A Blend of Rendering and Camera Work

November 17th, 2011 Thomasso

It has been cold out, so I have been staying indoors, both at home and at work. With all this time hiding from the cold, I am spending it with my camera, and using it with the instruction handbook that I never read since I bought it. Also, I have been seriously working with some of the these 3D graphic programs that I had downloaded last month. It has been so nice to get better acquainted with the computer and camera.

The first image came from my new camera. I was taking photos of the Moon, using my 18-55mm lens, that came with it, when a seagull flew by in front of my shot. After looking at it on the monitor, the photo jumped out at me as being a very good image, so I processed it and posted it on Twitter, and now here on the blog. I do not own a telephoto, yet, but when I do get one, I want to do more shooting of far away objects with the camera. I am still drooling over that DSLR, the rang of options are incredible compared to my point and shoots cameras.

The next two images are from the same program I talked about earlier this week, called Wings3D, that renders using Povray. I am just starting to see the cool stuff that I can do with this program. I hate that this software has next to no help files, compressive guides or user manuals with it. There are some YouTube videos, and a very basic PDF files to download, but that is it. You are running it strictly by trial and error; which is sad when I am finding that it is a wonderful program to use, but it is complex and has unusual mouse and menu options.

The end results of working with Wings3D are very cool. I can now see why this is a heavy-duty modeller program. You can take a primitive object, like a sphere, and turn it into a 3D face by stretching and manipulating the mesh. I am still finding some options difficult to figure out, but I am making progress.

So this is what I have been up to when sitting idling by at my computer, or outside, going to and from work while it is still daylight.

I am waiting for the sky (weather) to clear up so that I do some night time photography. One of my primary goals with the DSLR is to take shots of the stars using long exposures and apertures adjustments. I have a 25.5cm reflector telescope, and for it I have purchased a mount to use with my DSLR, so I want to start using it for taking photos of celestial objects.

I cannot wait!

Posted in Around Town, Art, Astronomy, General, Photographs, Software, Twitter | 2 Comments »

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

No Such Thing as Simple: Printer Hell

November 10th, 2011 Thomasso

Where I work, we have a label machine that is used lots by everyone. It does everything from creating our shipping labels to making as assortment of address labels for just about any correspondences our office pumps out. And best of all, our super label machine holds several sizes of stickers and rolls of labels at once.

One day, (today), the computer that runs the printer died – just stopped working altogether. The office personal were in a state of chaos. The shipping department stopped shipping; the accounting department held off on their billing and invoicing, and administration tried phoning the manufacture to see if they could find a solution to the mess becuase they amongst the chaos of sending their stuff out too. To no avail, the machine had died, and no one knew what to do.

Through some hard work, and a couple of hours of tinkering, one of the techs got it working, but it was a long ways from being the super easy, super simple machine that it once was. Just to get it operational now meant having to go through a whole long series of carrot-stick menu options, and wasting sheet upon sheet of labels, just to get the quality and precision that you needed.  Now printing a single label was a hassle and chore – not a fun task.

After a whole morning, and several upset people, we got a call back from the manufacture of the printer. Our hardware was outdated and is no longer supported. The manufacture said that we must upgrade – for a small fee – if we were to have a super easy and fast functioning labeller printer again.

We knew the printer worked, but we could not figure out why the software would no longer give us all the settings we once had before. The mystery was compounded with the technicians from the I.T. department performing upgrades on all the workstations. It was not until one of the I.T. guys noticed that the tiny computer that operated the printer was attached to the server, and it had been upgraded too. He explained because we were now on a (useless propitiatory O.S., which I will not mention their name here) updated system, and this new system no longer gives us backward compatibility. So, a $10.000.00 upgrade actually caused more damage than giving use the best performance that was claimed to offer?

Nice.

The fellow that got the printer semi-working, (just finished just moments ago), however, it came at a price. The printer is hooked up to a MAC. I am MAC illiterate, along with 99 percent of the office staff here. The MAC has a mouse with one button–I am not kidding. But if you follow the menu, and click the single mouse button, the printer works, albeit through a long menu that adds a couple minutes to your task.

The one button days are gone.

Posted in Diatribe, General, Humour, Software, Story Telling | 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

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.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w77rLrMtqyM&[/youtube]

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

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.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9vfHTPl6y8[/youtube]

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

Getting Totally Side Tracked

October 3rd, 2011 Thomasso

Well, there is nothing like getting totally side tracked when you are having fun. The new video card had opened the door to a whole new world of PC goodness, all at the expense of my precious time. I am now able to play 3D video games that were otherwise beyond the power of my previous machines, and to my amazement, I like them now; every pixel energy sucking one of them.

Like “Extreme Tux,” from my September 28, 2011 post, not only can I play the game, but I can also screen-capture the event too and play them back as a movie – in HD quality.

So here I am playing “Open Area,” a free Open Source 3D arcade style video game, that requires a huge video acceleration card to make it work. I seem to have more than enough power to play this game.

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

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPPycgpyKJM[/youtube]

Posted in Diatribe, Featured Software, General, Software, Video | 1 Comment »

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!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnNtuFeiFSw[/youtube]

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 »

Happy Brithday Linux!

September 17th, 2011 Thomasso

Wow, this caught me off guard this morning as I turned on my Twitter account to see what was tweeting. A tweet appeared, that almost didn’t catch my eye, about Linux being twenty years old today. If it were not for the Window$ Workstation that I was on crashing, as it froze up from a bug in its security software, I would have missed that tweet. Thankfully, armed with my laptop, loaded with Linux, I was able to read the tweet, and continue on troubleshooting why the workstation crashed. Yes, irony and sarcasm are at play in my mind on this subject between the two operating systems.

My Linux experience really did not start until 1998-99 becuase computers were still very much a costly item back then. And where I lived at the time there was no Intranet in that part of rural Canada so being hip onto what was in fashion and new, I was still wearing animal skins and hunting and gathering for my food in the time-line sense. My first computer was a VIC-20 Commodore Computer, and then the Comnodore-64.  But my first experience with Linux was through SOL-unix OS ( using classic Pentium chip/with 4 MBs of RAM, and a 8G HD), then switching over to  Red Hat (2003), and today I only use Ubuntu. I quickly learned the value of Open Source computing when Internet crimes started to make headlines around the world. The Open Source world of computing dirty little secret was that a password is needed all the time to install anything, whether software or updates. Hackers have to resort to other means of taking your data, and planting malware, unlike the propitiatory OS where updates and installs are done in the background, sometimes without the user’s knowledge.

The ability to program and fix and write software to suit my needs was the selling point of the free OS, a.k.a. LINUX.  I was able to tailor my systems and become more productive without the huge costs that my competitors were suffering with. Remember, I did four years of university using only Linux, and I was able to do more, save money and not have to worry about system failures during upgrades as compared to my colleagues suffering with their system’s issues. In fact, I am very certain that the person who had stolen my lap top, back in 2006 at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Surrey Campus, would have had a very difficult time cracking my Linux machine becuase of the encryption that naturally came with the Linux OS.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ocq6_3-nEw&[/youtube]

Happy birthday Linux – the big Twenty. My how time flies when you are having fun!

Posted in General, Linux, Socail Media, Software, Story Telling, Video | Comments Off