Brushie Brushie Buffy

January 23rd, 2010

Brushie Brushie Brushie

New server

January 20th, 2010

I set up a new VPS server last night with Debian + mysql + lighttpd to host all my php stuff (which so far has been on a shared hosting server, which is horrible).

Now this wordpress is running on the new server (Serenity) and it’s alot faster, and I’ll be moving 4-5 other wordpress installs over to this new server in the next couple of days.

That way I can do complete wordpress backups automatically for all wordpress installations and a full mysql dump automatically :)

Star Trek Online Open Beta

January 12th, 2010

Yay, tomorrow Star Trek Online goes into open beta :)

I’ve played around a bit in the closed beta, and so far I’m impressed, the space combat is fun and action packed, and the Ground combat is a bit like World of Warcraft, only more action, more interesting quests (no grinding, while waiting for drops) and the Fleet actions (Large open instances) were pretty awesome :)


I’ll miss my Andorian captain, who was wiped with all the other closed beta characters today:(

Givi monokey V46 review

December 30th, 2009

I got a Givi monokey V46N for Christmas, so I thought I should share a few pictures and initial thoughts on this box.

The box itself is great, and much bigger than my older boxes, however my helmet is quite large so there is no way this box would fit 2 of them. But it could probably fit two smaller full face helmets.

To attach the backrest you have to tape on a template, and drill two holes in the box, and the brake lights looked kinda complicated to install (for me at least).

The internal document holder

I’ve seen on forums and stuff that several people have had problems with this, the locking mechanism (see image above) kinda tricks you into believing that you are supposed to squeeze it someway, or even to remove the center pin.

The way you’re supposed to do this by the way is just to pull (using quite a bit of force) on the red plastic around the lock, to open it. Maybe I’ll put up a video when I get my new camera.

Sci-fi actors in 24 season 7

December 27th, 2009

Seeing, that my last post about 24: Sci-fi actors in 24 season 6 was so popular, I decided to make another one for season 7 which I just started (only see 7 episodes so far).

Robert Carlyle (Redemption)

24: Carl Benton
Star Gate Universe: Dr. Nicholas Rush

Tony Todd

24: General Benjamin Juma
Star Gate SG-1: Lord Haikon
Andromeda: Captain Fehdman Metis
Star Trek Voyager: Unnamed Hirogen hunter
Star Trek DS9: Jake Sisko as adult in The Visitor
Star Trek TNG/DS9: Kurn

John Billingsley

24: Michael Latham
Star Trek Enterprise: Dr. Phlox

Kurtwood Smith

24: Senator Blaine Mayer
Star Trek Voyager: Annorax in Year of Hell

Jeffrey Nordling

24: Larry Moss
Star Trek DS9: Thana Los in Past Prologue

Mark Kiely

24: Edward Vossler
Star Trek Voyager: Lasca in Non Sequitur

Nick Toth

24: Edwin Ross
Babylon 5: Exeter in The Deconstruction of Fallen Stars

Annie Wersching

24: Renee Walker (seriously hot FBI agent)
Star Trek Enterprise: Liana in Oasis

Colm Feore

24: Henry Tailor
Battlestar Galactica: President Adar (First episode only)

Bob Gunton

24: Ethan Kanin
Star Trek TNG: Capt. Benjamin Maxwell (in The Wounded)

Ryan Cutrona

24: Admiral John Smith
Babylon 5: Sgt. Major Plug in GROPOS

John Rosenfeld

24: Kevin Aldridge
Star Trek Enterprise: Mark Latrelle in Silent Enemy

It’s also worth noting that co-executive producers and writers of 24 Redemption and season 7 is none other than Brannon Braga and Manny Coto, noted writers/producers from Star Trek TNG / Voyager / Enterprise.

Home made Christmas tree

December 13th, 2009

Stacy made a hanging (ferretproof) Christmas tree today, I on the other hand spent the day sawing, hammering and working on the gift for mom (which I can’t post pictures of currently because of security reasons)

tree_dark

The mexican christmas gift standoff

December 11th, 2009

I hate Christmas presents.

When I was young, Christmas presents where the best, but now as I’m older (and bitter) the whole concept strikes me as flawed.

  • MAG – “mutual assured gifting”
    By receiving a gift, the rules of society dictates that you must return the gesture with a gift of your own, so if a person gives you something, you are pretty much forced to give something back.
  • Mexican Standoff
    If you give someone a gift one year, you HAVE to give them a gift next year (or else they will wonder why you suddenly stopped giving gifts), this combined with the  principle from the point above causes a Mexican standoff in which neither parties can stop giving gifts (unless both agrees on it, and bringing up “I don’t want to give you a gift this year” might be considered awkward for some people).
  • Net Value
    By the same social mechanism as mentioned in the first point, you will feel bad if you give someone a cheap or bad gift, if they give you something expensive or good. This means that to avoid causing yourself or other people stress and feelings of guilt, the gifts exchanged must be of approximately equal value. For gifting to work optimally you will need to agree upon in advance a price for the gift, to avoid over- or under-gifting.
  • Keeping track
    My memory is very selective, which means I can remember all ~700 Star Trek episodes but none of the gifts I gave or received last Christmas, so in order to maintain the delicate balance of gift values I would have to keep track of all the gifts given and received for every year.
  • The gift itself
    When you were young any 10$ brightly colored plastic toy was great and all gifts were welcomed.. But then what happened? The toys stopped coming, instead boring crap like socks, boxers, deodorant, picture frames, ties, shirts, etc..? I’m not fucking retarded, I have the ability to go to the store and get myself a pair of socks if the need be. The worst of all is the knick knacks, ornaments and other objects with no function, they rarely fit your taste and only makes you say “wtf, if this person thinks I’ll love these brass statues of pineapple, that person hardly know me well enough to justify a gift in the first place”.
  • Surprise gifters!
    This is the absolute worst, some ninny you haven’t seen in a year just popping up at the door with a gift and a big smile. WTF? Why is this person you haven’t seen or talked to in ages standing in your doorway like a complete muppet? You had no idea this bastard was going to give you a gift, so obviously you have nothing for him/her. So what do you do? you just pretend you haven’t gotten or wrapped that persons gift yet and that you will deliver it later, followed by an agonizing trip to the city to desperately find some last minute gift in the worst Christmas rush imaginable. That’s a nice stressful way to spend the holiday.
  • The generic gift
    If you don’t want to add to your health problems with the stress of getting a gift for the surprise gifter mentioned above, you’ve probably got one or two generic gifts on standby out of sight of the front door. This gift is wrapped up and ready to after the 3 seconds it takes you to write down the name of the schmuck in your hallway. The gift itself is so generic you could give it to anyone. Usually it’s something totally lame like a box of chocolate, flowers or Christmas ornaments (now there is a gift that certainly pisses me off).
  • The solution
    Since you probably don’t have a clue what that person wants or needs, you might as well just give the person some cash (don’t buy a goddamn gift card forcing the person to shop at a particular place), and if you want to adhere to the “Net value” principle above, you should both give the exact same amount (unless you want to account for difference in net income). Exchanging equal sums of money can be simplified into doing nothing, which in the end results in the best Christmas gift one can give: “a little bit of peace and quiet”.

Well, now that I’m done ranting about the horrors of Christmas gifts I can go to bed.. After all I have to wake up early tomorrow and complete MY gift shopping, I’m down to only two people I have to buy a gift to, so feel free to envy me (preferably around noon tomorrow, it will keep me warm while I’m going to the store).

Swedish police sketch

December 10th, 2009

Wow, I just saw this in the paper, apparently the Swedish police uses paint to catch killers.

fantomtegning_1164979c

This picture looks like something made by Ivo Caprino (Norwegian puppeteer).

Stargate universe DOES suck

December 7th, 2009

A while back I made a post about the new Stargate Universe show, a show which I like most other Stargate fans expected to be a Science Fiction show.

At first I was skeptical, but hang in there because many shows start slow. But now I’ve just seen episode 10, and I must say, this show DOES SUCK.. It’s like they tried to copy Battlestar Galactica + Lost + Grey’s Anatomy. SGU is not a science fiction show, it’s basically Grey’s Anatomy or Desperate Housewives in a dark studio with the occasional boring trip trough a stargate to a lifeless world where they do nothing at all.

sga

I was hoping the show would get better, but it’s just getting worse by every episode (except for episode 8 which reminded me a little bit about science fiction).

I will be very surprised if this huge pile of crap gets renewed for a second season.

I have no problems with people making drama shows, what I do have a problem with is that they change a sci-fi show into a bad drama show in a desperate hope to get stargate fans to watch it. Anyway I think I’ve watched my last episode of this crap, I gave it a fair chance but I’d rather watch SG-1 or Atlantis again.

Video editing software

November 26th, 2009

I enjoy the occasional editing and creation of videos. Recently I’ve been making a cinema commercial for the WSPA organization here in Trondheim (“Dyrebeskyttelsen”), but choosing the right video editing software is not trivial. For me it needed to have good tools for panning, zooming, cropping, masking and support lots of video tracks. Also the ability to work with HD, color correction, text effects, exporting to a sensible video format is a must. I tried out 4 different video editing software products and wrote a small review of them:

Sony Vegas
I really like Sony Vegas, but it’s limit of 4 video tracks is extremely annoying! I could get an unlimited number of tracks if I could afford 700$ for the Professional edition, however as my video editing is mostly on a hobby basis that’s not an option.

I think the 4 track limit is moronic, you just need to have 2 videos + some text and a picture and you’re maxed out.. There are ways around this by rendering your 4 tracks into a movie, then importing that movie in a new project but then it’s a nightmare to change stuff which you do all the time while editing. Great software, but way to expensive for 4+ tracks.

Pinnacle Studio Ultimate
So I decided to try another piece of software, Pinnacle studio ultimate, a hefty 1.9 gig download for the trial version. This proved to be the biggest disappointment since Star Trek 11. First of all the software is overly simplistic and lacks lots of features found in Vegas, it is cumbersome (does not allow for fast cross-fading video/audio and other neat functions like Vegas does). But the worst part.. It’s limited to 3 (THREE) video tracks? WTF? I could not uninstall it fast enough, and now my computer feels kinda dirty..

Adobe Premiere / Premiere Elements
Wow, it’s even more expensive than Sony Vegas Professional, 800$ And the fact that their webpage is a mess and I have to register for a trial means I won’t even bother testing it. However! at the time of writing this I see there is also a “Premiere Elements” that according to Wikipedia allows for unlimited tracks for 100$ so I had to give it a try.
1.2 gb download, but it went very fast, installing took a while and required a reboot.. The program itself was not very intuitive and the trial made a HUGE ugly watermark on all the videos AND all images in that video. It was also horribly slow, background rendering running for like a minute with just a background image in one track and a moving image on the other track. The program also locked up twice in the hour I was testing it.. Not impressed.

Cyberlink PowerDirector 8
Another more reasonably priced piece of software (70-100$) which is supposed to be able to handle 16 tracks, and I honestly can’t see myself having more than 16 objects visible at the same time any time soon, so I guess I’ll have to try this one as well. The trial version was on a slow server so took a long time to download the software despite it’s small 235 MB size.
I did however not get to try this software for reasons stated below.

Magix Movie Edit Pro
Unlike the other 3 products mentioned, I hadn’t heard of this one until recently. The trial version was only around 200 MB compared to Premiere and Pinnacle which were 1,2 and 1,9 GB. But the websites promise of unlimited tracks and a fairly low price of 90$ made me check this one out. Like powerDirector it was on a slow server, and took a while to download.
Fast simple install, and user interface is nice and simple. Using keyframes to do changes/motion/scaling, etc.. was very nicely done and easy to use, and the program was a pleasure to work with. My only complaint is that the preview of the video has very bad framerate (maybe it’s just because of my semi transparent video over an image), do detecting subtle changes in the video while editing could be extremely hard.

Conclusion
After being forced to abandon Sony Vegas I found that the best program for me (behaved most like Vegas, lots of functions and lots of tracks) was without a doubt Magix Movie Edit Pro, it’s a very nice piece of software which I will be buying before the trial is up. It’s stupid that when you buy the downloaded version you miss out on getting Vasco De Gama bundled with it, but that I can live without.