For those of you that are wanting to take five and watch some calming scenery from across Japan’s various areas without having some anime reference flashing in front of your face at 54 beats per minute, then check out Japan Scene’s channel on Youtube (link). You’ll definitely appreciate the picturesque quality of the images and delivery of the subject matters through video.
It’s been two years and some odd months since I put together my gaming rig: the SSM1 (Sonokamome System Model 1) and I’ve decided that it would be fun to think about the specs for the next rig, SSM2. Now, given that the economy is really bad in most parts of the world, and that due to calamities in the weather that have affected the production of some hardware components in key manufacturing plants in the world, I can’t really enact in being active with purchasing hardware. Plus, I’ve already spent enough on the current rig for hardware and software (the former lately being hardware).
In the last two years since putting together SSM1, I’ve upgraded the video graphics card: first started the build off with a Nvidia GTX 260, followed by a year later with an upgrade to a GTX 460, and then a year later with the current GTX 570. Each card as relatively set me back a bit during the time that they were purchased, I’ve learned that for upgrading something important like a video graphics card, it’s best to go back to budgeting and planning ahead…sort of.
Continue reading
Assuming you have finally figured out what you want out of your custom computer and you want to figure out a system to keep track of the cost as you go around shopping, I’d like to move on to the topic of budgeting.
Usually this is where most people window shop, make a list, and then sum up the grand total (subtotal + applicable taxes + shipping and handling + misc costs for purchase). But this usually ends up being a waste of time, or rather, the time that could have been allocated to carefully check the parts and price is now shifted to the time now used to “restart” the window shopping, listing, and re summing the grand total again. In other words: if you simply have a list of parts that you would like to buy without the researching the prices and taking a second look at comparable products of similar or same performance, purchase costs, cost of purchase from particular retailer, then costs could go quickly up past the initial estimated budget cost as you purchase your parts as you go along.
Continue reading
So after checking all the games that I bought during the Valve’s Steam Winter Sale along with the games that I have accumulated from Humble Indie Bundle sales, I’ve realized that I’ve got more than enough gaming content to last me for two to three and half years worth of accumulated time. And that’s a conservative estimate to the amount of time it would take to get through every single one of these title’s entire content. So…just for kicks here’s the list of the games I’ll have to get through (somehow) within this year. The order is in the matter of whatever I think is supposed to be finished first.
Continue reading
It’s been awhile since I’ve given updates to what I’m up to So I figured that I should go ahead and give note of what I’ve been up to in these last few weeks.
F.E.A.R 2 Failthrough: Failure Returns
As of late I’ve decided to start making lists of software which should show up later on in a wiki that I’ll put in on txug.org. Now…I do this with much passiveness because I don’t think that really anyone will appreciate it but I’ll do it anyway just for kicks…I mean you never know when it will come in handy to know how to use MediaWiki so it does not hurt to learning the MediaWiki syntax (although having a really good mastery in CSS, PHP, and Jquery would be lovely at this point for me too).
I’ll try to make something that will include proper “how-to” guides in using XMPP and using various XMPP supporting clients and give a mention of some key features that should be universally found in most XMPP supporting clients. That and maybe a few videos that will explain how to use it.
But it’s not just XMPP stuff that will be on the wiki but also a list, again, of software that is recommended and tested by myself or others. And why make such a list when there are already tons of sites that give software recommendations? Well I figure a Wiki format of presentation is more effective (given the notoriety of MediaWiki and it’s various uses in many important projects such as Wikipedia). And because having another “definitive” software list won’t hurt- in a wiki format, fixing dead links or removing entries is much easier than in a blog post or in some page within fancy over-the-top CMS framework.
And that’s about it really. So I leave you now with a piece by Ryuichi Sakamoto (you probably saw that by now didn’t you?)
Watch video
There are many people out there that probably can’t afford a copy of Photoshop or, even less so, Lightroom. For those of you that are in need of an image manipulator and would like to have some of the basic functionalities for editing and manipulating any raster graphic that you may be making or editing, I recommend GIMP. GNU Image Manipulation Program (or GIMP) is a free and open source software that allows for the user to do all that you would usually do in Photoshop. Although GIMP does not have all the sophisticated features of Photoshop, but it does have a large user base and is quite popular among people that use it to work with image manipulation among those that use UNIX or Linux based operating systems. There is a need to be a bit creative with the tools given in order to get some of the effects that otherwise would be readily available as far as color manipulation. But this, again, does not make GIMP useless or sub-par; far from it.
GIMP is perfect for the average user that only calls upon using image editors like GIMP or Photoshop when editing photos of particular occasions such as weddings or holiday gatherings at home. This is also perfect software for the starting amateur photographer that is wanting to learn on how color edit their photos from their digital camera -such as what I did for the pictures for Glimpse Phlog a few years ago (click here).
you can also GIMP to do some raw drawings using a tablet and pen (like a tablet from Wacom for example) and make graphics that you can later on manipulate using layers and folders to organize the image composition you are making in GIMP and save it in various file formats such as JPEG, PNG, GIF, etc. You can also import images of various types to then edit and manipulate from within GIMP as well.
Again, highly recommended software for those of you that are starting out and need of a raster graphics editor that’s free, easy, and good. It works with Windows, Linux, UNIX, and Mac OS X
So go ahead and give GIMP a try (click here)
There are two schools of thought about the internet that concern themselves on the internet being a conceptual place. One particular belief is that the internet can be considered a conceptual “place” and another school that favors the thinking of the internet as simply for what it’s made up of: just a series of interconnected computers and clusters of computers in various real-world geographical locations. It was an ongoing small debate among professionals that work with computer networks and fiction writers, marketers, and anything that is promoting anything related to the internet, for the idea that the internet, is a “cyberspace”, or a ” great information superhighway”, or just simply “The Internet” as a , being a pseudo space of ever expanding and morphing real-estate for the mind.
Continue reading
There is one thing that in the past years I was never having time for: watching movies. Sure, the occasional direct-to-video media such as anime and whatnot that would be available here in the U.S. where it would be sold in major chain video stores would be the only primary access but try something like the latest Japanese live action release and you have something that is hard to find at the time. Unless of course you went to the local International film festival which, still, did not really help much either when you were still stuck in school or at work.
So here’s a list of some movies that I’ve got listed to check out.
And that’s just a few that I had in mind. There are others but the trailers are a bit hard to find (^_^);.
The great thing about live action movies is that, unlike anime, they really are catered to the audience intended. Particularly because, given that the subjects are live and part of the audience of which it’s directed to primarily. So you have this “mirroring” effect happen. In other words: the live action film is sometimes a reflection of what is somewhat immediately going on with the particular audience in that point in time. Their fears, their hopes, their wishes are all there on the screen. In anime, it’s not so much about that as it is about simply escapism for the sake of itself – which is not a bad thing at all and has demonstrated to being a particular common denominating thing as far as having people come together and appreciate aesthetics, art, function, technology, and all the fun things that geek-culture has to offer. And that’s what it’s all about right?
But for live action. I think it’s a bit of a matter of just sitting and watching to observe what is being said as usually the matter is a bit serious or sometimes there’s something that is wanting to be said.
“I forgot the color of your eyes, the things we said…”
“You’ll forget more tomorrow..but you’ll still have what I’ve been trying to give you this whole time.”
Under the glittering diamonds that moved under the every changing dome of purple, scarlet, and orange with the smells of tangerines, with their juices spraying very lightly in the air.
And heat of the air that made her presence powerful…even if…
Chromium. It’s no longer the name of the 24th element in the periodic table of elements, but also the name of one of the progressively developed web browser framework around. It’s what’s helped the development of the Google Chrome browser, the Linux-based Google Chrome OS and Chromium OS. And some of the development gone into Chromium has also spilled into the development of the Android OS which Google also is a part of working in for smartphones. Now the thing to remember is that this does not have any tracking software of any kind such as Google Chrome (which records the date and time specific when you have installed a copy of Google Chrome, Searches, time stamps sessions using Google Chrome, unique browser install identification numbers, and crash/bug reports automatically).
All of these things are shut off and can only be turned on if you register for synchronization in Google Chromium, so for those of you that are concerned over privacy that’s the reason I would encourage you to check out Google Chromium.
I would highly recommend, if you are the extreme adventurous type that is not afraid, to try out the bleeding edge of the technology going into testing for future Google Chromium (Chrome) releases.
It takes a bit of searching in the directories but fortunately I’ve provided a few links here for you to check out. One is for stable releases and the other is a separate set of releases that involve the latest advancements done to the Webkit rendering engine (along with changes to The V8 Javascript parsing engine).
You can either install them, if you have Windows, from .zip files and use the small install file to have the program formally “installed” onto Windows. Otherwise you’ll be prompted by Chromium if you want to have it be the default browser every time you start it up.
Latest Chromium Builds for Windows
Latest Chromium realeases with Web-Kit Engine changes
If you want to build from the source code, something I’ve yet wanting to try myself (^_^);, then I would recommend you to read the instructions for Windows, Mac, and Linux users.
A big thanks to Alexis for pointing me out to Google Chromium two years ago (・ω・ )