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djotaku's twitter feed
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- just started playing WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos. http://raptr.com/djotaku
- video did NOT kill the radio star. Radio is still around. MTV, on the other hand, no longer plays music videos. RIP TRL.
- Yay MD for the $170 electric bill credit!
- @harajukuroxy that stinks. My mom used to get a lot of migraines.
- My latest computer animation: http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/dtbp/node/48
- My latest computer animation:
- Nearly done with my latest animation
- @minimoniotaku: the old momma joke was hilarious
- Using akmod-nvidia, built the latest drivers for nvidia and 3D works again! w00t w00t! Blender here I come!
- Dagnabbit. Nvidia doesn't support Xorg7.4pre so no Blender for me for a while
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Oct
30
The Perils of the Edge of Change
Category: Computers, Linux, tv | 
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We’re on the edge of the largest disruption in Tv technology since color Tv became mainstream. In 2009 all analog television transmission will cease. Although the two terms tend to go hand-in-hand that doesn’t mean that all channels will become HD. There just isn’t the bandwidth for that in the cable pipes right now. But it does mean that soon nearly everyone’s Tv will be obsolete. Sure, the government plans to subsidize at least one converter box per household, but by-and-large everyone is going to need a new Tv; and a new Tivo….
Currently I’m trying to finish building my own PVR (Tivo) using the Mythbox program on Linux. I only have two parts left, which I hope to get for Christmas. One is the hard drive and the other is the capture card. The capture card is, undoubtedly, the most important part of the PVR. Without it, there’s no way to get the Tv programs onto the computer to save them for me to watch later. The capture card can also be called the tuner card. The tuner is the part of the Tv, PVR, and VCR that interprets the signal coming down the line. So, do I buy an analog tuner and be obsoleted or buy a digital card?
I started to investigate it and originally I had the WinTV-PVR-500 MCE Dual TV Recorder Tuner Card which is an analog card and has two tuners. That means I can record two programs at once or record and watch with pause at the same time. Then I found WinTV-HVR-1600 1183WB NSTC/ATSC/QAM/FM Tuner and WinTV-HVR-1800 1129 NTSC/ATSC/QAM/FM Tuner. After looking at the raw specs, the cards seemed to be best to worst in the reverse of the order I have listed them there. The latter two have tuners for both analog and digial so it would seem like the perfect deal. Quick definitions: NTSC is over-the-air analog, ATSC is over-the-air digital, and QAM is digital over cable. However, I started to do some research and things aren’t always what they seem.
Although the latter cards claim they do QAM, I found in my research that not all cable companies transmit their digital channels in QAM. This leaves me with an analog tuner over cable and a digital tuner for over-the-air channels. So when cable switches to become fully digital, I will be worse off than just going with the standard definition card. That one has two standard def tuners so with the conversion box I’ll be able to do two channels whereas with the others I’ll just have one tuner for cable and one for over the air.
So, while I’m waiting to see what the cable companies standardize on, I think I’m going to stick with just getting the WinTV-PVR-500 MCE Dual TV Recorder Tuner Card. I don’t want to be crippled now for, perhaps, getting something better later. I’ve seen people who are early adopters get taken advantage of over and over. First off, with the HDMI and other such cables which have changed because they were afraid of people ripping off DVDs. Then there are other things like the Sega Dreamcast where the platform was discontinued. So I’m sticking with the old technology for now.
On a quick side note, I’m excited about digital Tv. At least with other the air Tv, I see the networks taking advantage of the way digital transmission works by having multiple channels within one signal. Now those who can’t afford cable will be able to watch 24/7 weather - like the weather channel.
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Oct
29
Ok, I got a better version uploaded. The video is MUCH better quality and the audio is better as well. However, the conversion to flash caused it to go a little out of sync. It’s still not as bad as it was before. Still, for someone like me who’s trying to share their creative vision, it’s quite annoying. Enjoy the improved version. To see my original version, just follow the Vimeo link and download the original .mov file. You’ll notice that the first part is a bit more in sync.
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Oct
29
I’m not really impressed with the way that the audio was left out of sync when I converted my video to xvid as well as the strange artifacts in the videos. I intend to re-upload a director’s cut in the next week or so. When I do, I’ll announce it here.
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Oct
29
Trick or Treat
Category: Blender, computer animation | Leave a Comment
I’m happy to announce that my third animation, and second micro-short, is now complete. You can watch “Trick or Treat” by going here.
Thanks everyone who’s helped out in various ways!
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Oct
25
“That’s pretty fruity - you’d probably like that”
Context: T telling Lauren about fruity beer. Our boss just heard this part out of context and almost spit out his coke.
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Oct
24
An Over-Reliance on Wikipedia
Category: xkcd | Leave a Comment
Another great comic brought to us by xkcd:
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Oct
24
Sugar should be out by next June
Category: Sugar | Leave a Comment
I decided to get a little more organized for this animated short, so I put my tasks into the Gnome Project Manager. (Similar to MS Project) I also figure this way I know how long it should take so I won’t rush myself and compromise in quality. I want this to be the best animated short I can create with my current skills. I don’t want to be rushing just to get it out there. I’ve already put a few out there and now I want to focus on making one I can really be truly proud of and perhaps enter into the Suzanne Awards.
I’m pretty excited about this short and getting organized has gotten me jazzed up. Now, if only “Trick or Treat” would finish rendering so that I could get that out of the way, I’d be happy. I have about 65 frames left to render. Hopefully I can get it done on time.
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Oct
23
Rigging on Nick’s body is done
Category: Sugar | 3 Comments
I finally finished rigging up Nick’s body. His face is yet to be done, but at least I finished up this milestone. At this point I’m not sure if I’m going to start work on the facial rigs right away. I’m leaning more towards beginning modeling on my next character, Wallace. This is because at the NY Blender Conference (which was awesome!) I spoke with Bassam about how he handles facial animation and he told me he used latices in combination with shape keys. Every other book I’ve read uses shape keys exclusively or armature-driven shape keys. I figured that while I’m thinking about the type I’m going to use that I can hold off on that and make an armature that will allow me to achieve good results as well as not being a real pain in the butt to use. Also, I’ve done a lot of work on this armature and added a lot of constraints, which I’ve never done before. I think I’m going to make this my general purpose rig for human characters for a while, so I’d like to take the time to get it right - or as right as possible. Then, after a few shorts I’ll either refine the armature or create a fresh one.
Well, as a little present to myself for finishing the armature, I made the following render of Nick. It is 2560×1024 so that it works perfectly as a background on my dual monitor setup. I may upload a square ratio render tomorrow.
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Oct
23
Sorry for the Outage
Category: Site | Leave a Comment
We keep losing power around here. I’m not sure who’s to blame. This time even the server lost power. That means that the power outage lasted longer than the UPS could handle. That’s quite a few minutes, so it wasn’t just a blip in the electricity.
Sorry if the outage kept you from getting somewhere on the server you needed to get to.
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Oct
21
Quote of the Day
Category: Quotes | Leave a Comment
“Oh no you’re bleeding. And you’re bleeding on my face.” - Danielle
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Oct
18
Gutsy Gibbon Released Today!
Category: ubuntu | Leave a Comment
No lame jungle puns from me. Just go here it here. Or, if you already run it (as I do on my laptop), then just use the upgrade tool. I’m upgrading now. If anything major breaks, I’ll let you know.
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Oct
17
Incongruitastic
Category: Blender, videos | Leave a Comment
When I first began to study about Salvador Dali, I looked up surrealism in Wikipedia. The article mentioned that surrealism was not limited to the art of painting. It also extended to video work. I always wondered what a surreal movie might be like. Well, I have found one that, for some reason, has really stuck to me. It’s called Incongruitastic. This project originated with the animator wanting to combine all of his ideas into one short film. The result is episode 0, which is extremely surreal.
However, I recommend that if you didn’t like episode 0, at least check out episode one. They’re all only 1.5 minutes long so you won’t waste much of your life if you don’t like it.
I’m addicted and I ca