Posted my Photos in Video: On YouTube

February 5th, 2012 Thomasso

I spent some time editing a little video of some of the photos, and a short clip, that I took today from my Sony A33. The video a sort of the spur of the moment project, very amateurish, and I put it together in less than an hour.

Basically what you about to see is the short video clip of the bridge going over the Fraser River, then some of the photos I took of that hike along Brae Island outside of Fort Langley, BC. The music is mine – done on the LMMS, and the video production and editing was done suing the OpenShot on my LINUX PC, with Ubuntu 11.10.

Enjoy.

Posted in Around Town, Art, Astronomy, Audio, Photographs, Software, Video | No Comments »

Since When is Politics Boring?

December 2nd, 2011 Thomasso

I have always been interested in politics, and my need to know more about it peaked when I took my first Political Science course way back in 2004. I really believe that the first steps in understanding politics is having a really good base of knowledge. I never got any good learning experiences when I was in high school, they never taught it then adequately, and sitting in an armchair would have never gotten me close to what I needed in terms of knowledge (of fully appreciating) all the facets of politics since my University days. I think too, the need to want to learn it plays a huge part in appreciating it?

Here is how I break it down: You have your mainstream politics, and your local politics, but then you have your the in between politics that kind that only deals with the special interest of the clique that you are associated with, and no one else cares about. In my little clique, the Students and Institution of the university that I once belonged to, has had an explosion of activity in the last three days. Student politics has hit the local news media and syberspace like a mid summer grass fire.

The Kwantlen Student Association (KSA) has hit the news feeds with a flurry of activity. On November 30th, 2011, a rally to impeach the current board members from power took place, as over 400 students, whose numbers could form a quorum, voted to oust nearly three quarters of the KSA’s board members. This is politics at its best in my opinion becuase it engaged hundreds of otherwise busy students to take a stand, and hopefully putting a stop to the mountains of negative publicity that Kwantlen Polytechnic University has been getting over this.

Here is the geniuses of the whole movement of the Special General Meeting (SGM) to oust the then KSA on video, thanks the student paper The Runner:

The SGM had its hiccups too on Nov 30, 2011. The fire alarm was pulled twice, and someone sprayed pepper-spry in the hallway leading to the conference room where students had to reregister before the vote took place. Yes, the police and fire department were on the scene.

In the end, the vote took place and the KSA was replaced with about 12 new temporary board members, and changes to the by-laws governing the KSA, and a motion to issue a new election for the new KSA.

With allegations of corruption, criminal and civil wrong doing, out of control spending, and actions that does not benefit the students as a whole, who says student politics is boring?

When I was a student, I missed a golden opportunity right in front of me.

Posted in Diatribe, Events, General, Law, Law and Order, Socail Media, University classes, Video | 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.

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.

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.

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

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 »

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.

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

ANGRY BIRDS by Pomplamoose

May 10th, 2011 Thomasso

I was just watching CBC News about two hours ago when their entertainment segment came on and they said that a music band had just released a cover song of the Angry Birds theme sound track. The name of that band is Pomplamoose (French for Grapefruit) who are a very well known You Tube band that does mostly cover songs. I was shocked, excited, in awe!

I know both Angry Birds and the band Pomplamoose very well, and I was surprised that they would be united together, especially seeing this on Canadian national television! Of course, in my humble opinion, they did a great job.

Musicians Jack Conte (mostly instruments) and Natalie Dawn Knutsen (lead vocalist) mixes their their music using a process that records both the video and audio together as a total mix (Wikipedia). The results are very amazing. They have become very popular, and using their talents and self marketing, they seem to be doing very well for themselves.

Please note that the spelling is lightly off from the French Canadian spelling of the word Grapefruit in their title.

Je vous présente le pamplemousse!

Posted in General, Humour, Socail Media, Video | Comments Off

Politics and That Bin Ladin Guy from 9-11

May 1st, 2011 Thomasso

I was reading some tweets from friends when I noticed a huge surge of tweets with the trending topic of Osama bin Laden in them. Around 7:30pm (pacific time) these tweets started popping up. Then the grand-daddy of all tweets coming from President Barack Obama, who tweeted that he was about to do  a rare late night public announcement live, streamed live on the web. So I waited with bated breath.

It was announced that Osama Bin Laden had been killed by American forces, issued by the President (10:30 Eastern).

Oh Twitter. I laughed, I cried, and read with intent. There were so many perspectives on this event that I had to stop my stream to read them all in real time. As I type, our Prime Minster is speaking about the 9-11 and the death of Osama Bin Laden. His speech was short. I understand that he is, after all, in the twilight of an election.

Here is the President’s speech in its entirety:

So, I will continue to pick this up for tomorrow.

Election Fun:

On a Humours note, poking fun at the election, I present a YouTube clip of this acapella group, “The Tra La Las,”  poking fun at the Harper Conservatives. This is for some members of my family, who are staunch Conservative supporters–you know who you are… Heh heh heh. So get out there and VOTE tomorrow! Vote, it’s your right and privilege!

Harper is the Root of All Evil

As the night progresses, and if I have more energy, I will probably add more to this post. But I must get back to Twitter.

Posted in Criminal Law, Criminology, Events, General, Humour, Law, Law and Order, Socail Media, Social Justice, Twitter, Video | Comments Off

Yes, Ubuntu 11.04 is Out in Less Than 4 days!

April 24th, 2011 Thomasso

Well folks, or for those of you who live in the free world, the next release of Ubuntu is out on the 28th of this month! Code name Natty Narwhal, 11.04 will have a new look, and some extra features. I cannot wait! UBUNTU 11.04.

For those of you that are currently running Ubuntu 10.10 on your systems already, the update/upgrade should be automatic for you. But, if you are running another OS, then follow the instructions from the Ubuntu web site, and you can run a dual boot system.It is an entirely free operating system – no strings attached.

Have a look at the web site, and enjoy Linux–the best OS in the world!

Here is what the Ubuntu Beta 3 looks like on this YouTube clip. This should give you an idea of what to expect from this OS. It is very user friendly, and very secure compared to other more popular OS’s.

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