Updated CV
This post is from Sol.
Updated my cv.. and sorry about not updating this RSS feed for ages. Visit the site for craploads of updates.
Why? (part I)
Every once in a while the Internet™ provides you with a "Why?" moment. Today, I opened a link from random and, by far, it has been the top 1 jaw-drop event of the week so far.
Why?
Ok - so far so good. I have ClickToFlash installed, so annoying Flash content is disabled by default. It's quite a useful tool. You can select on which websites Flash is enabled with no need to click, e.g. YouTube or other heavily Flash-oriented sites.
Here, when the page opened, I had zero idea what the article was about. The little Flash boxes on top of the article gave no hint whatsoever - yet I decided to click on them.
What? Why?
Right. Okay. What?
The title is in Flash.
The subtitle is in Flash.
Why?
To go further into the absurdity of this, playing around with the "ps" command reveals following facts:
Before loading the article titles - Safari WebKit plugin process (which contains all Flash content when loaded), uses 992 kb of real actual physical system memory.
After clicking on the titles and loading the useless stupid Flash content: 20796 kb.
People. If you want to make our lives harder - please - just go ahead and make some .png files or whatever. Preferably, use text for text. Use headings for headings. Don't go wasting our precious memory.
Here's a sample of a heading:
Heading
Subheading
And this is normal paragraph text. Extremely simple.
If you can't live with the set of fonts that normally comes bundled with your Windows, use images. Or SVG, I guess it could load your fonts somehow. Thank you.
Assembly 2010 stuff
This post is from Random stuff. For commenting, click on the title.
Assembly 2010 came and went. I landed an entry to both Graphics and Fast graphics competitions where the entries resulted to places 11. (Graphics competition) and 1. (Fast graphics competition)
Fast graphics entry
The fast graphics competition had a timelimit of 1,5h used for the piece and submission of the entry to the system. It also had a theme that it has to follow. This time the theme was “You’re holding it wrong.” The obvious iPhone themes crossed my mind but luckily I decided not to go that way and tried to come up with something at least a bit more original. I suppose not starting right away with the first idea and even sketching a few was a good choice this time. I used first 30min without starting the work at all and that left me approx. 1h to complete the painting which I pretty much used all the way. And like I said it ended up first in the competition. And to lend a bit of thoughts from my old pal, who ended up 3rd in the same competition, it worked well because it was indicating what would happen right after the moment instead of just showing it straight on.
Imagination takes over
I used two evenings on this piece. It wasn’t really in any way a sweat-and-tears effort. More likely a good mood doodling-kind of effort instead. Also I had a pile of errands to run for at the same time so I didn’t really polish or finish it. First the idea started from a boy fishing at night-time and the screen would be split to underwater and ground-view straight from the side where the underwater would be what the imagination of the boy would suggest (at least when I was a small boy the dark water was a bit scary at nights. =) The original composition might have worked to some extent but not really in this kind of competition as it wouldn’t be dynamic in any way. So the composition made a bit of a perspective twist and after a while I ended up in to the layout seen in the final version. Also the boy turned out to something else too. I think the original idea is not that present anymore. But anyway – the voyage was fun.
The Graphics competition had a great quality in the entries. There was 28 entries in the whole competition and 22 of the passed from the jury to the screen. One of them were disqualified after that due to copyright issues (or a rip-off to be more exact.) I ended up 11th but am not in any way disappointed by that. It’s quite there where it belongs anyway. At least when the two first ones were very different but still very high quality entries. Although otherwise the ending results looked a bit messed up for me.
The event was great again. No surprises but good quality demos and intros, friends, meeting people, hanging out – all fun. Thanks to all!
Assembly 2010
This post is from peeba.gfxile.net. For commenting, click on the title.
Another year, another Assembly demo party. I participated, rather expectedly, to graphics and fast graphics competitions. Although my graphics entry picture was used in a Nokia N900 real wild demo too (Derelict by Hedelmae), I didn’t specifically draw it for the demo. It just happened to suit the theme of a friend’s demo nicely so I gave it to them to use 
The theme of this year’s fast graphics compo was “you’re holding it wrong” and the time limit was 1h 30min as usual. There were surprisingly few iPhone puns. The conspiray theorists might wonder if Nokia’s role as a sponsor of the party had an effect on the selection of the theme! Hmm!! 
Anyways. In fast graphics, I placed third with my picture called “herp derp” and my “Komrade Kong” in the graphics competition came in second. I think I was the most frequent visitor to the stage this year with my three appearances since Hedelmae’s wild demo placed second as well.
Both of the pictures were drawn in Photoshop. This time around I actually spent pretty much the entirety of the time allowed for the fast graphics compo and I’m pretty pleased with the picture myself. “Komrade Kong” didn’t take much time either. I think it probably took around 8 hours total, spread over two days. I first wanted to draw a King Kong -style gorilla rampaging in a city, throwing a tram and stuff but after a little bit of sketching I realized I wanted to draw a squid as well so I had no other option but to submerge the gorilla! That way I also got rid of the pesky time consuming perspective drawing of the town too. The idea of the military uniform and the cigar was given to me by a friend, no doubt inspired by the great fictional movie in the Simpsons called: “Hail to the Chimp”. Or “Apina Pressana” as the delightful translation goes.
TTV photography experiment
This post is from peeba.gfxile.net. For commenting, click on the title.
I’ve had my grandfather’s old Yashica A twin lens reflex camera laying around for a while now. It’s a nice camera. A little too nice actually since the medium format photos you can take with it are too high quality to be worth the hassle of developing the films for and scanning them not to mention the cumbersome filming process itself. If I want to work my ass off for my photos, the photos better look distinctive from any modern camera!
But hey, the Yashica has a lovely ground glass viewfinder that is peered from above and boy does it look trippy. It’s even got these extra guide line helpers in case if you want to use 35mm film instead of the square aspect ratio medium format film. Lots of grime and dust has also polluted the mirror and the glass of the viewfinder. Awesome artifacts. So I built this TtV (“through the viewfinder”) rig on it from cereal box cardboard and some black duct tape to mount my digital camera above the viewfinder. With the help of a few close up filters and a 50mm lens I can now shoot through the viewfinder with relative ease and end up with digital images that ooze of analog sex. Hot.
Consumer-quality Photobooks Part I.
This post is from Random stuff. For commenting, click on the title.
Remember how just a ten years back we still were used to get loads of photos from print and then slip them to very uncomfortable slots or glued or slipped the corners in holders? Of course it was nice and memorable that way but I suppose nowadays people start to be content on having most of the pictures as low resolution versions in their hard-drives (with no backups.) From somewhere around the start of this millennium there has been a possibility to do those family albums relatively easily with a bearable price-tag using photo service providers with dedicated pagination applications with a focus on high-level controls. I did my first one in 2005 using services from Ifi, which is currently known as Ifolor, and back then both the paper and printing quality was low enough that I wasn’t keen of ordering more for any purpose. That was of course 5 years a go from now and I do not have knowledge on the current quality yet as the whole system in their print has changed as far as I recall.
Recently I got a bundle from a chocolate package to get photobook for a very small price and that got me involved again. The bundle was from TicTacPhoto and the price was spot on to do something fun. So we compiled a book of cat-photos for kids where we included all our own and some of our friends cats we had taken photos of. The software they provide for pagination is not too good quality. It does not handle other formats than .jpg and it is a bit slow as it can not handle more than maximum of 12.5% from my CPU power. Also the system and templates for layout were OK but not very good. Very slow to use in any case. Although we got it done in couple of hours and when we finally received the book the quality was OK. At least a lot better than the one 5 years back and we all liked it a lot. So later on I loaded my family-trip photos from last summer and did an another book but more about that when I receive the physical book itself.
Also that spawned an zeal to complete another one and I tried to find more about those services in Finland. There seems to be loads of it but my first on the line to test is kuvakirja.fi which is a site from Fotoyks. I created a very similar book from a summer-trip that I ordered from TicTacPhoto: ~60 pages and landscape layout. The software they provide for the layouting is easier to use, faster and has more features than the one TicTacPhoto provides. But still it could be a lot better and faster anyway. (I command you software developers: whatever you do, consider multithreading! =) Of course the material is from a different trip so they’re not straightly comparable.
I will post more about the results and services later with some pictures and as well will try out more of these services. The TicTacPhoto and Fotoyks are very similiar in cost. Next ones in the testing queue are Ifolor and Blurb. Feel free to suggest some.
Sculptris test drive
This post is from peeba.gfxile.net. For commenting, click on the title.
Sculptris is a free 3D sculpting program developed by an insane Swedish programmer. Even though obviously it isn’t quite as laden with features like Mudbox or ZBrush are, it’s already a pretty sweet tool. And most importantly, it fulfills the first rule of sculpting software: it’s loads of fun!
Here’s a severed male head floating in space that I modeled… But hey, at least it’s not bald this time!
Uneton48, Realtime portfolio project, summer begins to approach.
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Time passes. I started creating a realtime portfolio which runs realtime. More about that later when I really get it to a even first draft stage. Technical side is rolling already thanks to the versatility and ease of Unity3D.
Another 48 hour film project completed just a week a go. Boy does working around the clock multitasking directing, lighting, filming and acting deplete the energy quite fast! Was close to health-meltdown in the end. Although we did run out of time in the end – it was a project full of learning-moments, thoughts of processes and fun. We didn’t of course go with too serious of a goal as we are not trying to get break in the industry but still it was interesting to try multi-cam full-HD filming with two 5D Mark II’s and audio recorded separately with a good mic. Also we had a bunch of not-too-pro lights and took some time using them too. Although we didn’t have too much time to play with them to achieve something extraordinary but managed to pinch some experience out of them anyway.
Edited a bunch of photos from January-March. Some of it in: Winter 2009-2010 album.
And here’s a selection again:
Zen Bound 2 for iPad
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For all you seemingly huge amount of iPad owners over there on the other side of the globe… I will shamelessly advertise anything I have been involved with…
ZB2 for iPad is now available:
yay. Which reminds me to update my projects page with some stuff. =)
Muses of Helicon and Delta as Indicated
This post is from peeba.gfxile.net. For commenting, click on the title.
I’ve been spending some more quality time with Ableton Live recently. Here’s two recent songs of mine:
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Delta as Indicated. Downtempo electro.
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Muses of Helicon. Goa trance.
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