Mr Fluffy Face – 15 Second Sketch

December 11th, 2011 Thomasso

Kids, both young and old, love drawing, even if they do not do it as a full fledged hobby, just playing around with new technology is the fun itself. Case in point are a group of “older” kids that I was showing off a 21 x 14 cm drawing graphics tablet that can be plugged into any computer using a USB port. Watching their eyes, watching the screen, as I started sketching this image, below, was an amazing experience for me. For them, it seemed intriguing as the different colours and shapes appeared in front of them.

I wish I had more of these graphic tablets, as some never got a chance to play around with it; time just ran out. Those that did play with it seemed to be more on writing their names than actually drawing. Perhaps I reinvigorated some artist sleepers to a new medium at the Senior’s Centre.

Posted in Art, General, Humour, Linux | Comments Off

Unexpected Saturday Stuff to Do

December 10th, 2011 Thomasso

I guess with being sick for so long with the flu, I put off more than I should have over the last two weeks. I completely forgot things like paying some bills, meeting some friends for some potential business arrangements, and my commitments with some volunteer organisations I spend time with. My head is still a little light from the flu, but I am on the mend. Now I just need to catch up from all the time off.

I wish I could find more time to play with my new camera too. With such short days and the weather not being to terribly co-operative, finding good shooting conditions has been a pain. Those small moments of available time where I can get out and shoot, are few and far between. Of course, I have been focusing on night time photography, doing things such as shooting the night sky, so finding that perfect clear night to shoot has been, well, a rare event over the last three weeks. Fall and winter time in Vancouver is less than ideal for finding clear nights, and being cold out, and having the flue, is just pure torture.

Last night we had the full moon for December, which featured a Lunar Eclipse for Saturday morning. Friday night was perfect shooting conditions, as the sky was clear and it was not too cold out. The moon looked brilliant. My only regret was not having a good telephoto lens with me. Life as a poor photographer; making due with the tools I have.

And to end the post off with, my act of weirdness in art. This was me doodling with my drawing tablet using a drawing/painting program called “MyPaint.”

Have a great weekend!

Posted in Art, General, Linux, Photographs, Software | Comments Off

Passing Some Time Away – On Art

November 11th, 2011 Thomasso

I could not sleep this morning. I laid in bed for most of the night becuase I was restless, but I think I could be coming down with something?

Oh, I hope it is not something like a flu?

Anyway, I fired up the PC and tinkered with this 3D PovRay program again (Wings3D) and tried to see if I could make heads or tails out of it. I think I made some progress with it?

Check this out:

I managed to figure out how the light settings work. I am still working on how to create different surfaces and textures on various objects. I can see that there is still a lot of work trying to figure out all of the functions on this program still. It is a small, but bery versitile peice of software.

6:18am – I should start to get ready for the day. I think I down becuase it is raining out like crazy?

Posted in Art, General, Linux, Software | Comments Off

Rendering the “D” that Failed me Three Times

November 4th, 2011 Thomasso

Yes, as you can tell from my twisted title, it is one of those afternoons, and nothing seems to be going right with this computer and its operating system. I think I am a little grumpy too, from lack of sleep becuase it was a very cold last night, and I was too lazy to get up out of bed and turn up the heat. Now I am paying for it. Ok, enough cranky-pants attitude here!

For those who follow my blog, religiously, you know that I love my 3D graphics. My choice of rendering software is PovRay, and I like to use a very small, light weight, program called Kpovmodeller. However since the latest upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10, the KDE libraries have being taken out, and the little graphic rendering program no longer works. I could probably get it going, but this would mean investing hours, time that I do not have. So to compensate, I have switched, not by choice, to a program that is also open source, and appears to run on just about all platforms, Wing3D.

Wings3D is not what I am used to as a 3D graphics rendering program. In fact, it is a little bit more complicated than my beloved KDE software that I adore, but, for now, this is all I have to get me through.

Remember that this is stock, the default settings, with no tweaking, just slapping three objects together after I figured out how to do that, then pressed “Render.” Nice, but by no means what I was going after. The text, well, the text looks weird too. Actually, the whole thing looks like it was submerged in chocolate, and you are seeing it just after it was taken out–still wet and runny–but without the drippings.

So this maybe the official thomasso.com 3D graphics software for a while yet. I guess I could grow to like it, but I will forever miss my Kpovmodeller.

Posted in Art, Diatribe, General, Humour, Linux, Software | Comments Off

A Quick Post to End the Week With

October 23rd, 2011 Thomasso

Just letting everyone know that I am still alive, and as usual, I got caught up on everything else and could not find the time to post.

I have two posts that I want to get up on here, but they are requiring a little bit more time than I originally anticipated. So, for now, I threw this up to keep you up-to-date.

I am working – a lot. This is good, but it sure takes a hit on my social scene.

For all my friends who have Ubuntu, there is an upgrade now, Ubuntu 11.10, as I posted earlier this week on, but some have already found a little bit too much, while some are OK with the learning curve. Time will tell, and you all will get through it. I am forcing myself to live with the new Desk Top, and I am starting to find my way around it, and I feel that I am adapting to it with a satisfactory level of efficiency.

It is getting cooler out. The trees here are now showing off their autumn colours. Very pretty for the camera. But the rain, the past couple of days, holy cow! Could this be a brutal winter, or what?

Posted in Around Town, Bitching about weather, Diatribe, General, Linux, Photographs | 1 Comment »

Day After the Upgrade: Ubuntu 11.10

October 16th, 2011 Thomasso

The real truth is, I never upgraded; this was a fresh install of Ubuntu 11.10 (code name Oneiric Ocelot). I was hesitant at first of doing a fresh install becuase the last version of Ubuntu, 11.04 would not boot up on a new machine, fresh out of the box. Instead, from that install, I had to go to with the Long Term Support, (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS) so that my BIOS would latch onto the boot loader and install. So, a plus for 11.10 as it booted up flawlessly.

I am not a big fan of the Unity Desktop. Regrettably, it is now part of Ubuntu, and Gnome 2 is now no longer included during the installation. In fact, installing Gnome 2 afterwards created more problems than I had time to deal with, so for now, I am sticking with Unity.

My thoughts on Unity are  half and half. I think it looks cool and is very distinct from all the operating systems that I know of, but when you are old-schooled on Window$ XP, and Gnome 2, following the Dash menu layout is a cumbersome learning curve for the brain first thing in the mornings.  But Unity does seem like it is stable, and I have not found a bug with it yet. I guess now that I have a 24 inch screen, space that the icons take up  along the left side seems acceptable. I would drop it if I have a small screen for sure.

The Ubuntu Software Centre was another shock for me. Sure, it looks great, and that does not seem to have any bugs in it that I could find, but seeing propitiatory apps for sale along side the open source ones made me cringe. Advertising for proprietary apps on free open source systems, to me, is wrong on so many levels. Apparently there is a way of blocking it. Just waiting for the hack to be released so that I can rid those ads from popping up.

Along the same vain as the Ubuntu Software Centre, they took out Synaptic. One of the first things I did was installed it right back. Synaptic is a way better app finder than what is now standard for Ubuntu 11.10.

For your information: “Ubuntu is already used by 20 million people around the globe, according to Canonical” (PC World, Oct 13, 2011).

So, what worked for me?

I have a 2TB hard drive, along with a 2TB external drive with USB3. There seems to be a noticeable difference on accessing, and moving files between both drives. Actually, accessing the external drive seems to be performing a lot better than before.

Adobe flash seems better too. It was weird that it seemed added/preloaded during the install, but its integration seems better. Normally you have to load it afterwards becuase of the license from Adobe.I am not a fan of adobe, especially now that they stopped their support for Linux with their Adobe Air Installer, so my favourite apps like TweetDeck may come to an end soon. Sad for those vendors really when the mother company stops support like that? Oh well.

One surprise was my drawing tablet just worked right after the installation, or as they say, it now works right out of the box. It was calibrated and set up without me having to configure it. Very cool.

I think ATI and Ubuntu must have had a long talk. Now, my video card (Radeon HD 6770) is performing the same as it does on the Window$ machine. I am very happy with that. See, smile –>

Now Thunder Bird is the default email program for Ubuntu 11.04, replacing Evolution. I dropped Evolution months ago, and made the switch to Thunder Bird because Evolution kept crashing on me, or it would double list emails, even after deleting them. It was frustrating, and there was no fix at that time, so I switched. This might be a good warning for those who are still using Evolution, you will have to migrate your data over to Thunder Bird during the installation.

Posted in General, Linux, Photographs, Software, Video | Comments Off

A Weekend of Stuff To Do

October 15th, 2011 Thomasso

I have so much stuff to do, I am way past laughing at it; I now just hit that stage where you just sit there and ponder the list, and mentally place priorities on each item. Of course, nothing goes according to plan. From winterising my place, to cleaning up unfinished projects, I knew time was not on my side.

I wanted to clean up my computer upgrade this weekend. Also, and unexpectedly, the latest upgrade of Ubuntu came along on the 14th, so I knew I had to get that done so that I could clean up all the parts and cases from the hardware I installed last week. When I started the upgrade, it went smooth, and quick. I was happy until I rebooted the computer and the dumb Unity Desktop popped up. I hate that desktop, so I went to switch back to Classic Gnome, and it was gone. In fact, a lot of the programs that I liked were gone. They were there, but they were not migrated over to Ubuntu 11.10, and there no plans to migrate them ever. So, I started searching for fixes to restore the Ubuntu Desktop back to the way I like it. This will take some time. I am frustrated about that.

The cost of things here in Vancouver are now starting to become noticeably high. I know the media is most always days and weeks behind on theses changes, but I do believe that inflation is creeping up at a faster rate then what I thought it was going to be. I went to buy some building supplies to start winterising my place and items like pink foam insulation almost double from six weeks ago when I bought them. Screws and nails really climb up in prices. I actually stopped short my buying spree, and focused on going back home and digging through my buckets of odd and ends for come items.

It is getting cooler out. I got out my winter quilt last night after I found spending more time wrapping my blankets around then sleeping. Maybe they are right, those weather predictor guys who are calling for a super cold winter this year, saying that condition are ripe for record breaking winter temperatures? I hope they are wrong, I really do.

Well, back to my list.

Posted in Bitching about weather, Diatribe, Graduation, Linux | Comments Off

Those Pesky Diversions

October 8th, 2011 Thomasso

And another diversion from the real world.

Warning: This game is not for children, and contains violent graphic content that may be offensive to some. Viewer discretion is advised.

What I tried to do here was capture in high definition (HD) while playing the game in HD also. So far, setting all the setting to high seems to not slow the video card down.

My only hassle was uploading the huge file to YouTube. This was the third attempt. The first was great video but no sound. The second was no video but incredible sound. This time, what you are seeing now is a heavily compressed version of the HD file by YouTube. I am surprised that you can upload file of 20Gb in size of mp4 quality.

OK, back to work.

Posted in General, Linux, Software, Video | Comments Off

Up-to-Date Now

October 2nd, 2011 Thomasso

At least my graphics look phenomenal now on my personal computer. After spending three days working on my own time, battling constant disruptions from work, and fighting sleep deprivation, I felt success yesterday. I am still along ways from finished as there are still a number of loose ends that need to be sorted out. I need another hard-drive of at least 1 TB to do a proper swap becuase all of my files from my “Home” directory are encrypted. The new machine was too different in its architecture to recognise the boot-loader on it, so I had to quickly rebuild an older machine with the old motherboard and RAM from before to do the data swap. The new machine performs incredibly well, thus making all of this hard work worth it.

I now have a system that works flawlessly in 1080i definition. With the Radeon HD 6770 graphics card and Asus M5A97 motherboard running a PhenonII 840×4 3.2Ghz CPU, along with my HDTV capture card, the bill was easily under $500.00.

My next purchase will be a proper antenna for capturing off-air HDTV. My current issue is a fluctuating signal as I have a lot electronic devices that seem to interfere with the signal while the antenna is placed inside.  I will need an outdoor antenna, one that can sit upon my roof.

So in the meantime, while I was working on my little computer project, I was also going through some very high activity at my work. The fiscal year end has come and gone, and with that too was inventory and account clean-out day.  Nothing like counting paper-clips and pencils, then toilet paper and brooms.

For the next two weeks I am going to stay low and focus on relaxing. We are in our busy season at work, so I do not want to take on any projects that would only add to the stress. I feel I am very lucky that I will be making some very good money up until the year-end, so I am going to save becuase who knows what is going to happen after that.

Posted in Art, General, Linux, Photographs, Software | Comments Off

New Machine, More Money

September 28th, 2011 Thomasso

What started out as an experiment for recording and viewing HDMI on my PC, turned into a major upgrade. I just did the CPU upgrade and bought a really nice graphics card, but that is not the end of the money pit issues for this machine?

For the CPU, I bought a AMD Phenom II 840 x 4, and a Radon HD 6770 graphics card.

Once I bought the graphics card, I realised that becuase of my video capture card being a PCI x 16 slot, it was right beside my PCI-E slot, and the graphics card was not going to fit because of its size, the big fan to cool it with. solution: I need a different size Motherboard with the PCI-E away from the PCI x 16 slot.  And along with the new Motherboard, I will need a 500+watt power supply due to the graphic card’s power requirements.The list keeps growing and growing.

Everything will be changed over, except for the Case (tower) once I am done! I should have just bought a whole new machine for the start.

So, here is a short little video of me playing Extreme Tux Racer. What is so special of me, who cannot play a video to save my life? I could never play a video game in high resolution, do a screen capture and do tweaking to the configuration at the same time. The times where the video cuts out was because I was setting the bit-rate and other adjustments while I playing the game.

Je vous présente Extreme Tux Racer avec moi, jouer le jeu!

Added: October 3rd, 2011

Ok, I should have put a download link if you want it.

For LINUX, just go to your favourite repository: search and choose “install.”

For Mac and Window$, go to these links: TUX RACER and EXTREME TUX RACER, for download and installation files.

Posted in Featured Software, General, Linux, Software, Video | 3 Comments »