microUgly's Vanity Site

Assassin’s Creed II – A tourists guide to Venice

2010-09-08T09:52:00.001+10:00

In a few weeks time I’m going to be in Venice, Italy, where I’ll be staying just a couple of blocks down from Basilica di San Marco. I’m already geeking-out as I pan around the city in Google Maps, because I know these streets and landmarks like the back of my hand—thanks to Assassin’s Creed II. I can’t imagine how tempting it will be to climb buildings and jump across rooftop once I arrive there.

If it wasn’t for Assassin’s Creed II, I wouldn’t know anything about the sites in Venice. I think that’s a credit to games and how they can be educational, even if they weren’t trying to be. I now have a passionate interest in seeing key sites whilst I’m there. I may play through the game again to brush up my knowledge and plan some activities.

A non-perverted use for private browsing

2010-07-03T10:46:00.001+10:00

Opera (my browser of choice) only recently introduced a “private” browsing feature. For if you don’t know, private browsing allows you to browse websites without leaving evidence of it on the PC. Firefox and Chrome have had this for a while.

Opera justifies the feature by using the example of being able to plan a surprise vacation without your other half knowing. But we all know it’s probably not vacation sites your trying to stop you partner finding out you’ve been looking at.

Having said, private browsing does allow you to do things you couldn’t do before with a browser—namely log into the same website with two different accounts at the same time.

I frequently use private browsing to access a different Gmail account without logging out of my usual one. Also, for my work, I have to access content via HTTP Auth with many different accounts, and the authenticated session lasts until you close the browser. Whilst previously I would have to use multiple different browsers, now I can open multiple private tabs to access the same HTTP Authenticated resource with different accounts.

So now you don’t need to feel so guilty about appreciating private browsing—there is a non-perverted purpose for it :)

My new favourite colour scheme chooser

2010-05-21T10:15:00.001+10:00

I now have a new favourite colour scheme chooser - Color Scheme Designer

I don’t remember which tool used before this one, but I do know Color Scheme Designer is an improvement.

Questionably Journalism by ABC’s Hungry Beast

2010-02-15T19:30:00.001+10:00

Hungry Beast is a TV programme that jumps between journalism and parodies of journalism. I watched a few episodes last season and found it to be relatively informative. I hoped it would be confronting and challenging.

Last weeks they aired the first episode for the season with stories about the proposed mandatory Internet filter for Australia. They surveyed 1000 “demographically balanced” Australians to find out what their opinion was on this matter.

They said some of the results might surprise you, and the first one did surprise me. They said 80% of people were in favour of automatically blocking material that has been refused classification in Australia.

What they revealed on the website, but not in the programme was that material that is defined as “refused classifications” was:

child sexual abuse
bestiality
sexual violence
gratuitous, exploitative or offensive sexual fetishes; and
detailed instructions on or promotion of crime, violence or use of illegal drugs

Throw that list at me over the phone and I would have said, “absolutely, yes. Keep this out of the country,” before actually thinking about what they mean. Whilst the first three items are illegal, the last two are not illegal. I wonder how many of the surveyed understood this.

To clarify the latter point on refusing classification on crime, I quote Aasher Moses from the Sydney Morning Herald:

But the RC classification extends further to more controversial content such as information on euthanasia, material about safer drug use and material on how to commit more minor crimes such as painting graffiti.

If this information cannot be accessed, then it cannot be debated. (Strangely enough, you can walk into any government founded youth center in Australia and find printed material on how to take drugs safely.)

As for fetishes, you can do it but you can’t view it!? Crazy!

But most frustrating was the extended interview Dan Ilic had with Senator Conroy available on their website. Dan raised all the appropriate issues and challenged none of the responses. Conroy laughed and played dumb about how small breasted (and therefore young appearing) girls would be banned. He accused the EFF of scare-mongering. He admitted the filter was easily circumvented but suggested it was ok, because people still speed and underagers still buy alcohol despite the laws—no challenge. I’m pretty sure, preventing alcohol purchases from minors does not cost the Australian tax payers $125.8 million.

My point in the end is that I thought Hungry Beast would be a reputable resource for information. I’m not bothered if the facts differ to what I believe, but I am bothered when they don’t present the facts clearly and do not challenge our leaders.

How I found Stargazer Demoscene

2010-02-07T21:07:00.001+10:00

Browsing on the Playstation 3 store I see a software named Linger in Shadows. I downloaded the video and didn’t see game but a rather neat visual experience.

There were no reviews for Linger in Shadows on IGN, so I wiki searched it to find what it was. It’s a Demoscene. I don’t know what a Demoscene is. The wiki page lead me to demoscene.info.

Demoscene.info lead me to Scene Awards which lead me to the Stargazer download.

Now I know what a Demoscene is, and Stargazer is pretty sweet and I recommend you download it.

Checklist for an iPod killer

2010-01-16T11:10:00.001+10:00

I don’t want an iPod, but unfortunately most other portable music players don’t offer the right features to properly compete with it. I am currently still using a 4th generation iPod brick, but it runs the RockBox firmware, which makes it hard to replace because RockBox makes it a much better device.

So here’s my checklist of features a portable music player requires to satisfy me.

More screen than controls

The iPod Touch is a clear winner here where it’s all screen for viewing videos, but I would also accept the Creative Zen X-Fi. The iPod Classic is an example of too much controls and too little screen.

Support for Open formats

The device should support both OGG and FLAC. There is no licensing fees for these formats, OGG is superior to MP3, and OGG is now a much more relevant format with Mozilla and Opera supporting it in their web browsers.

Minimum 32GB storage

My entire CD collection takes up over 20GB of space. To adopt a device that also plays videos will require much more space if I don’t want to swap and change videos on daily basis. Preferably, it would include an SDHC slot so I could load videos separately.

No lock-in to proprietary software.

This is an epic fail for the iPod. I don’t want to have to use iTunes to manage my portable music player. Other software can do it better, if it wasn’t for Apple making it intentionally problematic to do so. Apple wants you locked into iTunes because they want your money—they’re not doing you a favour.

Digital Radio

This is probably a little too hopeful since I don’t think there’s a single player that supports this. The Zune HD (not available in Australia) support HD Radio, which is better than normal radio.

Support for advanced tagging

Tagging offers a really powerful database of information for your music and ID3v2 has had support everything you could think of. And yet most players stop at support for album/artist/track.

It should understand the difference between album artists and track artists
It should understand that two albums with the same name are not the same album if the album artist differs.
It should store track ratings in the track rating tag so ratings are available to other software and devices.
It should support multiple artist tags per track so Cypress Hill & Pearl Jam’s “Real Thing” appears for each artist.
It should understand disc numbers so we don’t need to change the album name to include which disc it is.
It should support multiple genres per track. Most tracks or albums do not fit just one genre. Organising your collection with just one genre makes it very fragmented and unlikely to be useful.

Add tracks to playlists as listening

Something I like about RockBox is that I can put my entire iPod on random and as I listen to a song, I can add it to various playlists. It would be nice if you could correct track genres as I’m listening also.

Crossfeed audio

Crossfeed is the process of blending the left and right channels of stereo audio to simulate a more natural listening experience. For example sound coming from the left will only be heard by the left ear with headphones, but when listening in an open room with speakers you hear it with both ears. Crossfeed simulates open room listening and is a feature of RockBox I really like.

So are there any contenders? Yes.

Creative Zen X-Fi come very close. Their X-Fi technology sounds like the crossfeeding I desire. They come with 32GB of storage and include an SD expansion slot. The Zen X-Fi has support for FLAC, but not OGG, and whilst I like FLAC, I really do need to use lossy compression.

The Samsung P3 sounds very good. It’s 32GB but doesn’t include a memory expansion slot, so I may be constantly connecting the device to swap videos. But it does support OGG and it’s DNSe 3.0 feature may be a form of crossfeeding. It can also connect to your mobile phone via bluetooth.

And then there’s the Cowon S9, which could be the one. It’s reputation for audio quality is above all others. It’s BBE sound feature is superior to the Samsungs DNSe 3.0 and Creatives X-Fi. It doesn’t include memory expansion, so again I may need to swap videos often. It’s supports OGG and FLAC and even APE audio formats. And it has a 3.3 inch sexy OLED screen.

The S9 and P3 prices are comparable to the iPod Touch, whilst the Zen X-Fi is almost half the price since it has a smaller, non-touch screen. But screen size isn’t such a concern for me, so long as it’s still practical. And I’m not yet informed on how well they all handle tagging. I’ll be heading to the forums at Anything But iPod to get that information.

Opera Mail reply without quoting

2009-12-07T10:22:00.001+10:00

An annoyance I have with Opera’s Mail client is that if you highlight some text an in email you are reading, and then reply to the email, only the highlighted text will be quoted. This is obviously a feature that is by-design, but I often highlight text as a read with no intention to quote it.

To get around this feature I’ve created new buttons that deselect highlighted text before creating the reply message.

Reply | Reply all

You can drag and drop these to your Opera toolbar, or the raw commands are:

Deselect all,,,"Reply",Reply & Reply

Deselect all,,,"Reply all",Reply All & Reply all

Queensland partition to introduce R18 game classification

2009-12-04T11:01:00.001+10:00

If you’re a Queensland resident who feels it’s about time that adults have the right to play adult-orientated games, now is your chance to have your say.

Queensland residents draws to the attention of the House that the Classification of Computer Games and Images Act 1995 is currently out of step with the wishes of the electorate.

Your petitioners, therefore, request the House that it be amended to permit computer games to receive the R18+ classification when they have been refused classification under the Commonwealth Act.

Sign the partition at 'Classification of computer games in Queensland'.

Episodes from Liberty City – She’s Got the Look

2009-10-10T09:23:00.001+10:00

Rockstar always make great trailers for their GTA games which always feature great music. I wouldn’t say Roxette’s “The Look” is a great song, but it works so well in trailer:

I’ll also take this time to say that GTA IV, is the best in the series. I miss some of the distractions from the previous games, such as “Rampages”, but the missions have the right amount of difficulty, and the story and characters are brilliant. For all the flak the GTA games get from the media, these games deserve to be played.

What the Font?

2009-11-15T09:19:00.001+10:00

WhatTheFont is a web-based tool for identifying a font in an image. It’s not a new service and I’ve known about it for a long time, but I don’t think I’ve ever blogged about it and yesterday it was a lifesaver for me.

I had some printed material that I need to create a new document to compliment. Because it was printed and not particularly large, the scan quality was pretty poor. And the font had no spaces between the characters, which WhatTheFont cannot handle. Despite this, WhatTheFont detected the font correctly based on two uppercase characters in my sample. Amazing! And the font was very obscure, so I would never have found it otherwise.

As a side note, I believe that a trick you can use to help WhatTheFont identify a font that has no spaces between characters, is to edit the image and put in the spaces between each character yourself.

Dillerkind shirts on RedBubble

2009-11-28T08:48:00.001+10:00

One of my favourite artists on DeviantArt, Dillerkind, has started selling shirts and prints on RedBubble.

Check out his stuff if you want something unique and fun.

How to remove the tail-light from a Ford Falcon, style-side ute

2009-10-13T18:56:00.001+10:00

I hate forcing things. I’ll waste much time examining why something won’t move before I force it. I’ll even search the web first.

When I searched the web to find how to remove the tail-light from my Ford Falcon ute, I found nothing. So I post this in hope that it’ll help others.

To remove the tail-light from a Falcon, style-side ute, drop the tail gate and unscrew the two screws that would otherwise be obstructed by the tail gate (this is no secret).

This next step is where you may need to apply a significant amount of force. Two wedged shape pins hold the tail-lights in place—one at the top and the other at the bottom.

The pins are angled towards the center of the ute, so you need to pull the light diagonally away from the corner of the ute. On my ute they were held very tightly, so it was easiest to pull to release just one pin at a time, rather both at the same time.

Easy when you know how, but frustrating when you think you might be about to break something.

Notepad++: Linebreaks in Regular Expressions

2009-10-08T21:40:00.001+10:00

Believe it or not, Notepad++ does not support the use of linebreaks in regular expressions for its “find” feature—it’s regular expression support is quite weak actually.

But if you don’t use regular expressions often enough to look for an alternative to Notepad++, here’s a trick to get around the limitation.

Open the find dialog and select the “Replace” tab. Change the Search mode to “Extended”. Now in the “Find what” field enter “\r\n” and in the “Replace with” field enter “__RN__” and click “Replace All”. Now all the linebreaks in your file will be replaced __RN__ so you can use this string in your regular expession in place of the \r\n. When you’re done, use the same method to convert __RN__ back to \r\n.

I used this method to identify multiple linebreaks in an .srt subtitles file and replace them with a single linebreak.

tsMuxeR – Invalid SRT format

2009-10-08T21:19:00.001+10:00

I’ve been playing with converting some videos to different formats and tsMuxeR is one tool I’m trying. When including a subtitle SRT file in the mux, I would get the following error:

Invalid SRT format. "0036D148" is invalid timing info

Google didn’t reveal what the cause could be, so after much trial and error, I found that tsMuxeR does not like it when multiple lines of subtitles are seperated by two linebreaks instead of just one.

So the following text would trigger the error:

22
00:02:26,400 --> 00:02:29,551
He would wait for her

until he drew his last breath,

So it needs to be changed to:

22
00:02:26,400 --> 00:02:29,551
He would wait for her
until he drew his last breath.

The percentage that tsMuxeR errors at is roughly relative to where in the srt the invalid data is. This can help you identify where to start looking for problems.

PC gaming is on it’s death bed…

2009-09-03T15:38:00.001+10:00

… at least for me.

I’ve always invested a tidy sum of money into my computers so I can run the latest greatest games, for at least the first 6 months of it’s life.

But I’m starting to get fed up with having to jump through hoops to install and play a game. Years ago, it started with having to load the original CD to play games. The there were games that wouldn’t let you play if you have a virtual optical drive—purely out of spite. These days having an internet connection is required to activate games.

Spore introduced me to having to install crapware. I don’t give a shit about online communities, leader boards, trophies, and videos. I just want to play the goddamn game and not have my system tray spilling over with useless game utility that offer me nothing.

Last night this all got worse for me when I installed Grand Theft Auto IV. Not only do you have to have the DVD in the drive to play, not only do you have to active it online, not only does it install crapware, you HAVE TO have a Windows Live account to save your game!!! WTF!?

I was ready to punch something by the time I was forced to wait for patches for the Live client, then patches for the game, then Live kept rejecting my connection. If you don’t login to Live, you can’t save your game. If you can’t connect to live, you can’t save your game. If you can’t save your game there’s no point playing!

I totally resent having to have crapware and a live account to play games. I bought the game! I bought it with real money! And I’m treated like an arsehole when I come to install it. I so long for the days when you bought a game, you installed just the game, and then you played it, and saved your game to the computers local drive.

I have gaming consoles, but some games I simply prefer to play on a PC… I’m going to have a seriously hard time to justify choosing a PC game in future.

EAC, FLAC and embedded Cuesheets

2009-07-17T22:50:00.001+10:00

For the second time, I’ve started the process of backing up my CD collection onto my computer. I’m doing this with two goals in mind:

Allow me to restore an identical copy of a CD if I were to misplace it.
Allow me to use the backup to produce a copy of the tracks in any format quickly and easily.

I’ve chosen to use EAC to rip the CD because it can correct errors on scratched discs, with the AccurateRip feature you can identify when a rip may not be perfect.

And I’ve chose to store the CD as a single file in FLAC format. There are other lossless formats that might offer better compression, but FLAC is open source so I can be confident of the formats longevity.

The reason this is the second time I’ve attempted a backup is because I spent so long researching the right configuration for EAC that by the time I got to the FLAC side of things I ran with some settings I seen online which wasn’t the ideal choice when it comes to handling cuesheets.

Cuesheets describe how a single audio file should be split up into tracks. EAC will create the cuesheet as a separate file which totally fine—unless, like me, you would feel more confident with your backup if the cuesheet can’t be separated from the FLAC file.

The solution for not allowing the cuesheet to be seperated from the FLAC file is to embed it. But there are two ways to embed a cuesheet:

Embed as a tag named CUESHEET.
Embed in the CUESHEET block.

I’ve chosen to embed the cuesheet in both the tag and block of the FLAC file. I made this decision because the block option only stores the track running times, necessary to recreate the CD using CD burning software, whilst the tag option allows you to store track information including the track titles which can be used by music players and convertors.

You could just use the tag option, but all FLAC software should read the cuesheet block, whilst cuesheet tag support could vary and I want to avoid having to export the cuesheet from the tag in this situation.

So here’s the punchline—my EAC command line options to import the cuesheet automatically after ripping:

-5 -V -T "ARTIST=%a" -T "ALBUM=%g" -T "DATE=%y" -T "GENRE=%m" --tag-from-file=CUESHEET="%a - %g.cue" --cuesheet="%a - %g.cue" %s

Here’s a quick breakdown of the parameters meaning:

-5 : The amount of compression (between 1 and 8)
-V : Verify the encoding
-T : Each of the values after the T’s are tags. I’ve selected to use only tags recommended by the OGG specification.
--tag-from-file : Creates the CUESHEET tag
--cuesheet : Creates the CUESHEET block
“%a - %g.cue” : This will resolve the file name of the cuesheet EAC generates.
%s : The name of the Wave file to be encoded.

Good, clean Internet censorship

2009-07-10T09:07:00.001+10:00

Censor this?

Good, clean internet censorship? Help get this advert on the air and in the air - on every Qantas flight in the country during the next sitting week of Parliament.

The Government's test trials on internet censorship are about to end, the results are nearly in and they're looking to announce their plans to filter all internet activity.

We know exactly where every politician will be - on a Qantas flight to Canberra as Parliament resumes. Your contribution will allow us to show this ad directly to them, and their staff, making it an issue they can't avoid.

Even if you’re not interested donating, it’s worth viewing the ad. The Internet is a little “too amazing”.

Novint Falcon – the ultimate FPS controller

2009-07-05T18:58:00.001+10:00

This will probably be out of my budget, but it looks amazing. So I’ll be keeping an eye out for an Australian price.

Enable Gmail themes within Google Apps

2009-07-02T19:11:00.001+10:00

A little while ago I decided to enable Google Apps for my domain for Email use. It’s free, I can easily access my mail from anywhere, and if I change web hosts I don’t have to worry about backing up my mail.

But one thing I had missed with Gmail under Google Apps, compared with normal Gmail, is the ability to apply themes to Gmail. I had read somewhere that the theme setting would appear automatically after an undefined period, but was this was wrong.

If you want access the themes in Gmail under Google Apps you need to log into Google Apps for your domain, and go to Domain settings. Then under the General tab, check “Enable pre-release features” and save the changes. Wait 20 minutes, or so, log into Gmail and you should see the themes tab under the settings.

Jessica Rabbit bikini colouring

2009-06-26T07:33:00.001+10:00

Jessica Bikini by ~microUgly on deviant ART

Another colouring of a King-Cheetah pencil. Coloured using Inkscape, of course.

The sequins were created using Tile Clone, then the Tweak Tool was used to subtly shift their place and jitter their lightness to create a sparkle. This is the first time I’ve used the Tweak Tool this way—it’s a very clever and useful tool.

Opera Unites us

2009-06-16T22:24:00.001+10:00

Just wanted to spread the word that Opera has released a new feature for the upcoming version of Opera 10 (which you get the early builds of) called Unite.

As I understand it, Unite is a web server that installs as a part of Opera. It then allows you to quickly and easily share content from your PC via the Internet—the idea being that the typical web user shouldn’t have to rely on web hosting, or services like Facebook, to share content. Anyone can write code to allow you to share your content however you like.

I haven’t explored how it works at all yet—in fact I’ve only just turned it on. But it makes a lot of sense. Always-on internet connections, like ADSL, is the norm. And only P2P software has made good use of that fact. As internet access gets faster it only makes sense that we all start using our PCs to serve content instead of commercial web hosts.

I look forward to seeing where Unite leads.

On a side note, how did I miss this great Opera April fools joke - Opera Face Gestures.

My Sad Psycho

2009-06-01T18:31:00.001+10:00

This is my Sad Psycho. It’s a wall decal by Michael Fuchs, available at Blik. Although, I got mine from Supernice who, unlike Blik, ship to Australia.

It was a little tricker to put on the wall than I expected. Each colour is on a separate sheet—so you have to place each colour on the wall one at a time. And they don’t have any overlap at all, so if you’re slightly out with your positioning a gap will be visible between the colours. It’s also made more difficult by the fact that the backing paper is not transparent, so you can’t easily mark where to position them before applying.

Cutting the decals into smaller sections makes life much easier--and safer, since if you are slight out it’s only one piece that’s effected. I laid the black outline first as one whole piece then added each colours section one by one. If I were to do it again, I would have cut his eyes out of the black sheet and put them on after the white face—this is the only area where I didn’t line up things well enough and separating the eyes would have minimised the flaw. But my mistakes are barely noticeable.

You can see another, perhaps clearer, photo at my DeviantArt page.

Download Apple HD trailers and convert to MP4

2009-05-27T20:25:00.001+10:00

I enjoy watching movie trailers, especially high-definition ones on my plasma TV. I find the best source for movie trailers to be Apple Trailers, but there’s two problems with this:

Apple doesn’t provide links to download the trailer in HD
I play the trailers using a PS3 which doesn’t support MOV files.

Until recently I thought the only solution was to buy the Pro version of Quicktime which both lets you save high-definition trailers, and convert the video from MOV to MP4. Turns out there’s a free alternative.

To download the trailer, follow the High-definition link for the movie (i.e. http://www.apple.com/trailers/focus_features/9/hd/). Sometimes these links don’t take you to the correct page—you can tell you’re at the correct page if the URL ends with hd/. If it doesn’t end with hd/, add it.

Right-click on the button for the resolution you want, copy the link path, and paste it into your browsers address bar and it should look something like http://movies.apple.com/movies/focus_features/9/9-tlr_1080p.mov. Now edit the url to include a h between the last _ and the resolution number so it looks like http://movies.apple.com/movies/focus_features/9/9-tlr_h1080p.mov—and that’s your download url.

Now to convert the downloaded MOV file to an MP4, download and install Yamb. Start Yamb and double-click on “Click to create an MP4 file with multiple audio, video, subtitle chapters streams”. Click the Add button to add your MOV, choose the location for the converted file, and click Next to start the conversion.

The conversion process is very quick because the video is not re-encoded, which means there is no loss of quality.

For more information refer to the HD-Trailers.net resources at Download from Apple and Convert .mov to .mp4.

On a side note, 9 is going to be freakin’ awesome.

Get HD version of YouTube videos

2009-05-24T20:58:00.001+10:00

I had to get a copy of the Wall•E/Watchmen trailer mash-up. I knew their were tools that would grab the video for me, but I really wanted to HQ version, I really didn’t want to have to install software just to do it.

Turns out you can get even better than the HQ version, you can get the original HD version. And you can get it with a simple bookmarklet. You can read the details of how at UnlockForUs or just or just copy and paste the following Javascript code into your browsers address bar as you’re watching the desired Youtube video:

javascript:window.location.href = 'http://youtube.com/get_video?video_id=' + swfArgs['video_id'] + "&fmt=22" + "&l=" + swfArgs['l'] + "&sk=" + swfArgs['sk'] + '&t=' + swfArgs['t'];