This proves I am a bigger geek than all of you combined aka Spiderman T-shirt design FTW!

So on May 1 my friends and I are gonna watch Spiderman 3 in Powerplant. It’s not my theater of choice but since a lot of my friends are watching there I figured why the hell now. Big movie events excite the fanboy in me, and so to commemorate one of the best movie franchises in recent years, I made a Siderman 3 t-shirt. What’s cool (as cool as geeky can get) about the Tee is that on the front is the red “good” Spiderman logo and on the back is the black “evil symbiote badass motha” Spiderman logo.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon and evening working on this, and while I was still a bit disappointed with the results and tired from the heat (and paint fumes) I will wear this T-shirt proudly tomorrow, just as my friends will look elsewhere and pretend they do not know me.

Spiderman red

Spiderman Black

Food links

Bloghopping can be a hunger inducing activity, especially when you stumble upon food sites.

…

I can’t think or a witty intro, so that’ll have to do.

Brooklyn Kitchen – A restaurant in Brooklyn apparently. The Potato Ginger Samosas had mymouth watering.

lil kian chu – Mika’s actually on my blogroll, but I thought I’d add her her for some local flavor. go back to some earlier posts to see the entries that made my mouth water. Just the mere image of the apple stuffed chicken (seen above) had me drooling.

CtrlAltChicken – This is probably the geekiest cooking show ever, hosted by Diggnation’s Alex Albrecht and his fiancee Heather. Episode 1: Chicken Cordon Bleu.

Sucks to be on a diet.

Dealnews.com FTW!!!!

Oh. My. God. I just found my favoritest website ever. Ever ever EVAR. Anyone who knows me well knows that I love going to sales. I love getting things at a good discount. Dealnews.com is like discount heaven. It’s a virtual sale anywhere you look, like this sandisk sansa 2GB mp3player for only $50, or a refurbished Sony PSP for $130 (which incidentally is exactly how much a DS Lite costs).

Excuse me, I think I just wet myself.

Fuck Creative Labs, I’m watching video on my DS lite now

So Creative Labs were being bitches and asking me for more money than I had bought my Vision:M for in order to repair it.  That’s stupid on so many levels I don’t even care to think about it.  I was tempted to go and buy the Archos 404 out of spite, since for $199 I get a player with an even larger screen than the M, and it look smore durable too.  But the budget geek in me won out, and decided to do with my DS what I’d been planning to do in the first place, turn it into a video player.

All you gotta go is download Moonshell v1.71 and batchdpg v1.0, and you’re good to go.

Moonshell is the homebrew media player you’ll have to install on your DS flashcart or M3 DS simply in order to play videos, audio, etc. and batchdpg converts batches of your video files into a format (dpg) that moonshell can read.  Here’s a link to the best settings for batchdpg so your videos come out the way you want them to.

A caveat, the videos are converted, so there’s no way they’ll look as good on the creative or even an iPod, but they’ll do if you’re on a budget.  The audio is painfully weak however, and when converting videos thru batchdpg I’d suggested you check the “normalize” checkbox and invest in a cheap pair of cans (big ass headphones, as long as you can hear the dialogue, you’re fine) or in ear headphones.  My genius in-ear headphones (SRP 600 pesos) allowed me to watch Entourage while on a shuttle to makati just barely.  I tested the sounds with my Sennheiser cans and it was much better, but I don’t want to be wearing those things on me all the time.

Anyone who has a DS and wants to get a bit of extended functionality on their machines should definitely try this out, since it’s a free way to videos on your DS.

Army girl

 

Saw this dude’s blog, then went over to this dude’s blog, and felt compelled to clonk out a sketch of my own, despite my suckiness.  Done in 20 minutes on a 6×9 wacom graphire 4 and PS.

God I feel artistically inept.

Broken Creative Vision:M LCD Screen pt2 : I’m screwed

What’s a polite way of saying, sorry, you’re screwed?   Let Creative Labs show you how.

Dear ryan

Thank you for the information provided.

As regards to your enquiry, I would like to inform you that the limited
warranty does not apply to the damage caused by normal wear and tear,
abnormal use or conditions, misuse, neglect, abuse, accident, improper
handling or storage, exposure to moisture, unauthorized modifications,
alterations, or repairs, improper installation, improper use of any
electrical source, undue physical or electrical stress, operator error,
non-compliance with instructions or other acts which are not the fault
of Creative, including damage or loss during shipment.

However base on the information you provided, I am afraid that you will
not be able to use the warranty claim for in warranty servicing. As such
we will treat the product as out of warranty case and you will be liable
for servicing cost and subjected to stock availabilities.

For more information on warranty coverage, you can refer to the link
below:
http://asia.creative.com/support/warranty/warranty.asp

In case if you need any clarification, please do not hesitate to contact
us. Thank you.

So the short version is that they won’t be able to help me out.  It’s hard to get angry because they were really polite about it and the responses came back very quickly, but I’m disappointed because this isn’t an isolated case.  Like I pointed out with some of my earlier posts, this has been happening a lot, and a company as large as creative labs should have the responsibility to take care of situation slike this where it’s obviously a manufacturing defect that’s causing these screen cracks.

They lose a lot of goodwill this way, and word of mouth spreads like wildfire these days, especially with the internet (ahem ahem).  A month ago I would have gleefully endorsed creative to anyone who would listen, but now I can’t really encourage anyone to buy one afte what I’ve experienced.  Acoworker of mine was actually asking about what MP3 video player to purchase, and I suggested an archos instead, just because I couldn’t wholeheartedly reccomend a piece of hardware whose screen might crack at any moment for no given reason.

Chen Shui who?

 

In one of the most ludicrous shoe related news I have ever read, Nike’s put out a limited edition Air Force 1 shoe with Taiwanese president Chen Shui Bian’s mug “lasered” on the side of the shoe.  I seriously doubt that any self respecting Taiwanese hipster would want to wear these shoes, but what do I know right?  I’m just a geek blogger after all.

In other presidential show related news, Nike Philippines is releasing its own limited edition shoe with former president Erap Estrada’s face printed on the side of a red, yellow, and blue colored shoe, with a matching wristband to boot.

Starcraft Origami

 

I have been away for many days, mourning the cracking of the ZEN:M.  NO, I lie.  I was just lazy.  I’m still not over it so please, be gentle and don’t ask me any questions.

But.

This Flickr page hath brough me cheer.  Starcraft Origami from the kids in Korea FTW.  Not that it’ll take the stench of the VT kiler out of everyont’s collective mouth, but at least this must be proof that not all those kids are bad seeds.  Nobody who could make origami this beautiful could be bad, could he?

Broken Creative Vision:M LCD Screen

I thought I was alone, but this site proves me wrong. So this has been happening all over the world, after all, and I’m not just a poor schmuck who happened upon a shitty creative. I wonder why this hasn’t stirred up a bigger fuss? Anyway, the site doesn’t really help me with my problem, but at least I know I’m not alone.

theBroken

No, this isn’t an emo post.

Well, it is, but i’m being emo aobut a broken gadget so…

Anyone who reads my other blog knows I get excited about gadgets in a manner that is somewhat distrurbing. So when one of my gadgets gets damaged, it’s not a pretty sight. I hooked up my creative zen to my dad’s laptop this morning to get some podcasts on it, and I noticed something funky with the screen. I figured it was just acting up or I’d plug in the zen improperly so I promptly unplugged it and plugged it in again. Same screen. Almost half of it was white and there were…lines…streaking out from a corner…

Then it hit me.

My screen had cracked. The screen on my barely 4 month old DAP (digital media player wassup?) had cracked. I wasnted to scream. But I was almost late for work so I just sucked it up and went on my daily commute. But FUUUUUUUUCK. I spent 10k on that just last christmas and now it’s fucked! I’m lucky that the other half of the screen is sort of legible so I can still scroll around and generally use it as I used to, but it’s called the Zen “vision” M for a reason, you’re supposed to be able to watch videos on it DAMMIT!

fuck fuck fuckity fuck.

I did some snooping on the internets and found some people with the same problem, and it looks like I’ll have to pay upwards of 5k to have the unit shipped to creative and fixed, which is really sucky. I’m gonna call the creative service center here in the philppines to see what’s going down, but my hopes aren’t incredibly high.

Update: I called the local distributor of creative and they said that they don’t do hardware fixes because they’re not authorized to. They only do firmware upgrades and shit like that. Hell, I can do a firmware update on my own. Sigh. They said I could have it shipped to singapore, but that it would cost around 8 thousand, not including labor, so my only recourse is to find someone who’s gonna be in singapore soon, or go there myself. Sigh.

Acrylic transfer/mixed media tutorial part 3 (reflections/tips)

Making this painting made me realize how much i want a loft type studio where i can spend time painting.  Not one of those classy pre selling kinds, but the kinds popularized in old 80s and 90s movies that looked like old abandoned warehouses.

It’s also a bitch to paint outside, even with shade, especially if its a windy day.  I used to love windy days but I swear to god wind REALLY SUCKS when you’re trying to paint something.  Just keeping pieces of paper or newspaper down becomes an additional burden, not to mention dust mites or bits and pieces of foliage accidentally sticking to your paint.

Having a clear cut plan is a solid idea, and one that will save you a lot of time and trouble.  Even though some of the time i had to Macguyver my way through the painting  had pretty general idea how I wanted it to end up and the process I was going to take to get to that end.

Don’t be afraid to experiment.  This first painting was partly an experiment for me, even though I wanted to have a good finished product.  I’ll take the things I learned from making this one and hopefully make use of them in my next painting, which will be a satire (I hope) on police brutality.

Twitter

So twitter’s the new social networking fixation, and I’m trying to figure out what the point is. It’s been lauded by all sorts of people from Leo Laporte to conferences like SXSW, sothere’s gotta be something special about this software, something that gets people all a-twitter (ha.ha.ha.). What exactly that is I’ve yet to find out. For the most part it seems ok, but I just don’t know what I’d do with it really.

Ostensibly it’s about letting people know what you’re up to ALL THE TIME. It’s been called microblogging, and has a 140 character limit. You can add friends and see what they’re up to. You can install it on your phone so you always know where people are or what they’re doing, and some folks have even hacked an rss feed onto it so they can see up to date CNN news. But there’s already things that do this, so what’s the big fuss?

Does twitter have anything truly relevant to share to the social networking zeitgeist or is it another overhyped idea that a hell of a lot of good mileage? We’ll see. Try it out for me too will ya?

Acrylic transfer/mixed media tutorial part 2

So, moving on from Part 1.  The Acrylic Emulsion’s dried, and now I want to add I bit of color to the painting.  I’d already thought of a  block of green on the side, so I mixed the thalo green with the white latex paint to get a color I liked (actually I didn’t really like it, I was just impatient.  Let this be a lesson to you kids, sometimes it’s worth the time it takes to get the right color).  Anyhoo, I take some masking tape to mark off the areas I want to paint and to make sure that the paint doesn’t spill over (which I actually did with the white background as well, though I forgot to mention it in part 1), and proceed to paint the right 1/3 of the plywood green.

<-see the masking tape?

After the paint’s dried a bit I peel off the masking tape and let it dry outside.  It’s time to make some stencils now.  The idea behind the painting, simplistic as it is, was to have the machine surrounded by the elements that make up political dynasties: Murder, Marriage, Media/Celebrity, Merges/Alliances, Myth, and Money.  I decided to make stencils out of these elements and spray paint them onto the plyboard.  This constituted designing the images in photoshop, printing them out, then cutting out the designs.  I laid out the printed design on a cutting board, overlaid it with acetate, then cut the image out (with an x-acto modeling knife) onto the acetate so it could be used more than once.  This took almost an entire day to do and by the end of it my fingers hurt like hell, even with frequent movi/TV breaks/internet breaks.

After the stencils are done, I call it a night and go to bed, as it’s around 1030PM already.  I wake up and set to laying out the stencils on the wood.  The tools of the trade here are masking tape, newspapers, the stencils, and a can of spray paint.  Use the masking tape to stick the stencils and newspapers on, making sure that the primary image is protected from random spray paint.

<–the weapon of choice for vandals worldwide

After that’s done, it’s a simple matter of spray painting over the stencils and making sure you try as much as possible not to make a mess.  There are instruction on the spray can, which I totally ignore.  It’s just a little ironic that the act of cutting the stencils took almost a day and the actual “painting” took maybe 5 minutes.  Life’s weird that way.

<-5 minutes later…

<– Voila! but it’s not quite done yet.

At this point the painting’s pretty much finished, but I feel like it’s lacking something, si I stencil a few more “accent” images, including a stylized signature that I’ll be painting on the bottom right corner.

<–The final product

And there you go.  I am now the semi-proud owner of a mixed media work that I have absolutely no idea what to do with.  Tomorrow, reflections, lessons, and a sneak preview at the next painting.

Acrylic transfer/mixed media tutorial part 1

This is my first attempt at a tutorial of any kind, so bear with me. Over the last holy weekend I had 5 days of vacation, so i thought that I’d put it to good use by creating a painting. I was inspired by this article on PCIJ about political dynasties, and while reading it I had the image of a political machine, literally an old clunking gears and pulleys machine clunking out winners. So I googled up old machine and found this image, which thought was perfect:

So I had my machine. But now I wanted to give it a halftone effect, just for kicks, and remembered the software called rasterbator which takes any images and converts it to a huge halftone copy spanning as many sheets of paper as you want. Just a quick plug, these rasterbator guys are AWESOME. They put together this software and are giving it out for free and all they ask is that you show them what you’ve made with it. So rad. So anyway I’ve got the idea and the image and the rasterbator download, it’s time to buy materials.

<-The rasterbated image.

Now I’m no professional artiste, and this is the first time I’ve really painted in a LONG time, so I’m trying to do everything on the cheap. First off, I need a surface to paint on. Canvas is ok, but expensive if you want the really big kind, and I wanted the really big kind. Plus, I love the texture of wood, so I went to the local hardware store and bought plywood (they come in one size 4×8 feet but I had the guy there cut it in half so I’d have two 4×4 pieces), some white latex acrylic paint, thalo green latex acrylic paint, acrytex (think of it as ink that you use to color the white latex. el cheapo), acrylic emulsion, some paintbrushes, and thinner. All in all I think I spent around 1500 pesos, which isn’t too bad.

<-the materials

Now I wanted to use an acrylic transfer effect, which simply explained is the process of transferring a photocopied image onto an acrylic latex medium. There is expensive acrylic medium specially made to do this but again I am el cheapo so i try to do it with acrylic latex paint. The gist of the process is this. Photocopy the image you want to transfer to the medium (acrylic latex paint). Paint over the image, then paste it onto the surface (the wood). Rub against the back of the iamge some so that it gets into good contact with the surface, wait for it to dry, then peel it off to see the image magically appears on the paint.

fig1.1 it’s pasted.

fig1.2 I peel it off…painfully.

Unfortunately, life’s not that easy. You literally have to rub the paper off with your fingers little by little, trying to make sure you have enough pressure to get the paper off but not so much so that the acrylic itself comes off, taking the print with it, like so:

<-FUCK!

Unfortunately, this is bound to happen, and I don’t know of any way to make sure it doesn’t. I just tell myself it adds to the “street art” effect and push on, until I get this:

<-after a hard day’s work.

The annoying thing is that no matter how hard you try, there will be little paper fabrics still sticking to the image. If you try to get them off you rub off the image itself, so you’re stuck in a lose lose situation. I found that soaking a sponge in water and scrubbing off the paper that way helps a little, but you have to be really careful you don’t fuck up huge swaths of the image. When the paper fabrics dry they take a lot of the black out of the print, so the solution I came up with is to simply paint of the image and the wood itself with a clear acrylic emulsion. The emulsion “wets” the paper strands, making the image look much darker. When it dries, it will maintain that “wet look” to a certain point, and give your wood a glossy look to it, as well as waterproofing it some. Just be careful what brushes you use, because the cheap ass brushes I used shed hair like a sick dog.

<- tada! all shiny and black!

Ok, that ends part 1 of the tutorial. I’m hungry and i’m gonna go have dinner now. part 2 tomorrow. Maybe.

The squid and the whale movie review

It’s kind of hard to share exactly what makes a movie like “The Squid and the Whale” so good because it doesn’t exemplify the typical Hollywood bombast that most people expect, ie big stars, big explosions, and big stories.  This movie is the antithesis of all that, being a short movie about a dysfunctional family that’s just trying to get through life as best as they can while dealing with a divorce.  It exposes the flaws and weaknesses of human nature while at the same time celebrating in tiny, measured amounts, its nobility as well.

Slice of life movies like this may never make big money in the box office, but they’re certainly well worth watching and learning from.  At the very least you’ll feel relieved that you life isn’t as fucked up as theirs.

Flickr sidebar ressurectd

Just a quick update, the Flickr widget is back with a vengeance, and features pics of my street art hunting romp through UP Diliman.  I’ll write a much more detailed post about this soon, but till then, feel free to scroll down to check out the flickr widget and check out my Flickr account while you’re at it.

Musiq Soulchild’s LuvanMusiq

 

If you’re tired of listening to JT and Pharell and you want some light RnB tunes to carry you through the day, I present to you Musiq Soulchild.  He isn’t revolutionary  by any means and will probably remind you of a host of other musicians , but his sweet, soulful music is just good enough to make you want to bob your head and maybe ask someone out on a date.  For real.

Half Nelson movie review

 

This is the kind of movie to watch on a lazy summer day with a coke and some chips in hand.  It isn’t a blockbuster by any means, but a thoughtful, contemplative movie on how people deal with their lives, how they struggle to overcome the pitfalls they find themselves in.  It isn’t  a grand story about redemption, but just a story about a teacher looking to inspire his students while at the same time being a druggie fighting to pull his life together when he’s not in class.  Half Nelson may not have entertained me as much as TMNT did, but it certainly had its moments, and is one of my favorite movies of this year.  Or last year, since it came out in 2006.

If this is the Sony Ericsson K850, it’s really, really fugly.

So apparently gadget hounds have been slavering at the mouth to get any kind of word on the successor to SE’s K800 and K810 cybershot cameras, with the K810 being just a slimmed down version of the K800.  The rumored K850 is to have a 5MP camera onboard, which has both photography enthusiasts and cellphone addicts chomping at the bit to get a look at what might be their all-in-one gadget.

Numerous pictures have been floating around the web recently, but this one is supposed to be the “real deal”.  All I got to say is that if that’s what the next cybershot phone looks like, leave me out of it cause that is one ugly looking machine.   Although they did at least get red of the troublesome “trigger” navigation button.

More Sansa View info

Just in case you wanted more info on the Sansa View like me, here’s an interview with Sansa product manager Le Tran.  The release date for the view in the US is May 2007, so if any of you are itching to get your hands on one it’s time to start pinching those pennies.

HAPPY HOLY WEEKEND EVERYBODY!!!!

 

First off, to the people who regularly visit this site, I’m sorry I’ve been away for days.  I’ve taken a mini art sabbatical to work on a painting, and it’s really eating up my time.  It’s also sort of refreshing to go out and do something in the “real world” that’s tangible, but I assure you I won’t be abandoning this blog anytime soon.

Well then, in homage to my project, I’ll just give you kids a quick link to an interview with noted street artist Josh MacPhee, where he talks about street art and how and why he does it as a means to expand people’s horizons.  We live in a world where vitually every bit of space we see is up for sale, and street art aims to take it back and give people’s eyes an alternative to the latest shampoo ad.

If you can dig where I’m coming from, clink on the link for more revolutionary talk.

TMNT omg so good!

 

This is going to sound odd, but I think that TMNT is the most enjoyable movie I’ve watched in 2007.  It’s just that good.  For everyone who was bashing me about not really liking 300 all that much, I present to you the case for a good action comedy flick.  It’s got the right amount of humor, drama, action, and just a tinge of romance thrown into the mix.

What really draws you in about the movie is how fleshed out the characters are.  Donatello’s the genius doing tech support to earn a living, Michaalangelo’s earning money being a clown, Raphael’s the hotheaded borther doing vigilante work at night, and Leonardo…well, Leo’s off doing training in south america or something, becoming the “ghost of so and so forest” and pulling a batman on April O’Neil.  The sense of family is as real as a CGI movie can make it, and I totally buy the fact that Raphael would have issues when Leonardo comes back to lead team.  Oh and a sort of spoiler alert, things get really exciting once tempers start flaring and we finally find out who’s the better fighter.

The plot was semi ludicrous, I didn’t buy that the Turtles would all go to pieces just because Leo left, but it’s ok.  I LOVED this movie.  The Turtles have become relevant again in a way the revamped cartoon series never achieved, and towards the end there were hints of a sequel.  As long as it’s done by the same group who put this together, I’m on the TMNT bandwagon.

WATCH IT NOW NOW NOW!

Smurfs spotted in Lord of the Rings Online

It’s April Fool’s kids, and in the gaming industry that means it’s time to pull out the pranks!  Lord of the Rings Online developer turbine released a cute press release today (or was it yesterday) that featured the introduction of a small, hobbit-like race with blue skin called the Smeorufolc.  That on its own was hilarious enough for me, but for those who need to know more, check out the deets after the jump.

A little gadget love for the kids

So now that the market for teen and above targetted PMP (portable media player)s is saturated, it looks like companies are hopping on the kiddie PMP bandwagon.  With kids these days much smarter and in the know that you were back in the day, they’re sure to pick up these gadgets even before their folks do.

The Aigo F989 is a sweet looking machine that i actually wouldn’t mind getting my hands on, as it features a 2.4″ QVGA Screen, plays SFW and AVI at 30 frames/sec, and has a built-in 1.3MP camera.  The one feature  truly dig though, is the e-book reader, something which my creative Zen:M unfortunately and inexplicably does not do.

The Aigo MP-E817 looks like it’s more gamer centric, what with the crossbar, and sports a 2.4″ QVGA and also plays video (SFW and AVI files), has a mini-SD card slot and comes in 1Gb and 2GB flavors.

Check em out here.