Koda

Figure 1: Amalgamated calculus notebook

Ugh. It’s been a trying few days. Procrastination and a lot of homework make for a very unexciting weekend. I can’t stay dreary or annoyed for very long though - it’s much more fun to just smile through it.

… I’ll be keeping telling myself that until it goes away.

In other news: INKSCAPE 0.43!!!!!! Yha!!!! Wah!!! Buahh!!
I am a very happy chromakode. More to come.

“Silent, but deadly. Just like a ninja.”

Okay, this comic is just so cool. So unbelievably cool, it compels me to write about it’s coolness. Go there, and be treated by it’s graphic-novel goodness. You know you want to. There’s ninjas in it.

The Adventures of Dr McNinja

Blender 2.4 is also cool. The second alpha of 2.4 is now out. Here’s a screenshot of some stuff I’ve been throwing together lately for your viewing pleasure (*clickie for full size and photobucket advertisement*):

…and that with enough effort, you can find just about anything on the internet.

stuffonmycat.com

I am not sure which is more disturbing: the fact that this website is so developed, or the fact that I hadn’t seen it yet. My sanity is - and yours will be soon - in shambles.

Sorry I’ve gone so long without an update… I came down with a rather good cold and a lot of schoolwork over the weekend. On the plus side, I came out of it with a 9 page story for my writing class, which I look forward to getting critiques on tomorrow. Of course, as fate would have it, I also have two tests tomorrow. One is a quiz on the Katakana Japanese syllabary.

In studying the character set, I found two excellent pieces of software for Linux that have made the memorization work a breeze. Here’s a little review of them.

I started by using the excellent langdrill (Ubuntu: apt-get install langdrill) software to get fluid with Hiragana earlier this month. This excellent little program also features swedish and basic french (though I haven’t tried those!) and a variety of methods for drilling yourself on the language. One nice feature is the ability to switch between matching the Japanese character to it’s english character, and vise versa. However, as I got to use langdrill more, I noticed the user interface is a little clunky. Katakana has a lot of little confusing details that are hard to read, and I never could figure out a way to increase the font size in langdrill. Today, I decided to take a look to see if there were any other programs available with a larger display. So, after a bit of digging in synaptic, I discovered…

…just what I was looking for. Kanatest (Ubuntu: apt-get install kanatest) is a wonderful little program that will thoroughly test you on both Hiragana and Katakana (104 characters per syllabary!) with a beautiful large caligraphic display and an excellently simple user interface. It does what it is supposed to and does it well. This little app comes highly reccomended if you ever need to learn the Japanese character sets.

As Kanatest does not include more advanced options or quizzes for Japanese numbers and words, I will definitely be using both it alongside with langdrill in my studies. I hope that this little review has assisted yours!

Colds suck. I’ve spent the last few days in a quasi-sick state. I feel like I’m wasting these final days of fall inside.
I hit 9,000 pageviews on deviantART yesterday, which is a milestone I guess. It’s pretty amazing to consider that around my gallery has been viewed around 9000 times!

Here are some cool links for your clicking enjoyment.

This looks like a pretty slick toy. Yay for buzzword-compliance!
moo.fx - lightweight javascript effects library

In checking out bugmenot, I discovered a really neat host called NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. They seem to be a really neat and economical hosting service with a unique deposit-based business plan. At least, they say all the right things.

What I found most persuasive about their argument for their system was this gem in their FAQ:

[Our business model] has another profound consequence. In the event of a service failure, our revenue craters on the spot until it is fixed. The best word to describe that is “motivation.”

It’s reasurring to see a business designed from the bottom-up to be motivated to serve it’s users.

Out of the blue, I discovered that the URL www.garbageband.com redirects to GarageBand.com! Both are registered to the same “Evolution Artists Inc.” There is irony in this on so many levels.

And finally, meet the Moodgrapher. It is, as it’s name implies, a graph of the LiveJournal blogging community’s mood choice over time. Take a look, and see if you can spot any interesting patterns!

How many people worked to create the objects I use every day? How much of what I experience is man-made?

Here’s a little digital thank you to thousands of years of human creativity.

Saw this on Engadget this morning:

“Siemens has developed what it’s billing as a smart fire detector, which comes equipped with two temperature sensors and two optical ones, connected by a neural net. The optical sensors can determine whether a room is filled with, say, black smoke indicative of a fire, rather than lighter smoke associated with our attempts at haute cuisine. The neural net analyzes the data from the four sensors to gauge the likelihood that the info adds up to a fire. The detector can also be programmed to respond differently in different rooms, ignoring, for example, a steam buildup if it’s placed in a bathroom.”

–Smart fire detector separates smoke from fire

I think this is very interesting because Siemens has introduced a neural net to reduce false positives.
I would be very curious to learn more about how their testing goes. This is a very cool use of neural nets that improves on a very standard safety appliance. I wonder how much it will cost when (if?) it comes out…

What happen? The weekend has simply come and gone.

Today I finally bit the bullet and tried something I’ve been meaning to for a while: I brought my laptop up to the piano and hacked together a recording setup. After at least an hour and a half of fiddling, I finally got rid of the hissing associated with my terrible laptop sound. Now that I’ve figured it all out, I can enjoy Linux-powered recording with ardour.

School has the paradoxical effect of making me feel more creative. I’ll sit down at some schoolwork and out of the blue get a great idea for a picture. It’s almost as if I’m looking for a distraction in art.

One thing that’s really nice about this term my Creative Writing class. I’m enjoying it a ton. It gives me a way of being creative that also gets work done.

Over the weekend we were assigned to whip up “Flash Stories” - in scene with 500 words or less. Here’s my completed submission. Enjoy!

Corrugated
Today, I woke up inside a cardboard box. Now, you might be thinking it’s a strange thing to wake up one day in a cardboard box. I think so too. I’m not even sure how I got here. I just woke up today and here I am. Now, you’ve probably never spent a good deal of time inside a box before. Neither have I. I can tell you these things: it’s brown, cramped, and really dark. Actually, it’s so dark that I can’t tell if it’s brown or not. It smells brown. It’s really quite unspectacular.

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