Koda

You might have noticed things have been pretty quiet here for the last week or so. Perhaps you’ve been chomping at the bit, asking yourself: when will my beloved Koda ever return? Okay, not really, but let’s say you did.

Yes, I haven’t been keeping up regular writings here, but not without reason: I’ve been busy setting up a new rig! That’s right, I finally bit the bullet and got some solid hosting at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. And I love it.

So what does this mean for Koda? Tons. Tons of new room for exploration, that is. Blogsome has provided a wonderful introduction to blogging for me, though I feel it’s finally time to grow to a real site that I have the freedom to play around in. My hope is for it to become a blog, an art gallery, a home for projects, and much much more.

Over the past week, I’ve been busy porting things from here over to a real Wordpress setup, and revamping the theme to something representative of this transition. In short: it looks fresh, runs better than ever, and is where you’ll find me from now on. Oh, and it’s all sans-serify now.

It’s time to get the word out - and look forward to some exciting new things to come. So come on in, the water’s great!

Hope to see you there,
–Chromakode

日本語を勉強します。OMG! 名前は片仮名で書きました！

(I am studying Japanese. OMG! The name was written in Katakana!)

Yeah, I know it’s been a lot of fluff posts lately… I’m sorry, but I haven’t found the time to do (or write about) anything particularly interesting on the technical side. However, there are (and always will be) lots of interesting ramblings to share… so here’s some more.

Today I got to see the first video in my Japanese Culture class. It’s a neat little course, and so every other Friday I will be able to enjoy a bit more of this fascinating culture. The movie we watched today was pretty awesome… a samurai story exploring gender and social power and the ethics around them (in historic Japan). So anyway, it’s a real drawn out story about a Samurai’s son who is ordered to marry the lord’s mistress (who bore the lord a child), and they fall in love only to find that due to circumstances the lord wishes that he have her back. So of course, the father and son can’t let that happen. But long story short, we sit through 1:30 of pretty cerebral (and completely fight-free) tension, only to run out of time right before the real samurai style ass-kicking begins. You can look at the IMDB page… and yes, that movie poster seems to be showing the fight scene that will surely be bugging me all week.

This Firefox video seems fast on its way to becoming viral (omg! I used a buzz word!). But honestly, childish and poorly produced as it may be, I laughed. Hysterically. It’s kind of sad to see the anti-quicktime anti-firefox response these first contenders seem to have attracted… though it was also quite disappointing to see that the web designers had opted to use an open source unfriendly and hard to use quicktime embed instead of better distribution methods. But regardless, it’s quite silly to see some of the early adopters reacting in such a way that defaces the pages of some bravely uninvolved contest entrants. Surely there is a more mature way to express codec-induced anger than this.

Finally, if you like optical illusions, you’re in luck, because out of complete whim and amusement, here’s a feed for a more-than-daily updated blog dedicated solely to this purpose. There’s a lot of nice unique stuff there, and looking through them will certainly eat up at least 15 minutes of your time.

Yum. Mighty Optical Illusions

Good night.

Google: Morbidly Lazy

Go to any computer running Firefox, click on the url bar, and type in “morbidly lazy”…

I have nothing else to say about this.

… literally. Spring break has started with a bang… or rather a cough.

Expect some interesting things over the days to come.

However, right now, I must sleep.

Oh, and here’s a feed for a friday. Download Squad

Wait, what? It figures that the one day I’ve got the RSS reader closed is the day something I’ve written hits digg. Over the past few days, I’ve been talking to the friendly Jason of Tectonic about republishing my Compiz Howto there. Well, as of this morning, he let me know it was up. What I didn’t recall him mentioning, though, was that he’d dugg the story. Wow. Front page! I’m really quite amused and entertained. I suppose now I can truly say I’ve tasted the fury of the social web.

…and now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be in the corner over there, silently giggling to myself.

Oh boy. I have fallen in absolute head-over-heels love with Copper, a monthly comic by Kazu Kibuishi. It’s gorgeous, artful, interesting, funny, wise, colorful, and ad-free. And it’s two unlikely protagonists will absolutely win you over.

With it’s monthly schedule, Kibuishi clearly takes the time to do things right. Copper has been in the making for 4 years, so there’s a good amount (with a huge amount of effort and art) to read. Be warned though, after reading these fantastic comics, you’ll be left wishing that the next one would come sooner!

Also worth reading is the digital part of Kibuishi’s description of his method. There are many excellent digital coloring techniques and sensibilities that may be gleaned from his tutorial. What I found most interesting was his choice to scan in high resolution and threshold the line art down to aliased black and white values. As primarily a vector artist, I originally bristled at this approach, but the way he utilizes it for convenient selection is very reasonable. And after all, if it’s done in high-res, it can always be sized down to an antialiased finished project afterwards. A fascinating read!

I’m sorry for the apparent disquieting lack of a feed yesterday. It is always a good idea to continue things once one starts them, but I have excuses. The story goes like this: I was really really tired yesterday, fell asleep at 7:00, and slept for 13 hours. Dreamed about lasers. True story.

However, there is such a thing as a make up. So, without further ado, here’s:

The Fridge
The Fridge is the home of everything fresh and new in Ubuntu-land. Like any good community site, it has it’s share of usefulness, quirkiness, and newsy-ness. Whether you’re keeping current, looking to contribute, or simply pretending that you know what you’re talking about, The Fridge is a nice (cool) place to be.

Feed’d. The Fridge

Everybody loves web feeds. Call it web syndication, web 2.0, free stuff, whatever works. A well-fed feed reader is food for your mind.

Okay, so I had to say it.

However, there’s so much out there, it’s incredibly easy and at the same time equally daunting to find good feeds. I probably haven’t found them.

… but I do have some favorites. From now on, I’ll try to feature a new one each Friday.

And tonight’s lucky winner is… Copy-log. New web toys are fun, and copy-log is filled with them. Usually at the curl of the proverbial “Web 2.0″ wave, copy-log seemingly always has a handful of new ones to share. Curiously, little information about it’s author or history is published on the site. Yet, copy-log does it’s job and it does it well: it finds and points to cool emerging ajaxy websites so that you don’t have to… and the job it does is commendable.

Feed me! Copy-log