Hiatus

Just so people know, something is wrong with my wordpress.com account. I can’t post anymore until I get this fixed, so if there are any readers, you may have to hang out for a while.

R600 to be huge, in more ways than one

We already know that this little monster hums along at quite a clip,
but how does it look? Monstrous, of course. Those of you hoping to get
off easy with the case size and power supply requirements are going to
have to think again, ATI’s R600 tops out at a record-busting 12.4-inches in length and guzzles an incredible 270W of power.  

Now all I need is two of them in CrossFire

powered by performancing firefox

All DRM Cracked, Open Source Laughs.

So much for next gen eh? 

“As with previous multi-year DRM development efforts, this one disintegrated like wet kleenex on contact with the general public. Now that Vista, HDCP, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are all broken, it seems like the millions of dollars and thousands of work-hours sunk into these systems was mis-spent. The only benefit that these anti-copying systems confer to the companies that developed them is the right to sue competitors — and that benefit could have been had by shellacking a one-atom-thick layer of token DRM onto their systems, just enough to be able to invoke the DMCA. Everything else was just gold-plating, wasted money.”

Bet these guys are pissed off! 

Esoterica

Waaaay too much story about this one to post here. All you need to know is that I made it, and it’s cool.

Deets @DeviantART

[edit] Since making this, I have started wondering whether Esoterica was as good a name as when I thought of it, and whether I even understood the meaning in the first place. If you read this post and don’t offer your thoughts on this, you will burn in hell. I know this.

My Holidays in 20 Seconds

Wow. So much has happened over the last few weeks it’s a blur. I’ll start from the top:
1. School finished. Holidays rule.
2.Parents quit smoking. Frigging awesome, they say every cigarette takes 5 minutes off your life
3. Christmas. Bonanza! The main present was the Wii, which with Wii Play, Wii Sports, NFS Carbon, and Legend of Zelda: TP, never ceases to disapoint. I still need to get a lan adapter so I can go on the internet, which in Australia, is harder than it sounds.
4. I saw Casino Royale today. Easily the best Bond film ever. 4.5/5 stars.
Well, that’s about it folks,
Chalkley3 Out!

Gaming. Re-invented

Well, I was in the Wii mood after pre-ordering and making a website for a school project, so I made this. I also found out just how painful making a hi-res image can be on my computer (The full .psd version is 100+ megs, A3 size @ 300 dpi). Strangely, finding source images was not a problem at all, there are an abundance of hi res images on Google, contrary to my expectations.
Design/Layout, Cutouts etc. by Me
Game images, logos & artwork copyright Nintendo, Ubisoft, Retro Studios, THQ & EA Games. (Please don’t sue

@DeviantART

Profanity Buzzer

I am writing this post on a brand new fresh install of XP and I can say that after RC1, it feels good. Except for the fact that when backing up for the re-partition, somehow Vista gayed it up and half of my documents have been erased into the ether, never to return. So, in order to continue I need to get a few things out of my system: FUUUUUUUUCK THIS FUCKING THING WHAT A PEICE OF SHIT I MEAN JEEESUS WHO THE HELL DESIGNS AN OPERATING SYSTEM THAT CAN’T EVEN COPY FILES PROPERLY AND DOESN’T TELL YOU MICROSOFT IS GAAAAY I LOST ALL MY STUFF FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCKITY FUCK FUCK!!!!!!!!! Remember kids, on the Internet, no-one can hear you scream. They can only read it. Unless you use skype. This isn’t so bad as my music, videos and some of my other stuff was spared, but at least half of my stuff, including all my projects and unreleased icons, 800+ painstakingly collected fonts, and a whole lot of other crap that I accumulated over the years is gooooooone. And, I need to write a five minute monologue right now for tomorrow and all my source files are gone. Sigh…

 

Disappointments on the Port Bow!

Oh well, I haven’t update this thing for a while. Life is full of ups and downs at the moment, it’s altogether very bumpy. Well, Since my last post I’ve done a lot of cool things most memorable of which is going to the royal show. For people who have no clue what I’m talking about it’s this giant, carnival sort of thing that comes to Perth for 8 days a year starting around October. I think the original purpose was for farmers to show of their sheep ect. but now it’s this huge thing that occupied the entire Perth showgrounds (really close to our house) with all manner of things to do. I went with some friends and got to be the bag boy while they went on the Python Loop (huge ass rollercoaster) twice. The rides are pretty extortionate here as the average for a ride in sideshow alley is $8au. After feeling wimpy for 10 minutes I let them pressure me into going on the Mega Drop. Bad Idea. This thing is psycho. It takes you up 45 metres then in about .2 seconds it lets you drop all the way down at 204 km/h with a force of -5.5g. That would make you think that all the blood would rush to your head, but for me the opposite happened. I was so freaked out that my friends said I was as white as a ghost. After that we went on the splashdown (fun), Azzam and Sam blew five bucks on shooting cans with a cork gun (to no avail), buying about 5kg of lollies in showbags (pwnage) and then going home and having Azzam yelling at me because I wanted to buy a train ticket (illegal not to do so). The dairy pavilion they have there is quite awesome. Every stall has free samples, YoGo, icecream, cheese, flavored milk you name it, they have it. FOR FREE!

This week I also decided to undertake the horror of installing Vista RC1. To anyone considering this, DON’T. While it may be loaded up with eye candy, it’s a freakin unstable, slow, crashable, bsod inducing, incompatible bitch. After backing everything up I downloaded the ISO and started installing it, only to find halfway through the dvd was corrupt and I had to download the 2.5 gig image again. Big deal you might say, but on a 5gb download limit and with on 256k Internet, it is a big deal! Well, after a lot of fiddling around and a 5 hour install time (Yep, it looks like it’s frozen but it isn’t) I finally got it working. The logon screen is beautiful. Everything else, a work of art. But have you ever tried getting a Picasso to play DVDs? (bad metaphor, shutup) Not even all the fancy GUI tricks in the world would make me install a beta of this again. First of all:

~My neck hurts

~It’s really slow!

~It’s incompatible with my video drivers (a problem, since the vista ones from ATI don’t work with my outdated hardware. I get a BSOD every time I expand the navigation bar in the open/save box.This is something you need)

~I just realized while typing this that I put my ~ key back on upside down (WTF)

~It takes up 75% of my ram doing nothing (512mb)

~And… it’s just really freaking buggy.

My advice to you: Just don’t go there!

Adios, Chumps

Electric Boogaloo

I swear. If anyone even utters the words “car stereo” I will kill them. You wanna know why? Because today, as a fathers day present for my dad we thought we’d be nice and get him some 6″x9″ speakers for the back parcel shelf as the general consensus was that the stock Volvo (top of the range 14 years ago) speakers were lacking in the oomph department. We went to Strathfeild Car Audio and picked out some Sony Xplōd 3 ways. Since we don’t have an amp and the Sony deck can only support 4 channels we had to unplug the rear door speakers, and the dash tweeters (no biggy as you can’t hear them anyway) and wire the 6×9’s into the system. Simple enough? WRONG! We started out by trying to remove the shelf so we could cut out the hole for the speaker to sit in but that in itself turned into a drama. Turns out, that in a 940 the parcel shelf is actually bolted onto the body of the car behind the seats themselves. Note: if any Volvo engineers are reading please proceed to flagellate yourselves with a leather belt wrapped in barbed wire. So, a relatively simple task has now turned into a mammoth one involving removing the back seat completely (not easy) unscrewing the shelf and cutting holes in it. Well, after getting up to that bit we realize the bump for the centre seatbelt means the grill isn’t going to fit in properly. So, we go back to Strathfeild and the guy fixes us up with a different model with a smaller grill (bummer, cos the first ones were 300w and these ones are 220w. It doesn’t matter really though because our stereo only pumps 52w per channel and it could actually make it sound better. Still, numbers are cool)

Anyway… fast forward to about 3pm. We’ve gotten back and now we have to lay the wiring. We pull the carpet up (not easy either. You have to unsheathe the seatbelt pretensioners [Google it] which is dangerous because they are pretty fookin explosive [they were supposed to be removed last service but someone neglected to do it.]) and we find the whole floor is in at least half a centimeter of water. (how it got there I’ll never know) Unable to find the leak we ignore the puddle and lay the wiring. That was the only part that went smoothly (thanks to moi) meanwhile dad was cutting the holes (the grilles were still too big so we had to shave bits off them) for the speakers. The MDF the shelf was made out of decided it was going to be a crumply bastard today so we had to go to great pains to get the drill through without snapping the whole thing. Fast forward past that it was re-assembly time. Or as I like to call it, push and tighten things until they don’t move anymore and hope to bloody hell it doesn’t come loose and kill everyone. I even got to lie in the boot and fiddle with the wires, normally a privilege reserved for kidnap victims.

Well. It took 8 hours (seriously) and enough curse words to script another South Park movie but we made it and that’s the important thing. bitch

School… Oh Noez!

The winter holidays have finally come to an end. I got so much done, except none of it was stuff I wanted to do. I must admit, I spent the better part of my two weeks up a ladder helping Dad put polycarbonate sheeting up for our new pergola or on the roof pulling up tiles to put flashing underneath to stop leaks. I’m becoming quite the unplanned handyman. I still resent the fact that Dad insists on doing almost everything himself even though he has torn up cartilage in his knee. It kills him to do it and i’m seriously tired of watching him go around like he is Arnold Swartzinegger and than complaining he can’t walk or somthing like that. All things aside it was an interesting experience.

We also lashed out and bought a new lounge suite. This is very good since our old couch actually crunched every time you sat on it. Plus we have a gay pink chair that only has 3 wheels and is more brown than pink anymore. For a design-oriented guy like me it drives you insane. The good bit is that our new sofa is leather (unfortunately the crap el-cheapo type, not the nice natural semi-anilene stuff you see at the shops for 5 grand a chair).

I have New Super Mario Bros. on the brain. Understandable since I bought it at EB the pupil-free day before the holidays. I like it especially because is a faithful but innovative remake of the old classic that I grew up with. It brings back a lot of memorys because the first game I ever played (and the game that started my passion for gaming) was the Super Mario All Stars collection for the SNES. I also, on saturday, went to the Nintendo DS Connection tour at Garden City. That was awesome to go somewhere and actually find a game on WiFi or download play. I like it that Nintendo is finally starting to recognise Perth as an actual place on the map (apparently being the capital of Western Australia doesn’t mean much here…) and doing some stuff with us dudes on the west coast.

3 Days ago my dad bought a ViewSonic 19″ LCD with the money he made from taking photos. I don’t care because it’s on his computer but on the plus side i got his old Mag-View 19″ CRT. It’s geometetry is a bit crap though. I am now officially a deviantART subscriber and Beta tester. Wow! now if only i could figure out how to get a nice journal…

Sidenote: VistaFolders 2.0. The revolution amazing incredible… The… thing… that… is… coming