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the "pre-blog polls", now reside bellow the blog. please jump to the end of the page to have a little vote in them, just for fun. :)

... now, on with the rambling blog!

Wednesday 25 November 2009

squishboom

been making squishboom pre-alphas. gearing up for an alpha release, hoping for a rapid transition there-after from alpha through beta to official.
more to come....




edit


... COCK! if only i had re-ran remastersys... i've just got back into my squishboom pre-alpha2 desktop, having previously intended to be in my squishboom alpha desktop. note to self, always remember when in a unetbootin live-cd/usb environment instead of a real install. and if in that situation, always be sure to save anything you need elsewhere. oh phew, that reminds me *checks* at least i saved my tips desktop background image that's to be used as the default in squishboom. it only survived as i was saving the gimp xcf multi-layered file onmy hd, rather than what i thought was the pendrive, but was actually the casper inside the pendrive. heh. well... thats been about 7 hours of gutting and cleaning and rescripting completely down the pisser, what a pisser. gah. well, that was hard, n i hope, well learned.

Thursday 5 November 2009

http://omploader.org/vMnBnbw/cbdtbggf001.png
http://omploader.org/vMnBncA/cbdtbggf002.png
http://omploader.org/vMnBncQ/cbdtbggf003.png
http://omploader.org/vMnBncw/cbdtbggf004.png
http://omploader.org/vMnBndg/cbdtbggf005.png

some crunchbang desktopbackgrounds.

as seen here: http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/post/44321/#p44321

Linux*

it's the potential

"i need a better screwdriver... times nine."

... said my friend as he dismantles the innards of a perfectly working 900 athlon 768mb greybox.
he's prepping the old case to hold his new box's components while hes waiting for his new psu to arrive.

i think that old machine is just the perfect age for linux. linux would work really well on such a spec machine. really really well. alotta bang for those numbers.

"it's made out of stuff, it'll be alright" was another comment... i dont quite know the context, i wasnt listening, but it sounded cool, so it made it into this blog.

anyways, this little project he has going on here, and others we were talking about earlier has got me thinking geeky again... and dont worry, some of it isnt linux specific, so fans of other operating systems can play along too....

(hehe, yeah, i know my readership of this blog is currently about 0. and that's including me (i dont even read this blog). i know someday someone will read it, and just maybe, someday someone will get a kick outta my rambling....)

stick a computer in a freezer!

there, slapped you in the face with the doozey there, right when u thought i was gonna ramble on pointlessly again... ;D an idea inspired upon seeing hte operational temperature range of some components.

the obvious thing that stands out at first of course is... the overclocking potential! If you didnt think that immediately upon reading the words "stick a computer in a freezer" then maybe this isnt the blog for you. :D or maybe it is! and you need to stick around all the more. :D

there are small freezers available pretty cheap, and big enough to house your box in. however... i do wonder about how well each tech would stand up, the heat source, inside the tiny box trying to keep cool. when i first thought of the idea i was thinking a guy at his desk in a meat locker.... this idea very quickly moved on to putting the human interface outside. i was still thinking large room freezers while my friend was the first i think to put it into the realms of "doable". especially when i urged him to look for freezers on a shopping search.

i was actually gonna ramble on and make this another full length ramble... but heck... sticking a computer in a freezer does it for me. got mah geek on.

Monday 2 November 2009

arty musings from outside the matrix

http://n3wt0n.com/blog/?p=326

having been a long time fan of musagi, it is a joy to get to experience another creation from the same genius, "sfxr". it's a gorgeous little app for making sound effects. oh my... my music is gonna take another change of direction.... crap... i was really hoping to get the latest album i had been working on polished off and released... but i can see this will interfere with that plan. :)

now if only i could get musagi and gungirlsequencer (or another similar basic audio sequencer in e-jay style) on the go too... musically, i'd be provisioned with everything i need then.

lmms and ardour, they're nice to have, but not quite my preference for how i like to compose my musical creations. for the most part.


for my animation stuff, i still feel a little short handed. i miss the likes of animation shop. gimp's gap, it just dont cut the mustard when ya need workflow. still early developement for it.

i just recently started playing around with synfig studio, a simple vector graphics animation package (which i originally thought was more bitmap oriented), and it's showing some promise.

i also miss adobe after effects a bit. but this is my own doing. i chose this path, i chose to renounce slavery and proprietary and all that crap. idk if there anything close to similar in the open source community yet.

blender and softimage|XSI.
mmm. i do miss softimage from time to time. i recieved some top notch intensive training on it, and that helped me be familiar with it, and get some level of workflow outta it. my learnings with blender have been far more sparse, far less intensive, and less focussed with a hundred other things on my plate, and as a result, there are times in blender when i still, even years removed, find myself thinking in softimage terms.

still, i'd never get to poke under the hood of softimage, so i know i'm on the right path with blender.

this is a point i think many folks must look at me and think me a fool for opting to go for a kinda richardstallmanesque renunciation of proprietary software. i'm in it for the longer view, i see not only which way the wind is blowing, so to speak, but i see just how much faster and further i'll go if i steer my ship into those winds. the sooner i'm with them, the better. of course, (leaving the sailing analogy) i'll need to learn alot more.
.....this is not a bad thing.
this is not a "con", it is very much a "pro".
i do not want to be dumbed down by plastic wrapped convenience, i want to know how things work.

i dont want to be hostage to dependance, i want to be empowered with competence.
this is the difference.

so i choose non-proprietary as much as possible.... tho convenience does have me reaching for proprietary flash still, rather than the fsf initiative versions of GPL released flash. ideally though, if i was imbuing myself with the spirit of socrates and empiricus or other philosophers who made a point of sticking ot yer guns, then i'd stick to learning how to program, how to hack my own code to get it to work.... again... convenience traps the lazy and impatient.

ok, i'm straying wildly again...

but thats ok i suppose. its my blog, and i can do what i like. no fascist mod wanting to keep up appearances and excersize their powers of authority over me here. :D

so yeah... it's all on topic really, i just think broadly. :D

lemme pull it back round for you to see i'm correct in asserting i'm still on topic.

so as an artist, with fanciful delusions of grandure, of being up there with the greats, i too, like them, prefer to retain more control over my tools, and therefor over my artwork.

i want to make my own paints, fetch my own ingredients for the paints, etc. metaphorically speaking.

my paint comes in the form of complex arrangements of ones and zeros.

i could just leave it to the whim of the authorities, or i could (like the sentiment in the video in my last blog depicted), renounce the esstablishment, and do something actually progressive for us all. :)

heh, talk about limiting beliefs.... i've just noticed i've been holding myself back because of what i think other people think, because i think myself incapable of explaining or them incapable of understanding, the alternative sence of worth outside the stringent linear quantitative monetary terms.

there's the old idea (i once read in a book on taoism) that artists should not make money from art, that profit should be kept seperate from art, that art is above profiteering, that an artist would never lower themselves to be as low as the businessman, who is only a peg above the criminal.

... as someone identifyingy themselves with being an artist, you can see why i'd take to that idea. :D especially living in the society we do where businessmen have been allowed to seize too much power and status, and pressure the rest of us to conform to their ways.... it seems quite the paradise utopian society where businessmen are regarded as just barely better than criminals and artists just barely worse than saints. :)

even tho i think it's fading these days, there's still some remaining residual ridicule and demonising of open-soure freedom-software folks. probably exponentially increasing now, folks are starting to see free software in a rather divine light. it is rather saintly and angelic. it's very nice. "sharing", "community"... these are two big words in the ... community. whether you're calling it the open-source community or the more die-hard free(dom) software community, we're effectively all the same community. the ven diagram would be quite clear on this i'm sure. there's ecconomies of gifting, of giving, without expectation of anything in return. we've left the paradigm so heavily enforced upon us by dominator industrialists. we're more tesla, than westinghouse. we're achieving what the technocrats of lefist political ideologies dreamed of. ok, sure, so far we're pretty much only achieving this in digital realms. but i think its not long now before the dam bursts completely, and the corporatist oligarch can no longer plug the leak of all the technologies which will set us free. this will be none other than the surfacing of all those sci-fi technologies.... the total liberation of man from uneceassry toil. we'll have zero-point vacuum energy devices, capable of providing all our energy needs, we'll have 3d printers and hologram technology synthesizing to produce star-trek like replicators and other fabrication devices, geet engines, water fuel, solar paint, and piles and piles of other stuff... i could go on and on, and i'd still never scratch the surface of all the liberationary technologies that ALREADY EXIST and the many more which have yet to be imagined.

think i'm off topic again?

nope.

this is the point.

this is exactly why i, as an artist went to open source software over proprietary.

this is exactly the thing which will enable artists of the world continue to create their art, and do so without profit incentive-ising them, distracting them. ( to show that i still communicate my thoughts in ted-talks videos: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html ;D )

"why do you have to pay to live on the world you are born on?" asked the visitor to our world.

zero obliged outgoings.

and why not?

only if you are addicted to having a billion crypto-slaves should you baulk at the idea, and even then... you aught to reccognise the precarious situation you're in as master of a billion slaves who are at risk of waking up to realise they are but slaves for you... and they might not like it.

so yeah... i take my choice of software pretty seriously huh. :D

i got told in one of those silly little internet quizes recently that i was from arcutus, and as such, i'm a 5th dimensional being with a strong inclination to do things forthe benefit of all. well, idk if i'm from arturus, but the rest seemed to fit. ;)

time to beam up to my ship http://omploader.org/vMm9wcQ/booingwhirie1.wav
(first sound i just made in sfxr)

just a quick little stichato ramble on various linuxy things.

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_explanation.html

i really took to the sentiment expressed in the middle of this video, regarding the renounciation of authorities as the source of truth as being the principle of progressing our knowledge.

i was 5 when i decided the church was much hulabaloo about a storybook. i was about 6 or 7 when i hit upon the idea that maybe the teachers werent smarter than me. i was just barely a teen, barely having used win95, when i decided microsoft were not the pinnacle of human potential reflected technologically in our software. maybe i was always destined to choose opensource, freedom, linux, etc.

so anyways. i was playing around with my slax distros again... getting a bit of a headache from the wifi problems i'm havign with the slax based and davix based pair of distros i'm re-working. it's looking like it might be a bit more of a pain in the arse than i first thought to get it to have a one-size-fits-all ootb wifi solution. most of my headache though was when internet here went down for a couple hours. that was not amusing... me fiddling around trying to get something to work when it had no chance, and all my tests were giving me back false fail results. well, thats another couple hours i'll have to relive. so i need a break from that for a bit. might as well ramble a bit then eh? :D

so once my internet came back on, one o the first things i did brought me to my local forum where i posted a reply in a thread about easy ways to startlinux, which i'll share C&P style here.

=====
other similar installation methods from other linux distributions (incase xandros linux doesnt suit):

http://wubi-installer.org/ Ubuntu! wubi=Windows UBuntu Installer. as in the above example, no partitioning is required, very simple installation wizard.

http://goodbye-microsoft.com/ Debian GNU/Linux! again, no partitioning required. but will require you to know your hardware very intimately, and know a bit more about linux. not advised for the average beginner. (tho do try it to see anyways. you can always leave the installer uncompleted on your machine, and still use windows with no probs while you go learn how to get through the l33t hurdles.)

http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Operating-Systems/Linux-Distributions/Sauver-18423.shtml Sauver Linux. yet another linux distribution offering this kind of installation. except sauver doesnt seem to offer any other kind of installation. (i never got the graphics working in it, so idk what its like).

using the 4 above methods, you might later come across little niggles and nuisances about the way the filesystem isnt accessible in a more familiar standardised way... idk... most folks probably wont find an issue with this. but if you're a proper nerd, you'll want to go do a proper install for your multi-boot.

then there are other methods too...

virtualbox.
(tho we'll all have to wear our tin-foil hats to use it if sun microsystems get taken over by oracle.)
very user friendly virtualisation method, with excellent performance. just download any (i686 compatible) operating system's installation or "live" cd/dvd .ISO file (like this tiny one for example), and follow the on-screen wizard dialog-windows upon making a new virtual machine. very easy to surf lots of different operating systems this way, without risking the operating system you are currently using to some pebcak accidental format or anything. lets you shop around for the best operating system, so you're not stuck being a wintard.
virtualbox is not only useful for surfing linuxes, you could also use it for client MS Windows virtual machines inside a Linux host OS, since linux offers much better performance, this way, you only need to use your MSWindows virtual machine when u need to use some piece of windows software you've not found an alternative for, or couldnt get to install in wine.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/ not quite so much just a distribution of linux, but rather just a handy site sharing lots of helpful walk-throughs to installing various linux distributions to usb drives.

though, once you first set eyes upon unetbootin, you'll likely think pendrive linux a bit redundant. but that would be premature, because unetbootin doesnt really "install" anything. run from windows or linux, it just very conveniently puts a installation/live cd onto your usb, so that the usb drive can boot pretending it's the cd. ... so if you do choose to use unetbootin (and i wholeheartedly give it my recommendation), do keep in mind that it's more like running from a cd (only likely much much faster than your cd drive), than an actual installation. but if you can install from the cd, you can install from the unetbootin'ed version on your usb too. this is another great way of browsing through different operatingsystems/distributions like virtualbox is, except this way, you will be able to get a better feel for the native speeds, as it's not virtualised, and you dont need to be running a host system at the same time. further, unetbootin makes itself even handier, by providing a very generous and broad selection of distributions available in a drop-down menu... and it's so convenient, it goes and fetches the .ISO files from the net for you, and does the whole process of making the usb a live bootable cd environment. very plush, and so simple.


[quote]installing software ain't as easy and straightforward as windows.[/quote]
that can be a falsehood. these days there are many distributions offering solutions which make it easier to install software than it is in windows. it's all about the respository and package management in linux. open up your package manager gui in any major (and even most minor) linux distributions these days, and you'll be taken to a simple interface from which you can search/browse for software by name or purpose, and clicky clicky, and it's installed. no going to s shop to buy proprietary software, no spending money, no travel. just sat from where you are, depending on your distribution's repository, you'll likely have at least a few thousand (probably tens of thousands) of pieces of software you can install, and likely need no further explanation than "that there, thats your package manager, click/double-click on it."
i am slightly exadurating the simplicity to stop scaring people away. but suffice to say, if a repository doesnt have what you are after, you are still afforded the opportunity of doing it the manual way, the noob-feared "source installation"... and likely a few ways in between too. and just when u think you need to be a rocket scientist, chances are, you only need to be an idiot (as in "complete idiots guide to...") who knows how to use a search engine. :)


phew! what a pile of links i put in that. :D filled a whole row of tabs. hope they're o' use t' ye.


PS.

just now after posting this reply, looked at that prestopc thing ... oh. thats not like what i thought it was. :D :O
=====

and besides that, i dont really have much else to add to this post, except to say:


I LOVE LINUX!

:D

(doesnt get any less true with time.. if anything, more true)

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