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This is the wonderful 21006 White House. I love the look and did my best to recreate it, but I'm sure things aren't quite the same. I didn't finish the back yet, so don't turn it around. I need to find some better lighting though. I still think the image is too stark and the contrast is pretty heavy. Oh, well. Enjoy anyway!
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I found a number of old models from 1969 and rendered many last year, including this one. I finally got around to rendering larger a larger version with a better background (originally it has a seam in the back). If you search for this, you'll find that I fudged the trees and used something newer. Personally I like these trees better anyway.

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Okay, I've been a fan of adventure games, and specifically Infocom games, for most of my life.  I have fond memories of playing great games such as "Planet Fall" and "Zork" when I was in high school on my C64. However, even before playing those games, I was playing and writing games on my ZX81 using a very simple adventure engine. Now, I found Inform some years ago and ported mine and one of those old ZX81 games to Z-Code, Infocom's resurrected virtual machine. Normally you have to have an interpreter to play those games, but browsers are much more powerful now. That, and I wanted something I could potential play on my iPod from a web page. To that end, there is a great little javascript Z-Code interpreter called Parchment. Even cooler, they have a simple API that you can feed it a link to your Z-Code and it will play it. Well Hot Dog! I have some Z-Code files already, so I gave it a try! And, you know what, it works great in Safari! If you're bored and looking for a quick adventure fix, give these two very short games a try:

THE TOMB CAVERNS

CITY OF ALZAN

P.S. Playing through Caverns, I found some more mistakes I missed. (sigh) Since Inform 7 is out, I probably will just give it a spin instead of trying to fix anything. Live a little! [ View Article ]

I'd been waiting patiently to upgrade my iPod Touch to iOS4 today. Now, as a long time network engineer, IOS has always been the Cisco's CLI.  So, it was a bit weird installing iOS on an Apple product. But in the end, it was worth the wait and the install. Some common issues I had with the previous version are gone. For example, iTunes playlist folders are now carried over to my iPod. Email looks great and I really enjoy the new wallpaper functions. Now, I haven't played with or found all the new capabilities of iOS 4, but I'm finding my iPod meeting more of my portable computing needs than ever before. Definitely worth the upgrade, especially at the new price: free! [ View Article ]

I rendered this a couple of weeks ago and thought I'd share. This is LEGO(R) Model 357 Fire Station with Vehicles from 1973. I'd like to create a more "action oriented" version in the future, but it is pretty nice to begin with. I personally like the middle engine with the two yellow round. It was the reason I rendered the model to begin with.

357 Fire Station
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Here's an interesting idea, plant a tree and offset the carbon emissions produced by your blog. And, even better, you can make it happen for free! That is the premise behind Mach's grün's Carbon Neutral campaign. Just blog about their initiative and the “Arbor Day Foundation,” their partner in the US, will plant a tree in the Plumas National Forest on your behalf.

Their site has some good information on how and why this initiative works. The idea is that a blog produces about 8 lbs of CO2 and a tree absorbs about 11 lbs. By planting a tree, your blog becomes carbon neutral letting you and your visitors feel you've done a small part in making the world a little greener. I like trees and blogs, so the two together sound pretty good to me. If this sounds like something you'd like to get into yourself, then select the image below to get your own carbon neutral coupon.
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This funny article was tweeted by Major Nelson and it was too rich not to pass on. FINALLY: The Difference between Nerd, Dork, and Geek Explained by a Venn Diagram provides a visually comprehensive way to determine the correct usage of those oft hard to pick social epitaphs you are bound to throw my way. My wife's favorite is "Dork" which is mostly due to its unconfirmed origin -- check it out when you have a chance. My education is done for the day. [ View Article ]

I've playing around with other CMS systems lately to get a feel for what is out there. I recently had the opportunity to hack around in WordPress and ran across a neat little utility in some of their docs. It is an external Online CSS Optimiser/Optimizer that does some CSS compression. Well, I'm always one to try something new so I threw in the CSS from this site and plopped the results into my theme's style sheet. Although I didn't notice any super speed ups, the code did compress 37%. Some of the options messed up my site so I recommend testing out each before using the results. Let me know if you see something odd.

Playing around with the CSS made me run the standard XHTML validator (see link in my footer). Sadly, my site didn't validate. Doing some checking, I found it was something I'd run across before. I'd blindly copied YouTube tags into my articles which won't pass XHTML standards. Fortunately, it was an easy fix and all is well! [ View Article ]

Flickr has become my new favorite place to share my LEGO creations. I tend to use Facebook for family and friends, manly because that is what my family and friends use. But I digress. It is pretty easy now to use available tools, mine being Windows Live Photo Gallary, that allow easy publishing. That means more time building and less time cropping and uploading. In all, a good use of technology.

To that point, I've been hacking some smaller models and uploading them to Flickr as I finish them. I put some effort into a simple modeling system that lets me put more effort into playing around with the model and less on the background. That doesn't mean I've completely given up on unique scenes, it just means I can build up my library of includes. My goal being the ability to combine models into more interesting scenes in the future. Well, at least thats the idea.

Well, back to the models themselves. Hope you enjoy them! If you like, you can follow me on Twitter as I've been using Flickr's blogging feature there as well.

Birds on a Fence


   
695 Racing Car


658 Fire Engine
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Well, I'm finding the 64bit version of Windows 7 works pretty well. I have most of my applications running again, using the 64bit versions if I could find them. The SSD drive is working great and I'm just using an external drive enclosure to get around the space limitations.

I've been rendering some of my models with the 64bit version of POV-ray. It seems to be working great. Not a huge difference, but some. It was interesting to see that memory and graphics each seem to get a speed boost. Overall, things are peppy, but some of that is probably due to completely reloading my machine with a clean copy of Win7. So far, no complaints. [ View Article ]

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July  2010

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