, etc. If you are using solid colors or cartoon shading then you might be better off just hand painting the edges to tile properly.
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Did I get your attention? Okay it’s not as serious as it sounds, I live in Florida and it’s to be expected wherever you go around here. The common law of Florida is pretty much that if you see a body of water it’s likely to have a gator in it and guaranteed to have snakes.
I was walking on a trail behind an office park; the trail wrapped around a lake and was about a mile long. I wanted to take some reference photos of foliage and different plant species and tree barks, etc. Mostly I just wanted to try out a new lens I just bought. Ofcourse while I was looking up at the trees I didn’t see this little guy, who I nearly stepped on. Apparently he was taking in a little sun because he barely moved and I was standing only a foot or two away. I don’t think he was poisonous; probably some kind of water snake or rat snake, but he did startle me a bit. You don’t expect these guys to just sit and chill next to you; normally snakes are pretty non-confrontational. Maybe I caught him by surprise as much as he did to me 
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