It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I have multiple hobbies. I tend to want to try new things, which often means I don’t stay focused. In the case below, I divided my time between two of my interests.
Fun with Fonts
I decided to play around a bit and try a different font for my site. My original goal was to use something with better kerning and ligatures, but most browsers don’t seem ready for that yet. I settled on using Trebuchet MS as my new site font. It has a bit more character than Verdana and better reflects the style I was looking for. It is a generally web safe font supported by most platforms.
Halloween LEGO Fun
Ran across these great seasonal models perusing Brickset. They are simple yet effective, really showing how LEGO models can shine with such few bricks. The Jack’o’lantern is just perfect and I love the use of the cheese slopes as teeth. I liked the yellow eyes of the bat. I didn’t bother modeling the ghost. It is a good model, but not enough to model.
Sea Swallow
I was having fun again with LDD and POV-Ray and thought this would make an interesting render after my first attempt. I also uploaded a slightly different version to LEGO’s gallery with different eyes stalks.
Waterfall v2 (Updated)
Okay, I went a bit overboard creating an updated version of my Waterfall with more accurate bricks and logo. I even randomly rotated the bricks to break up the monotony of the the logos. The first version with the LEGO logo was a bit too uniform.
Topography and Hyphenation
I’m a sucker for topography, something I really enjoyed in college when using LaTeX to get really cool looking printouts. A lot of that fun was lost with I started using applications like Word that do a pretty good job of kerning and hyphenating text without you having to do anything. Using (X)HTML I often just let the browser do what it does, even if it leaves a lot to be desired. This changed today when reading A List Apart’s wonderful article The Look That Says Book.
Waterfall
This is the second version of my simple waterfall experiment. I limited myself to a 4x4 plate and the bricks and colors available in LDD. I added a bit more foliage and color variation to the cliff.
Adventures in Lighting
Okay, I admit that lighting isn’t my strong suit. I’m good with geometry and scripting. But I struggle making the images look as good as they should. These photos are my attempts to try to get better colors and realistic lighting from POV-Ray.
Cube Dudes and Seagull
I’ve been having a lot of fun lately creating LEGO POV-Ray models and I thought I’d share! Brink Link was nice enough to post instructions for the SDCC 2010 Cube Dudes which I had to model! I’ve finished R2-D2 and C-3PO and they look great!
Having a Few Words with Wordle
I ran across Wordle while pursuing other Flickr photos. I was intrigued and decided to give it a whirl. I’d been avoiding installing Java on my machine due to my distaste for the poorly coded apps that tend to use it, but my desire to give Wordle a try overcame my desire to remain Java free. I ran it against my site with interesting results.
Watermelon
Here is my take on LEGO Stores Watermelon Monthly Mini Model Build for July. This model screams Summer and one just didn’t seem enough. Playing around with better lighting, fog to soften light and JPEG artifacts, and a bit of focal blur thrown in for good measure.
New and Old Models
I uploaded a couple of LEGO renders today, a new one and an old one.
Going Chrome, But not by Choice
I’ve been having a bit of a problem lately getting Safari to keep working! Seems it keeps crashing every few minutes with a library issue that I can’t seem to fix.
21006 White House
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.
344 Bungalow
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.
Fun with Z-Code (aka Inform)
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.
Fun with iOS 4
I’ve been waiting patiently to upgrade my iPod Touch to iOS4 today. Now, as a long time network engineer, IOS has always been 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
357 Fire Station
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 rounds. It was the reason I rendered the model to begin with.
Making My Blog CO2 Neutral, and You Can Too
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.
Are You a Nerd or a Geek?
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.
CSS Fun and Standards
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.
Flickr LEGO Fun
Flickr has become my new favorite place to share my LEGO creations. I tend to use Facebook for family and friends, mainly 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.
All Is Well In 64bit Land
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.
64bit and SSD Fun!
I was honored with a 128GB SSD drive today and I just had to give it a try. Since I can only have one drive in my laptop, I decided I’d swap out the old one and, while I was at it, spin up a 64bit version of Windows 7 on it as well. I’m curious to see how things will work.
Fly Me To The Moon Soundtrack
I uploaded a slightly longer version of the “Fly Me To the Moon” song to ACIDplanet.com. It isn’t much of a soundtrack since there is only one song. I created this version first but it was too long for the animation. The shorter version in the video was an edited remix of this one.