Everything, it seems, must end sometime. So too with mlingojones.com. This site, although I love it dearly, has reached the end of its days. Fear not, however, for I do have a new site to enjoy: Hexnut, a more professional establishment in the style of sites such as Stopdesign and SimpleBits.
I could go into detail about why I chose to close mlingojones.com just to start a new site, but there's already a lengthy explanation at the new site. This just feels like the right thing to do - change was always a constant with this site, and hopefully this last change will mark a period of things being steadier.
mlingojones.com exposed me to a lot of new things, and it has been an incredibly positive experience. Thanks so much to those who kept up with the site (even when I didn't). You can catch me on Hexnut; I'll still remember you :) .
Goodbye, everyone, and thanks for a wonderful year and a half of blogging!
Posted on February 12, 2008 11:07 PM
Recently Randall Munroe (author of the webcomic xkcd) wrote a blag entry about creating a ball pit in his room. I decided it would be fun to plan one out for myself.
In the blag entry is a link to a calculator that helps you figure out how many balls you'll need (and how much it will cost) to make a ball pit of a certain size. After measuring my room, I decided my ball pit would be 5' x 5', and 2' deep. I originally wanted it to be 4' deep, but then I realized just how deep that really is. The 2' wasn't arbitrary, though: it's the height of my bed, which would be used as a wall to contain the balls.
Mr. Munroe suggested crush-proof balls, which can be found here. I took the suggestion of the calculator site and used 74% packing efficiency, which came out to 565 balls. I added a pack of 500 balls and a pack of 100 on the Tinker Tots site, which came out to $134, not including shipping.
The other problem I had was containing the balls. I had planned to use my bed to keep them contained on one side and the corner of my room for the other two sides, which left one side unaccounted for. I needed a 5' x 2' wall to contain the balls on that side. My first instinct was to look at those pet gates, but none of them were wide enough. A couple of friends pointed me to these sort of stackable cubbies (the cubby side, obviously, would face outward). I could put together as many as I wanted, and the dimensions more or less exactly fit my proposed ball pit. For a more sturdy way to keep them together, my friend pointed me to these tie wraps, which seems to be the right choice since Mr. Munroe used them for his ball pit (look closely at the pictures and you can see tie wraps holding them together).
My remaining problem is how to attach the cubbies to my wall and my bed. I'm thinking those screws with the eyes at the end, which would be tie-wrapped to the cubbies.
Oh, and the last remaining problem is that certain restrictions (read: parents) prevent me from building this where I live now. When I get my own place, I'll look back here and actually build one.
Posted on December 9, 2007 2:02 PM
So, during my latest bout of technological splurging, I happened across a tablet. Not a tablet PC, mind you - just a straight graphics tablet by Wacom. A Wacom Intuos3 6x8 tablet, to be precise.
Now, unlike so many of my other purchases, this one has value. Value! Seriously, though, as an artist whose primary interest is in digital arts, it's been frustrating to not have a way to transcribe my physical works into a digital medium. Any drawings I wanted to color digitally would have to be inked and scanned, at which point I'd have to fiddle around with the contrast and do some shady business with the magic wand and lasso tools, and then I could finallyget to coloring a rough piece that didn't end up looking so hot. This tablet changes things. I can ink on the computer (still figuring out the best way to do that). I didn't have much luck during a half-hour tryout of Painter, but hopefully we'll be able to change that. All in all, I have big plans for it, so let's see where it goes.
Posted on December 7, 2007 12:09 AM
So on Thanksgiving (Black Friday, really) I did something I really probably shouldn't have done, and splurged on games. It was only two games, but the price was still around $100. I bought Hellgate: London and Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. (As a side note, whoever decides on the titles of games in general needs to learn a thing or two about colon use. And overuse). Anyway, I haven't really played either game yet.
I realize my laptop won't be able to play the newest, coolest games with the best graphics because of the video card (Geforce Go 8600M GS) but it should still be able to cope with what I bought, especially SupCom. My video card meets the minimum system requirements for each game, and I believe it even meets the recommended requirements for SupCom, provided an 8600M GS is better than a Geforce 6800. Despite this, both games were running incredibly slow, even with the graphics settings turned all the way down. My friend Ankit suggested that it was a driver issue.
As primarily a UNIX user - and more specifically, a Linux and Mac user - I'm used to having my updates all in one place. In Fedora all I do is type "sudo yum update" into the command line and it fixes me up with the latest updates. In OS X it does it automatically (I'm sure I could do this in Fedora too, but laziness is a direct contender with efficiency, and it often wins out). With Windows, this apparently isn't the case. I've been regularly running Microsoft updates, but that hasn't updated the video card drivers, which my friend tells me that I'm supposed to update before installing a game.
I then tried the HP update application, which told me that I was missing a critical update: an update to the update application. After spending a few minutes getting my head around that, I ran the update application, which told me that my software and drivers were up to date. What? I ran it again, hoping it would somehow find an update this time (it didn't). Also, at some point I got this error message (luckily, the Internet wasn't busy, so the window loaded quickly. I guess the tubes weren't too clogged).
Finally I decided to download a driver update directly from NVIDIA, which I did. The actual install process was long and confusing, and it took a while for the installer to get between screens. There was a good 15 minutes of the install window just showing a repeating background featuring the NVIDIA logo before anything actually popped up.
It's now almost 2 in the morning and I haven't played either game. Hopefully when I get home tomorrow I'll be able to. Also, for anyone wondering why I vastly prefer OS X and Linux to Windows, you now have one of many reasons.
Posted on November 26, 2007 1:24 AM
Today I was playing around in Photoshop and discovered a neat little way to make edges look kind of ripped, like paper (hence the entry title).
Create a new document (whatever size you like), background white. Make a rectangle smaller than your document.View image.
Run the image through a glass filter (Filter -> Distort -> Glass). Set the texture to frosted, the distortion to 5, and the smoothness to 4. This creates the distortion that will ultimately lead to the unevenness in the rips. View image.
Take the filtered image and put it through the Crosshatching filter (Filter -> Brush Strokes -> Crosshatching). Stroke length should be set to 15, sharpness to 0, and strength to 15. This makes the ripped-looking edges, but they're a bit blurry. The next step "sharpens" them up and gives us out finished product. View image.
Finally, run the image through the Scatter filter (Filter -> Brush Strokes -> Scatter). Set spray radius to 4 and smoothness to 5. The edges now look a bit more ripped, and there we have it! Ripped edges in Photoshop. View image.
You can play around with the settings on the filters to make some really cool stuff. I particularly like playing around with the settings on the Scatter filter.
Posted on November 5, 2007 11:46 PM
