Flash games, quick fun.

I recently browsed over to http://bloggrunn.blogspot.com/ and found these cool flash games.

Minigolf
BlackJack
PinBall

We're back!

Well, it was an amazingly awesome vacation, despite how happy I am now to be back home where we have the essentials of daily life; TiVo, internet, and the beloved dog-butts.

I won't entertain you with the dirty details just yet, because we just got back less than 20 minutes ago, but I however must say it was an incredibly beautiful week spent in a house which was surprisingly immaculate even with our high expectations from the pictures, details on the web site, and the name of the house; "Tranquility." The view was great, the beds were soft, the beach was less than 20 feet away, and across the highway we were located on was a grocery store (which is surprising since
Depoe Bay is home of the smallest harbor.)

The dogs were happy to see us, though Lucy did not pee on the floor as we had expected which is a plus. Another unexpected turn of events took place as I turned on my computer to find my wireless network card could not connect to the router... Now that this has been taken care of, I have many pictures to move over to my computer, and it's slide show time....

Thats all for now...

Preparation for digital photo printing.

I recently ran across this article which prooved somewhat useful;

Preparing digital images for photographic printing

Online Printing

Because I have recently been checking out places where I can get prints made of either my digital or film images, I decided to look around more to see if there is anything better than what I have seen so far. I haven't taken a look at anything in full detail, but before I do I want to have a list of places to start with.

Please, let me know if you know of or find anything I don't have listed here, I may edit the post to add your suggestion. If you haven't already, you should check out deviantART and SnapFish.

Photothru
Shutterfly
PhotoWorks
Ofoto
Mpix
Club Photo
winkflash


And this online photo processing article looks possibly helpful, as does this cnet discussion...

Hackers set up fake wireless access-points.

From news.bbc.co.uk:

"People using wireless high-speed net (wi-fi) are being warned about fake hotspots, or access points.

The latest threat, nicknamed evil twins, pose as real hotspots but are actually unauthorised base stations, say Cranfield University experts.

Once logged onto an Evil Twin, sensitive data can be intercepted.

Wi-fi is becoming popular as more devices come with wireless capability. London leads the global wi-fi hotspots league, with more than 1,000.

The number of hotspots is expected to reach 200,000 by 2008, according to analysts.

"Users need to be wary of using their wi-fi enabled laptops or other portable devices in order to conduct financial transactions or anything that is of a sensitive or personal nature," said Professor Brian Collins, head of information systems at Cranfield University.

Read the rest...

Snapfish.com

My Uncle and I have recently been talking a lot about photography, and we especially tend to dig into details such as the development/printing process, lens mechanics, and extremes like astrophotography and micrography. Yesterday night he browsed to and mentioned a website as well as some of the information about it, and this website you may have already guessed is Snapfish.com. The site boasts that they are "The best value in film and digital photography." I haven't ordered anything from them yet, but here is some information about their services that might be handy if you are contemplating services such as these.

First of all, Snapfish gives you all the space you need to upload your digital photos, and they provide what I have found to be the easiest way to do it over the web. Their solution is an ActiveX application, so you have to use Internet Explorer, but it is well worth it to avoid the inability to upload more than 12 photos at a time, which still requires you to select each of the 12 photos individually... Not only will you have your digital photos online, but you can share them with friends and family. Digital photos are not the end of your online photo album though. Read on...

Snapfish offers 35mm film processing. You send in your film and for about $5 after shipping you receive one set of prints, negatives, and each of your images is scanned and added to your Snapfish account. Snapfish gives you standard prints initially, and now that they are digitally scanned, you can print them just as you can your digital photos, in various sizes.

Unfortunately you have to pay a fee to download the full-resolution images, and the images scanned in from your negatives are only 1612 x 1024 pixels. Apparently any digital photos you upload are stored in the original size you uploaded them in. To get the images, you can either download them or order a CD. The CD pricing seems a bit extreme comparatively, but to download them it costs 49 cents each for 1-10 photos, 39 cents each for 11-24, and 19 cents each for 25+ (limit of 50 files per download.) The nice thing is you probably wont need to download many pictures. Maybe after you have a few rolls stored you could find 11 you really wanted, the price would only be $4.29. If you take better pictures than me you may want all the photos, in which case you would download two rolls or 48 images at a time which would cost 9.12, cheaper than Walgreen's.

Prints are pretty affordable as well, though they are without a frame. A 4x6 is a mere 19 cents, a 5x7 ranges from 95 cents to 59 cents depending on quantity, an 8x10 is $3.79, and you can get wallet prints and family packs as well. Poster prints, which we all love, can be obtained with a high enough resolution image. Prices are $6.99 for a 11x14, $9.99 for a 12x18, $14.99 for a 16x20, and $19.99 for a 20x30. Standard shipping on each order is around $2.00 it seems like, which is reasonable for UPS ground, and you can always splurge if you get in a pinch.

I just started uploading all of my digital photos, I ordered the package kit which gives you the packaging and postage for sending your film in, and I plan on soon ordering my free 10 digital 4x6 prints and sending in a roll of film to be processed for free.

Midnight stalker.

So, I've been stalking these women at midnight. Actually, no, I haven't been, but on another subject I have been adding frames to my photos and photo-manipulations as you may have surmised from my latest postings. I've been trying a while to come up with a method to making frames, titles, and signatures for images and have finally come up with one that I am satisfied with.

To get my signature, I used a sharpie on a blank piece of paper (took a couple of tries before I got something I was happy with,) then I took a photo of the piece of paper. I now have the signature saved as a psd file so I can instantly drag and drop the sig into any image. I am thinking about coming up with an entire frame template that I can drop onto an image, but I'm not sure how well that will work yet as I haven't tried it. For the most part I have been using black frames, mostly because I think it is the best choice but I may change that later. I could make the frame semi-transparent or something like that. For now this works, and there is not much time until we leave for Oregon so I am more focused on practicing with the camera than on practicing with my mouse. :)

So here is what's going on; We are flying out on Saturday morning to Portland where we will stay overnight at a hotel. That night we'll be meeting with Kate's Sister and her family for dinner. The following day we will check out around noon and drive over to Lincoln Beach to our rental house on the bay. We will be coming back on the following Sunday, giving us eight total days in the beautiful state of Oregon.

One of these days I want to go up north here in Arizona to get some pictures. I've been pseudo-planning a trip with my sister Samantha to go to Crown King, but some things have to be taken care of before that can happen. It's probably for the best anyway, because I know it's freezing up in Crown King right now, and if we wait until it's blistering down here it will be perfect there.

OK, one more thing, my uncle Kevin has been diving into the black hole that is called astronomy due solely to Kate's recent purchase of a relatively inexpensive telescope. She bought the telescope because the price difference between a home on the bay and a condo on the bay was $300, only the house was cheaper. The only difference noticeable was that the condo had a telescope, as did many of the other homes and condos available for rent. So, Kate did what anyone else would have which is get the cheaper house, and buy a $100 compact telescope that we can take back home when we are done, causing my uncle to learn every odd and end of astronomy and telescopes. It's really cool because when I got into photography, I was initially interested in going to the limits with the camera, which is why I wanted to have access to an SLR camera. Soon we shall have a t-mount adapter and pictures of the moon, and who knows what else. :)

DISKPART

I recently had to format an old 40GB Linux HD so I could use it for backup on my Windows XP installation. It took me a small while of thinking before I realized how I could do this without making some sort of Linux utility CD, and without using the disk partitioning program on the window shell (because I never have before and by the looks of it never will!) I realized that there must be a disk partitioning utility on the Windows XP disk, because when installing XP on an old Linux drive it forces you to use it. Sure enough, after booting the Windows XP disk and jumping into the recovery console, the CD's version of DISKPART was much easier to figure out. In no more than one minute the old Linux partitions were erased and a new partition was created. If any of you decide to use this and are not familiar with partitioning utilities, beware that the partition label does not represent what is in fact on the drive, and you will need to format the partition before being able to use it on Windows. You can do this using the format application on the Windows XP CD, or simply boot into Windows XP and attempt to explore the drive, at which point you will be prompted to format the drive (only in NTFS, use another method to format in FAT32.)

After this drive is finished formatting I will be reorganizing all of my files onto it. The 20GB I currently have as a backup will most likely turn into a secondary backup where I will keep all extremely important files. After a while I wish to get a USB hard-drive enclosure so I can take the drive out of the PC, as well as bring files to other computers.

Mangroves can serve as tsunami barriers.

Scientists working on finding earlier warning systems for tsunamis are looking to more natural resources to protect ourselves from such disasters. Mangroves have already saved many lives and buildings from the power of a tsunami, and if carefully planted many more people could be saved.

Read more on csmonitor.com...

Happy New Year!

Well, it is 2005, and to start the year off good my uncle and I got my computer back up and running! After replacing the motherboard and processor with parts from the home cluster, we booted up Windows XP, and within minutes my computer was back up and functional like nothing ever happened (for those who don't know, my motherboard recently caught fire, most likely due to a CPU problem.)

Yay! I am happily back on my 21" monitor with my personal keyboard and my massive storage space with pictures and programs, including Photoshop which I have missed more than anything. The cluster computers all have 1.7ghz AMD Athlon XP 2200s, which is a slight increase from my 1500 running at who knows what speed. Now that I have everything I need, you should expect a mass of images getting uploaded to my website and on deviantART.

I hope everyone else is having as great of a new year as I am right now! More later...

What the #$*! Do We Know?!.

"The name was first floated out of the filmmakers' exasperation in trying to find a way to combine all the information and elements in an engaging, entertaining manner. Then the title took on a life of its own, as we realized, What DO We Know? and Who are WE to Tell You Anything? We are not offering the ultimate solution to life's mysteries, but inviting viewers to ask themselves the What do I Know? question and figure it out for themselves."

- http://www.whatthebleep.com/

I recently watched this film featuring fascniating information coming from the mouths of physicists specializing quantum physics. Check out their site and watch the movie and you will be just as dumbfounded as the scientists are with studies showing the effects of thought on water crystals and crowds of people effecting crime rates by meditating. This only proves my theory, that no one knows anything.

Point: The human brain is the center of everything in relation to the observer. The only proof that anything at exists at all lies in an area which we know nothing about, leaving us and scientist alike in the inability to proove our existence. This is only the door which leads into a rabbit hole which you are constantly stopped in during the movie and asked, "just how far down the rabbit hole do you wan't to go."

Please check this out for yourself. You won't regret it. What the #$*! Do We Know?! Movie

Custom Creatures

"This artist's story begins as an unassuming science nerd who attended art school to study painting and sculpture at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, earning a BFA in 1992. The artist principally worked with oil paint, found objects and animal remains. Incorporating animal remains into sculpture and abstract painting for over a decade gradually evolved into the art of taxidermy. Although now a licensed taxidermist engaged in free-lance projects for various educational institutions and museums, the artist primarily concentrates on creating her outlandish reveries of fur and flesh."

- Sarina Brewer

Stop using Internet Explorer!

There are very good reasons why you should not be using Internet Explorer. One reason which no one can disagree with is that there are multiple vulnerabilities in the browser, some known, and some not. According to my web-page statistics, an infuriating amount of people are still using the crippled browser, which atop its gaping security holes has very little features when compared to alternative browsers.

If you use Internet Explorer on a regular basis you are putting your computer at risk. Special code on a web-site could access files on your computer, upload files to your computer, or damage your software environment. Please take my advice now and visit Opera.com or Mozilla.org where you can pick up a free copy of Opera, Mozilla, or Firefox which are all acceptable replacements for Internet Explorer.

If you fear that you will not be able to learn a new browser, please check out firefox and the skin available for it which makes it look like Internet Explorer. You can always switch back to IE, as there is no easy way to remove it from your computer and installing another browser or two will not disturb it in any way.

Thanks for listening, now go out there and download a new browser. Soon there will be action taken against people using browsers which are security risks.

If you think I am making this up, maybe you should read this.

Fire extinguisher!

I found myself yelling this today as my computer, yes my computer, began glowing red. At first it threw me off, but then two milliseconds later I was running through the house yelling, "I need the fire extinguisher!" I quickly found the small red bottle, raced back to my room, only to find the fire had extinguished itself... Thankfully it looks as if only the motherboard was damaged in the small flare-up, though I have not pulled the CPU off yet to make sure everything is ok... Later today or tomorrow I will go to Frys Electronics and see what I can afford to replace it with. It's just too bad it is so close to christmas, I'm not sure how much I will be able to spend. I also hope I can find a motherboard which will accept my memory, with 1.5gb buying new RAM would be hard to swallow.

Oh yeah, I am in the living room now on the laptop, but all of my photos and programs are untouchable until I fix this problem. Wish me luck, as I will need it!

More later, I am too sad to say any more.

Learning how to drive.

This week I took a trip to a local camera shop with my Mom. We had planned on taking her 35mm Pentax SLR in to get repaired, and learned that an alternative would actually serve us better. I ended up picking up a Pentax K1000 SE, and an extra lens, which for those who don't know is a widely used professional grade camera used by commercial photographers and students for many years.


I am happy to say my first two roles of film turned out pretty good, even though I have never operated a fully manual SLR camera before. I have been reading as much as I can on the internet and in a book I picked up The Basic Book of Photography, Fifth Edition which I highly recommend for anyone new to photography.

Having a fully manual camera to me reminds me of my days learning how to drive on a manual transmission. Learning how something physically operates, and operating it at it's most rudimentary form allows you to have more control over how it behaves, and this is extremely helpful in both driving and photography. Over the next month I will be testing out various lighting situations and film speeds, along with all of the various settings on the camera. I currently have a fixed 50mm lens which came on the camera, and a 28-80mm lens which came with a UV filter. My next investments toward the camera will be in order; Shoulder strap, 2x adapter, reverse adapter, and a camera bag. In January I plan on taking a class at Chandler Gilbert Community College, which will hopefully let me know if I wan't to extend my career in art.

Sorry I haven't been posting much lately. Much work has been going into taking and touching up photographs which are constantly updated on my web-site. My deviantART account has been getting more and more comments, and I am very close to getting a print account which will allow me to sell my art on their site. Here is the latest one, created and uploaded during the time this post was written.

Please feel free to check out my deviantART account and submit comments as you see fit.

Finally, more plot.

I know what you have been thinking, and it's true. I haven't posted for a while.

Without any excuses, here is a summary of what I am currently up to; I recently started a deviantART account, so you can check out the images I have displayed there by going to davidmonaghan.deviantart.com. The images are no different from those on my web page, but I want to get the images in front of more people.

I haven't been making any progress on the FamilyTreeLink.com site, and my morale regarding the entire project only lessens with each week that goes by where no-one is using the damn thing, including my Mom who talked me into starting the thing in the first place. Anyway, I am working on solving this problem without dumping the project in the garbage.

I have been playing with a new program, Apophysis which is fun. I have used it in an image already, which can be found on my deviant gallery and in the multi-source media section on my main site.

Christmas is coming, that should be fun... I wen't to the Boyce Thompson Arboretum with my Sister the other day to take photos. Both of us got some good images and had a good time.

Other than that nothing else is new, wait I did get taken by monkeys, but you wouldn't understand (It's an inside joke.) Ok, off to the jungle, and don't forget to rewind your rental DVD's before returning them or you will be charged a fee.

Assassinate Kennedy.

From WiredNews.com:

"A new video game released Monday allows players to simulate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The release of JFK Reloaded is timed to coincide with the 41st anniversary of Kennedy's murder in Dallas and was designed to demonstrate that a lone gunman was able to kill the president.

"It is despicable," said David Smith, a spokesman for Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, the late president's brother. He was informed of the game on Friday but declined further comment."

Read the rest...

Jet-engine for your laptop?

Alan Epstein, Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT has an interesting approach to solving the portable power problems facing our future. "The engines on three 747s put out as much power as a nuclear power plant," Epstein says.

From FuelCellsWorks.com:

"Although Epstein envisioned his micro version working roughly the same way that a conventional gas turbine does, much about micro-jet engines was a mystery. Would silicon crumble under 1300 C temperatures? Could microscopic bearings handle a million-plus revolutions per minute? With funding from the US military, Epstein tapped into the expertise of neighbouring MIT labs in fluid mechanics, materials science, structural engineering, and microfabrication. The project team eventually swelled to dozens of researchers."

Read the rest...

Blender 3D 2.35!

It has been released! Blender 3D 2.35 has been released and many things have been fixed and added. Among them is new select modes for face and edge select, as well as scale, extrude, and rotate modes.

For those who don't know, Blender 3D is a modeling and rendering program aimed mostly at game designers. It features a game engine which can create full executable files, as well as an animation editor to create full video's, animation sequences, or still frames. Blender is a free Open-Source program and can be downloaded here.

For a list of what has changed since Blender 3D 2.34 take a look at the release notes.

Blender gives you materials, opacity, lighting, and everything else you need to create convincing models of anything you can put your mind to. For samples look here.

Word of the day.

har•mo•ni•um
n.
Pronunciation: (här-mO'nE-um)

An organlike keyboard instrument that produces tones with free metal reeds actuated by air forced from a bellows.

Would you like to know more?