Just finished up the Last HOPE conference, which I ended up working at again. Everyone was great and I had a blast, but I’m now a bit too tired to commit some of the goings-on to writing. I’ll post more at some future date.
There’s going to be another HOPE, which I’ll probably sign up to man the Info Desk at again. Look forward to seeing you all there!
Showing us exactly what you can do with no budget and a good animator is Drawn by Pain. It’s a live action with drawn overlays series that arrived in my in-box courtesy of the fine folks at zero punctuation (they ran a trailer advert for it) and it’s turned out to be a good watch.
Drawn by Pain follows it’s sometimes heroine Emily as she confronts her inner demons while terrorizing NYC lowlifes (or possibly Connecticut’s south coast, there’s a 106.9 WCCC sticker in there). She appears to be slowly driven mad by her youth, hounded by forms given life through her odd artistic powers.
What really lies inside Emily’s abilities to injure and kill to defend herself with drawings and how she’ll tackle the problems they cause is the focus of the series.
Artistically the shorts are tight Drawing is sketchbook style and pops out of the screen from the city and ‘burb backdrop. Camera work is competent shot with (if I had to guess) a couple of Canons GLs or similar cameras and some good recording gear. Acting improves as the series gets its chops broken in.
If you want either an action/drama that’s fun to watch or a study in making a good mixed media film on a shoe-string budget this one’s for you. (Drawn by Pain drawnbypain.com)
You may have discerned by now that I enjoy making things. Pretty much anything.
So after searching around a bit for “what to do with extra bottles of oil” and coming back with “making soap” I’ve successfully whipped up a couple batches of the cleanly stuff that look promising. But here’s the catch: you want to figure out when it’s done reacting with the lye and, well, becoming soap.
Now, I could just buy some litmus strips. That’s probably a pretty good solution, but it A) involves buying something and B) involves finding the something to buy. Which wastes both time and money, and mostly defeats the using-up-leftovers nature of my initial soap making initiative.
One thing I *do* have is quick access to grocery stores and what-have-you on my ride home from work (very built out sections of Connecticut). After a bit of research, I found (and then remembered) that middle school science classes generally include an experiment whereby you test the PH acid/base level of various substances and objects using a reactive mixture made from a vegetable.
Our answer here, dear reader, is cabbage. Specifically the red variety.
Using nothing but some simple instructions, found here, you too can make an off-the-cuff PH judgment based on a simple PH chart of the water coloration. Or if you want to get fancy (or use the stuff for a bit longer of a period) you can reduce it in alcohol instead.
It’s not useful outside getting a rough reading, but fortunately for my soap making (and possibly ground soil testing) I really want to know if it’s near the center of the range, not get an overly accurate reading out of it.
Seems that this is a humor weekend in general. “How to Drink Wine” by Craig Martin over at The Travelers Notebook includes some hilarious tips on drinking Wine and a short on drinking hard liquor as well (do not snort, exhale first). All sage advise.. what are you waiting for, it’s only 3 minutes long!
Credit to the person who put up BCC Please. If you’ve ever gotten a forward from someone with hundreds of people in a CC field… do yourself a favor and send them to that site.
We had to actually look up what “revenant” meant. Normally I would’ve had that one.. but unfortunately D&D references always skew my memory. It means, literally, ghost. Or more exactly disquited spirit (thank you Wikipedia) from Eastern European folklore.
Not having finished the novel I can’t comment on if it ends well, but at the halfway point it’s proved to be up to Donaldson’s usual standard. Characters filled with emotion and human foibles thread through the story along with the empowered embodiments of ideas and extremes. While there aren’t a huge cast of central characters each one is thoroughly, almost exhaustively, plumbed for depth in typical Covenant novel fashion.
Even taking the detail of Fatal Revenant into account (normally something that turns me off to a novel) I like the book. For some reason it clicks quite a bit better than other novels that expound at length on detail. Thinking on it, that’s probably due to the exposition being used on the characters, rather than merely their surroundings. Thomas Covenant novels evoke a visceral reaction that most books can’t, and this latest book is no exception.
Returning the unimpressive Jabra headset to Staples, I now needed to pick out a new headset to give a go-round.
Staples, by the way, tends to be very friendly about accepting returns. It’s one of the reasons I buy from them if I need something local or might end up exchanging it due to a lack of reliable information on the products quality.
Since it’s the same price ($39.99) i decided to go with Plantronics Explorer 220.
So far the unit seems to hold up well. Plantronics ear piece seems to be a much nicer fit. The sensation that I was hearing muffled audio is gone, although there is now a bit of static hiss in the background. I would guess that’s the trade-off between filtering and hissing in a mid-range unit.
We’ll see how the battery life and comfort hold up after a few days of use, but so far I’m more impressed with this unit out of the box.
I had to pick it up. There really wasn’t a way around it, what with the game being available out the gate for Linux.
And it’s good! I’ve been playing Penny Arcade’s “On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness Ep1 for the past few hours (since I finished working) and it’s fun. Initially there was a bit of a hiccup loading the game but once I gave it a few tries it started up.
Another quible is that it eats massive amounts of CPU time on the x86_64 Debian release that I run on the laptop. Even so, the performance is okay once the game is going. Just don’t expect the system to be doing much else. Might be a x86_64 specific or Debian edgy specific problem, dunno.
Gameplay is similar to an updated Monkie Island or Zak McKracken. The engine is fairly novel, and delivers the story in a fun and simple manner. Don’t expect to be facing an incredibly tough stat building RPG.. the combat progression so far is fun, but it doesn’t get in the way of plot progression or the storyline.
And what a storyline! It’s got well spliced comic scenes liberally sprinkled throughout with pointed over-the-top humor that’s made Penny Arcade famous.
Rendering the PA crowd in 3D really seems to have payed off as well. The style captures quite a bit of Gabe’s feel for the pen with rounded lines and a realistic/cartoony presentation.
Check out the demo from the Greenhouse and grab a copy if you like it. For 20$ on any platform, it’s quite a bargain.
After brief consideration of all the contenders for my Bluetooth headpiece dollar at the local Staples, I settled on the Jabra BT2010.
And am finding this to be a rather nasty mistake.
Sound quality with the BT2010 is so-so when paired up with my Samsung M510. There’s quite a bit of squelch on the line, muting the highs and lows of whomever is speaking to me.. which makes them completely incomprehensible when they modulate their pitch up or down.
Battery life is excellent. It’s been going for a few days so far and hasn’t had an issue. They appear to have gotten this bit right, as it seems to stack up to it’s expected 7hours on time or 200 hours standby. In mixed use the little Jabra does fairly well.
But where it really falls down is the comfort. This thing is equivalent to sticking a rock in your ear. I tried it on both the right and left side of my head, just to make sure it wasn’t something odd. Another thing to note on the comfort level scale is the solid plastic wrap-around for the ear. Not only is it uncomfortable, it doesn’t keep the unit attached to your head very well.
Don’t even consider their claim that you can wear it without the ear clip. It doesn’t stay on with it most of the time.
So I’d say avoid the Jabra BT2010 and go for something with a more comfortable earpiece and better ear-clip mechanism.
To wit, sandbags.
Building materials, as you may (or may not) have noticed, are expensive. Really expensive. So how do you throw up a small structure on that spare plot of land you’re eyeballing because it’s really cheap and somewhere convenient?
Exactly the question I’ve been asking myself. You can get a decent plot of land anywhere on the cheap, but what to put on it to make it a bit more useful as a stopover destination.. there’s the rub.
Even without running water or electricity a campsite style layover’s not bad. But I always liked a cabin over a tent.
It appears there are a few options. Sandbags can be used to make a reliable structure (makes sense, they work for instant dams). Although to be honest those places look all together a bit too crunchy for my taste.
An outfit out of Africa intends to make a system for putting up a sandbag based structure that looks pretty slick. Unfortunately, their website doesn’t leave me with any indication on their status as a real company.
To get a better idea, this page on Sandbag shelter prototypes (mostly for disaster relief) contains video and picture documentaries of various implementations around the world. These folks also have some nicer looking structures than some of the other sites I ran into.