Sorry I haven't been posting in a long time, but school is INSANE. I may have more time next year, since 2 of my classes are only 1 semester, and therefore will be done by Christmas.
Anyway...
Here's a little note I wrote on Facebook, I figured I should post it here, too.
*sigh* Mark my words, if Obama gets elected, America is going down the toilet.
Let me give a little recap of what he plans to do:
He plans to take away gun rights, so people who legally own guns will be defenseless. Of course, "gangstas" and people like that will still find ways to get guns, and won't care about the legality. So, we will have villains roaming the streets, and no way to defend ourselves.
He plans to take the troops out of Iraq. Now, I'm not exactly "in favor" of war, and I hate how many people have died, but taking the troops out is definitely not the best option. It will show terrorists that we are weak, and is basically a sign of surrender.
He plans to remove funding for defense weapons. So, not only is he letting the terrorists know that they have won, he is giving them a free ticket to come attack us, and create another 9/11.
He plans to raise taxes on hard working citizens, for the benefit of those who are too lazy to work. So the hard-working have to work harder, and the lazy have an excuse to be even more lazy.
He opposes laws against illegal drugs. O_o Doesn't he think drugs are bad? What is up with that?
He plans to give illegal immigrants citizenship, resulting in more poverty, less jobs, and Spanish becoming the second national language. :p
There's more... but I don't have time to go into them all.
Anyway, my point is: Is this the kind of person we want for President? Seriously. Will this help America, or hurt it? The answer is obvious, IMO.
A friend of mine wrote this note on Facebook, and he said I could post it here. No, I didn't write this. I just thought it was relatively interesting, and he makes some pretty good points.
Dear Mr. Obama,
I am writing to respond to several issues you have raised on the campaign trail as of late. I would also like to express my offense at several of your rude and uncalled for comments. I would expect someone with your vast experience as a community organizer and a state senator would have taught you basic etiquette, but I guess since you are a new kind of politician, you are not required to follow the courtesy of old.
First of all, what right do you claim to mock the fact that John McCain does not use email? He is unable to use email because his fingers are not nimble enough to type. This reason for this is an old wound that he received does not allow him to type…
An old wound he received fighting for your freedom and for the flag that you refuse to salute…
How dare you mock the injury of a soldier who stayed longer than he needed to in a Vietnamese hell hole so that another could go home first? One who has never fought for his freedom or country has no right to mock those of us who has or will.
By what right do you attack the family of Sarah Palin? You do your best to find everything wrong with her that you attack her pregnant daughter and try to crucify Palin for the actions of her child. Before your attack the family of another examine your own. By her own admission, your wife has never been proud of her country until you started winning and your brother lives in a hut in Nairobi on $12 a year when you could easily help him out of poverty.
By what right do you ask for more of my money? You and your Washington cronies already steal 1/3 of my paycheck. I need that money more than you do, Mr. Obama.
How can you possibly claim superiority in the area of gas prices? Your response to crippling gas prices is to tax gasoline and the oil companies that already pay 3 dollars of taxes for every 1 dollar they make. When that doesn’t work, you tell me to inflate my tires and get a tune up. Are you saying that I don’t know how to take care of my car? And even if my car isn’t in perfect condition, keep in mind that not all of us can get taxpayer funded cars and free gas…
Your record on guns is confusing. Your record shows that you have no respect for my right to carry a weapon and defend myself and my family, but when talking about your campaign you claim that, “If they bring a knife we’ll bring a gun!” I’ll have to think about that one…
How dare your talk to me about national security? You won’t fund our troops appropriately but you would gladly make friends with, Mahmoud Achmadinajahd (sp?), Kim Jong Il, Hugo Chavez, Hamas, and have proven your friendship with domestic terrorist John Ares. Your record on this is abominable…
5,000 unborn babies die a day, and not only do you want to use my money to fuel this geonocide, but you won’t even protect the babies that survive the legalized murder we call abortion.
I could go on with other examples of your audacity. Names such as Tony Rezco, Ludicrous, and issues such as global warming and illegal immigration could be razed, but I have to go to bed now and get a good night’s sleep. I have to get up to go to school tomorrow so that I am better equipped to provide for my future family.
For these and other reasons, I have decided to give my support to John McCain this election year.
Your favorite bitter gun and religion clinging, small town, racist, bigoted, un-enlighted young adult,
Wow. I never thought this would happen. When I first got Guitar Hero 3 a few months ago, it was beyond my wildest dreams. (Well, maybe not my wildest.) But now it's happened, and I'm still in shock. I beat the hardest song in GH3 on Expert -- Through the Fire and Flames by Dragonforce. w00t!
Don't believe me? Check it out.
So there you go. Final score - 364,792 - 3*
You would not believe how many things went wrong while trying to make that video, though. One time I beat it only to find out my camera had died. Once I was in the middle of the solo and doing really well, and then my little sister started CLIMBING on me. O_o Needless to say, I lost that one. I used about 20 pairs of batteries; luckily most of them were rechargeable.
Once I finally beat it, I still had to edit the video. Obviously, I had some troubles there, too. It took about 14 hours to render the video. I had to render it three times. Unfortuntely, I would have only needed two times, but once the second one was done, (at about 1 AM,) and checked the file and found out that it was saved in the wrong format. >_<
So, I rendered it a third time. I stayed up until 2 AM the next night waiting for it. It FINALLY finished, but (of course) when I tried to upload it to Facebook, I found out the file was over the 300 MB limit. Grrrr.... So, I went to YouTube to upload it. And, according to Murphy's Law, YouTube was under construction, and I couldn't upload. So I ended up staying awake until 2 in the morning for nothing.
But that's not all! I was finally able to upload it this morning, at about 11. It is past midnight right now. It took more than 12 hours for it to upload to YouTube.
I'm done now, though. I hope it was worth it!
NOTE: Sorry that the sound is a bit off at the end. That's because I used two cameras, and I can only use the sound from one. One video is slightly longer than the other one, (probably because the frame rate is a bit higher,) so the sound from one doesn't exactly match the other. Deal with it.
As I'm sure you know, I've been into papercrafting for a few years now. A few months ago, I found http://www.nintendopapercraft.com/, which has supplied me with 90% of my papercrafts. So, I joined their forum, in hopes that they would give me even more. So, long story short, I now am part of NP's staff! I'm am a blogposter/designer, which esentially means that every time I design a model, I can post it on the blog. It also means that if the owner is gone, he may have me post someone else's creations. Pretty cool right?
And this is a pretty popular site; they were even mentioned in Nintendo Power!
UPDATE: I was just checking out the stats for my model ripping video. Before I posted it on the blog, I averaged around 12 views a day. Thats more than I expected. But, the day I posted it on the blog, I got 358 views! For the next month or so, I averaged 50-100 views a day. So far, it's been up for almost 2 months, and I've got 2,444 views. Not bad, eh?
Here's a fun logic game. Here's the link. BTW, the answer is at the end of the video, so if you don't want to know it, stop the video. I got it in 4 minutes B-)
Here's a video about how to trace the IP address of an email. I showed a video a while ago explaining how to do it with websites, and here's emails. BTW, the website in the video is http://www.ip-adress.com/trace_email/.
LOL! Another hilarious video. It's a Japanese game show (YAY!) where the goal is to eat the marshmallow with the rubber band pulling you back. It's soooooooo funny!! They all look like fish!
Yeah, so, I got a new laptop! Yay! It's pretty awesome. It's technically not mine, but rather the whole family's but I will be using it the most and, once I go to college, it will be permanently mine. I obviously don't really want to split it with everybody, but my dad payed for it, so it's better than nothing.
Here are some specs if you care:
Dell Ispiron 1420 2Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo 3GB RAM 1440 x 900 (widescreen) resolution Windows Vista Home Premium etc.
So yeah. Before you say "Vista, ugh", let me just say it hasn't really given me many problems. There have been a few compatibility problems, but it's only the occasional image blurriness because of different resolutions for the most part. One thing that was kind of a bummer, the image preview can't play animated GIFs. :p I know it's not that big of a deal, but you'd think they'd figure out how to do that. :D
My biggest complaint about Vista, I think, is that it uses 1GB of RAM automatically. That's just for the cool effects and stuff. So I'm only really left with 2GB of RAM, which still isn't bad.
But anyway, it's pretty cool. I'm still getting used to the way Vista works, for example the file layout and such, but mostly I'm liking it. There haven't been a ton of noticeable changes since XP, (except the obvious graphics upgrade) but most of the time, the changes I do notice are pretty nice.
So... yeah. It's mostly pretty awesome. Ooh!! I just remembered something. I took the default Vista background, played around with it in the GIMP, and came out with 9 new wallpapers! So, now you can download them! (I think you're legally allowed to do that... I don't know what license the original image is released under.) The first one is the original image.
EDIT: I've moved the pictures to a new folder, you can find them all here.
So there you go. I'm currently using Wallpaper4 for my background. Although I really like the default, that it exactly what it is, and EVERYBODY has it. So, I decided I'd be different. :)
EDIT: Okay, I took sooo long for those images to upload on to Photobucket, my other awesome thing got here in the mail. It's a drawing tablet!! So I have essentially turned my laptop into a tablet. So anyway, what I got was a DigiPro 8"x6" tablet. The price? $30 on Woot!. It's really awesome. The funny thing was, the day before Woot! offered it, I was looking at Wacom tablets, because I wanted one. Their cheapest one was $80, and it was really small. It probably didn't have pressure sensitivity, either. :p So now I've got this awesome thing for cheaper than I ever could have found it. :D
So... as a quick test I drew some things in the GIMP. Nothing special, but it's WAAAAAYYYYY better than I could have achieved with a mouse or the touchpad. ;)
Basically, a ferrofluid is a magnetic liquid. It's really awesome to watch. I found a place where you can buy it here, toward the bottom of the page, for about $0.75 per ml.
If you've ever played Super Mario 64, then you probably remember the never ending staircase. No matter how far you climbed the stairs, you'd still be at the bottom. Also, the music kept looping, even though the pitch got higher and higher. Well, here's that musical illusion again.
Do you notice any changes? No? Yeah. It's a small change, you probably won't notice it until I tell you. So I'll just tell you. Look up by the address bar, at the top of your browser (assuming you are using Firefox). I now have my own icon up there! If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you must be using IE. So... just:
1. Favorite this blog 2. Look at the image next to it (it's not the typical blogger logo) 3. Get Firefox. ;)
Anyway, these little pictures are called favicons (stands for favorite icon, I guess). I just found out how to make a custom one! Lemme give you a quick tutorial. Just to let you know, this tutorial is meant for Blogger. The process is different if you've got your own website.
First of all, you are going to need an icon. It has to be 16x16 or 32x32. Anything bigger I think will just shrink down. So anyway, create your icon, (I used the GIMP,) and save it as "filename.ico". Obviously, replace "filename" with whatever you want. The ".ico" extension means it is an icon file (you should know this already). Most programs can't create icons though, that's another reason why I used GIMP.
So now, you have to upload your file to the internet. Unfortunately, many image hosting sites do not accept .ico files as valid images, so I had some problems figuring out who could host my file. After a bit of Google searching, I stumbled upon the perfect place: Google Page Creator. I had totally forgotton that they let you upload up to 100 MB of files. If you use Blogger, you should already have a Google account, so sign in to Google Page Creator with your account. Find the place where you can upload files, and upload it.
Now here comes the tricky part (if you don't know HTML). Open a new tab, and go to your blog. Customize it, and go to "Edit HTML". Now paste this somewhere in between the <head> and </head> tags:
The <head> tag is right at the beginning, but you may need to use Ctrl-F to find the </head> tag, it's close to the bottom, but hard to find (or at least it was on mine).
Anyway, take that code and paste it between the <head> and </head> tags. I ended up putting mine right before the </head> tag.
You're not done yet though, there's one last thing you must do. Go back to Google Page Creator, and find your file in the list. Right click it, and click "Copy link location". This will copy the URL of the file. Go back to your blog HTML, and paste your file's location instead of http://mygpages.googlepages.com/myfavico.ico
For me, it ended up looking like this: <link href='http://gollum9999.googlepages.com/Icon.ico' rel='shortcut icon'/>
And that's it! Save your template and view your blog! Now you've got a new favicon!
Here's a really simple trick were you can make it appear that you are twisting someone's head around. They don't give the solution, but it's still pretty obvious.
Hey, sorry I haven't gotten back to the daily videos. I have a lot of unfinished projects that I need to do, so I haven't blogged anything lately. Here's something I found though. I guy who will spin anything on his fingers, from a Wii to a saw blade.
Sorry I haven't done daily videos in a few days, but I've been gone and apparently my list of future videos ran out. So, I'll try to get that going again soon.
In the meantime, I did find this video, and I had to post it immediately because it is so funny! Have you ever wondered what it would be like if board games were real? Probably pretty close to this:
Yay, Blender 2.46 is out! It's got a bunch of awesome new features. Release notes can be found here. I'm really excited about some of these new features. My favorites:
Glossy reflections
Continuous physics
Soft shadows
New particle system
Cloth simulations
I've been using the beta version for about 2 weeks now, so I'm glad I can use all these new features I've been testing. Here are some of the cooler updates:
Many features have been added to make fur and grass rendering for Peach possible. Big improvements were made in visual quality, rendering speed and memory usage.
The new Image Browser is blazingly fast and stable, and not only allows to browse for images in your filesystem, but can also show previews of materials, textures, world, lamp and image data.
The softbody, cloth and particle physics now use a unified system for caching and baking. For real-time tweaking, a new option "Continue Physics" will continue the simulation regardless of the current frame.
The particle system has been rewritten from scratch. It now allows advanced hair grooming tools, but also much better physics, boid animation and even explosions!
Cloth simulation is available in Blender via a modifier on Mesh objects. Cloth then realistically and in real-time interacts with other objects, the wind or other forces, all of which is fully under your control.
Ambient Occlusion is a render option that darkens areas with less visibility, simulating the effect of environment light. This new AO option is based on quick approximation, giving many factors of speedup.
Blender now includes two new sampling methods, using a Halton sequence (Adaptive QMC) and a Hammersley sequence (Constant QMC). Raytracing now also supports adaptive sampling.
Apparently, if you draw (using any drawing program) with the color Red 16, Green 0, Blue 16, (or hex #100010,) then you can see any videos playing behind it! And it's not some fancy editing trick, it really works. I tried it.
Sorry for all these magic videos, but I'm going through my favorites list in order. I guess I must have been searching for magic videos the day I favorited these. There aren't many magic videos in the near future. ;)
Anyway, here's a trick that many professional street magicians do where it looks like they can twist their arm all the way around.
Sorry I haven't been doing any "normal" posts lately (i.e. not videos) but hopefully summer will give me much more time to do this kind of thing.
So anyway...
I couldn't forget The GIMP if I'm listing open-source software. For those who don't know, that stands for The GNU Image Manipulation Program.
It's basically Photoshop, but for free. There have even been some people who switched from Photoshop to GIMP because they like it more. I use it for almost all of my image editing. I occasionally still use MSPaint for things like pasting screens, but otherwise, it's the GIMP.
So, what can it do? Even if you don't want to take the time to learn to use it, you can still do a few awesome things as soon as you open it. Even without creating a new image, you can open up some awesome effects. It's got some presets for creating buttons, (like for a website,) it's got about 25-30 presets for creating logos, (for example, I used the neon logo creator to create the logo for "The Blog",) and it's got some other things like pattern generators (like camouflage) and web page themes.
But, of course, GIMP's strength is not in it logo generators, but in it's editing options. As of right now (version 2.4.1) there are 33 different tools for editing images, and far more options available in the menus. Some of my favorite tools:
*Fuzzy Select/Select by Color: These both let you select parts of the images with similar colors. They each do something slightly different though, and I use both about the same amount.
*Foreground Select: Using this tool, you can select an item separate from the background. It's a lot like keying in videos, but you don't have to be in front of a green screen or anything (although something like that would help). I've used this for a few things, one being removing my head. :p
*Crop Tool: You may think "Bah. Every image editor has crop!", but in GIMP, the way they do it is REALLY easy to use.
*Bucket Fill: Yeah yeah. Everything has bucket fill, also. But I do use it a lot. Also, the colors don't have to be EXACTLY the same, (like in MSPaint,) but you can set the threshold for similar colors.
*Airbrush: This is really helpful for creating textures that I use in Blender. Unfortunately, I can't make anything good since I'm not using a tablet. :p
*Clone: Yay for the clone tool! VERY helpful. I use it for removing dates from photos (and stuff like that).
*Smudge: After fixing some things, it helps to get rid of the sharp edges with the smudge tool. :)
And those are just some of them. Some of the other awesome things that the GIMP can do? Layers, for one. I LOVE layers. I use to have to do all my editing in MSPaint, and I would have to save a new image for practically every change I made, or to edit in "layers". Another awesome thing: practically infinite undos. It always annoyed me how MSPaint only had 3 undos, so now I can know that whatever changes I want to make can be reversed. There's also a ton of different filters and changes you can make to an image, so... yeah.
The only downside I know of: long loading time. It takes like 2 minutes to start up. Other than that, it's amazing!!!
NOTE: I just found this out: Apparently, someone has created a hacked version of GIMP that looks and behaves more like Photoshop, called Gimpshop. So, if you use Photoshop and you want to see what GIMP is like, you might want to consider using Gimpshop.
This video has become somewhat controversial; there have been tons of comments on whether it does/does not work. Many people say they tried it and have burnt themselves, but others swear that it works. Just watch for yourself:
Hey, just finished a new thing in Blender! This one took me 2 days; it's a Goomba! Here's a picture:
And, as an extra bonus, I'm giving you guys the model! Do whatever you want with it. Mess around with it. Animate it. Whatever. One request, though: if you use it in a project, give credits for the model to me. That's all I ask. :)
Here's a trick that pros use to make things look like they have water droplets all over them. Not that I really do any custom painting, but I thought it turned out to be pretty cool.
