Growing Digital Grass

Okay, this is a small thing, but I liked it, so I'm gonna talk about how I did it. Nyeh.

Wife wanted a grass border for her blog. I poked around in Gimp for a while, learned a bit about paths, thought I'd do a half-dozen blade-shaped paths, create brushes out of them, and stamp a grass border. Learning about paths took up my mental energy last night, and I quit and went to bed.

Tonight, I thought about using Blender, and googled "blender grass". I found this tutorial that shows how to grow grass using particles. I followed it, mostly, but found a couple of twists. One was that using a Spot lamp didn't do too well for my purposes, as I wanted to scale the image down and repeat it, and the color variations didn't match too well on the sides. Second was that just scaling the plane from side to side skewed the grass blades, and scaling it on X & Y thinned out the particles too much.

So I changed the lamp from Spot to Sun (I accidentally tried Hemi, which looked awful), and instead of scaling the plane, duped it, ending up with 3 planes side-by-side, which looked much better. Changed the background to white, rendered, and saved the JPEG.

Then loaded the JPEG into Gimp, scaled it down a good bit, widened the canvas, and grabbed a chunk of grass that I wanted to duplicate. As I rect-selected it and hit copy, I just happened to notice that a brush was created from that selection. Very cool! So I switched to pencil mode, and "stamped" a row of grass, cropped it down to wide and not-high dimensions, and put it up on her blog.

FWIW, I grabbed the daffodil image (with CC permission) from Flickr and used Gimp on it as well, to create the image border and title text.

Yeah, having fun with graphics!

[Edit: Oh yeah, the border! Assume a Creative Commons-BY-SA license. Gimme sec, I'll figure out how to add it to the image...]

Grrr, Apple fail!

Apple just released an upgrade to the iPod Touch's OS. While it's free for the iPhone, it's $10 for the iPod Touch. Minor annoyance, that, but I suppose I can cope. After all, I'm not paying $700+/year for phone service, so I'm still saving money. So I fire up the iTunes store on my iPod. Not there. Not anywhere. Gotta go to iTunes to get it.

A little background: I run Linux. Apple doesn't like Linux; no iTunes for me. So that's my first complaint from back when I got my iPT: can't use it without iTunes, can't iTune w/o Win or OS X. Grrr. So I borrowed the iMac at work, and got my iPT turned on. From then on, I get most of what I listen to (i.e. podcasts) via the iPT's wireless connection. Plus I loaded up on free apps from the app store (The Weather Channel, Last.FM, Twitterific, etc.)

So then I wanted to put some videos onto the iPT, and broke down and started running Win XP in a virtual machine to be able to run iTunes. That worked well enough, and using Handbrake let me rip my DVDs into a format that the iPT can play. So far, so good.

Now I want to upgrade my O/S. I go to iTunes, and it says it can't install the new O/S until I upgrade iTunes to 8.2. Grrr, again. Okay, I upgrade. And I reboot. (This is Windows, after all.) Now can I upgrade? Okay, it downloads the upgrade, announces that it's backing up my iPT, announces that it's upgrading my iPT, then gives an error message. Something about an unknown error, go to this web page for more details. The details say to reboot Windows. I do so.

And now Windows doesn't see my iPT. At all. Doing a lsusb in Linux shows that it's plugged in, but Windows doesn't see it. And the iPT gives the original "I need iTunes" display. I reboot Windows a couple more times, with no luck.

Okay, fine. Since I got my iPT, we got a MacBook for Wife. I figure that if it doesn't work on Win XP, I'll plug it into the MacBook. MacBook sees the iPT, sees that it's hosed, restores the old O/S (2.2.1, I think?), then sees that I've purchased the 3.0 upgrade, downloads it again w/o complaint, and installs it, leaving me with a pristine iPT running 3.0. Success, perhaps?

I take the iPT back to my Win box, where my backup resides, and plug it in. It sees the iPT now, and gives me the option to load it up from the backup. I'm getting hopeful. I restore, things are looking good. Well, sort of; it's missing a few of my apps, but they're the ones I never use (SSH, TV.com, etc.) I'll deal with that later.

But all of my podcasts are gone. Maybe 60 or 70 eps of various shows that I've downloaded. A much larger Grrrr! So I'm done with messing with this Win XP VM. I plug into the MacBook again. And...

It proceeds to erase all of my apps! WTH!? Why on earth would it remove my apps (and their configuration) without giving me the chance to either stop it or validate them or something?! This is seriously bogus! And when I quit cursing Uncle Steve's lineage, and go to restore them, it knows that I've "paid" for these free apps, and offers to let me download them again "without paying". If you knew they were legit, why the !@#$ did you erase them to begin with? (And yes, I had logged in on the same iTunes account on the MacBook as I had on the Win box.)

All of this seems to be in the interest of Apple not letting me copy stuff that I own to places that they don't think I should copy them. Or, to rephrase, all of this seems to be Apple assuming that I'm a criminal and taking steps to punish me before I can prove myself innocent.

Feh. I'm wondering more and more what Android devices are out there, or what the state of Linux on the iPT has gotten to. This is *NOT* what should happen to someone playing by the rules.

Computer Treadmill

I spent the afternoon getting a new treadmill, for the purpose of making us a computer treadmill combination. Turned out, it was dirt easy.

We bought a ProForm Crosswalk 480. At slow speeds, it has a nice, quiet motor, and at Sears, it was only $500 or so. Initially, I was looking for a model that we could take the display off of, but the more I looked at this model of ProForm, the more I realized that we could just do away with the vertical bars entirely. The 480 has a cable that comes out the back of the unit, and the display (once removed from the upright stand) lays flat on a shelf (see the picture below), making it ideal for what we're doing.

We've had an Ikea computer desk for a year or more, and I forget the name of it, although I couldn't really find it on their website, so they may not make it any longer. From their current catalog, it looks a lot like the Fredrik line, as far as being adjustable, with the smaller shelves and all.

So the short of it is that we assembled the treadmill without the upright bars, connected the cable coming out of the treadmill to the display panel without threading it through the upright bar, and just put it on the lower shelf. We adjusted the height of the desktop to suit Wife (and although it's probably not optimal, 8-yr-old Daughter can use it without complaint, as seen below), and we're off and running. Or rather, walking.

Oh yeah, and since we don't need any features on the treadmill itself besides having it let you walk, we got away with a much cheaper model. Big win all the way around. Especially when you consider that a "properly made" model, (like the Steelcase Walkstation, for instance) costs 7-8 TIMES as much.

Weird Guitar Hero Problem

About a week ago, we started having a very strange problem with Guitar Hero 3. The guitar controller would work as far as going through the menus and starting to play a song, but once the song would start playing, even though we could see the fret buttons being pressed on the screen, strumming would only very rarely cause the note to play, and after a very short time, we'd fail out of the song.

My first thought was that it was a bad guitar, but strumming worked fine to move menu selections, and the fret buttons worked fine to select menu options. I thought it might be the Wii controller, but the same thing happened with both controllers. My son wanted a 2nd guitar anyway to go co-op career, so we got a brand new guitar, and the same problem happened with the new guitar as well.

The solution happened to be that we needed to delete our save data. My guess is that Son was goofing around with unlocking cheats, and corrupted the save file just enough that it gaffed the program when a song was playing. Or maybe it had nothing to do with him at all. But with a new save file created, it worked just fine again.

Hope this helps somebody.

Bad Words

We were watching a show called Kitchen Nightmares last night as a family. We told the kids that sometimes they say bad words, but that the show bleeps them out, and that's what they should do.

Well, halfway through the show, somebody says something bleepworthy, (I forget the context, even). Daughter, 7, pipes up, "I know what word he said, and it starts with 'S'." We cringe. Where's she been hearing THAT from? Okay, Sweetie, what word did he say? Go ahead, you can say it this once.

Her reply?

"Stupid."

Ahhh, I love our kids.

Yahoo! Maps

Okay, first, I'm a Google fanboy. I use Google mail, search, Earth, Blogger, and (until now) Google Maps. But as a result of playing around with Yahoo Maps (as a result of placing my Flickr photos onto maps), I'm really thinking Yahoo's winning my heart for online maps.

Both Yahoo & Google maps let you type in a zip and get there quickly. But Yahoo's maps have some neat extras. 1) They mark county lines. 2) They have townships more clearly marked. (I think Google has these, but they're not as obvious.) 3) The most cool thing: when you pull up a map, you can enter a type of business and see all of that type of business on that map. (After playing around, I think Google maps will do something similar, but it's extra clicks away, and usually takes you away from the current map when you click it.)

In typing this up, and making sure I've given Google a fair shake, the two sites aren't as different as I was initially thinking, but I'll still give kudos to Yahoo Maps for making locating a business feel much easier (even if it's only a little bit easier) than Google Maps. (And as a dig to both, both had the pharmacy closest to my house, but neither of them had it placed on the map anywhere NEAR where it actually is.)

Getting TV

Yeah, I just admitted in my last TV post that I use BitTorrent (along w/Netflix and iTunes) to download TV shows. My justification is that they're shows I could be taping off broadcast channels and cutting the commercials out of (or fast-forwarding through) myself, or getting on Netflix as a whole season, anyway.

But I'm also looking for better alternatives. I got excited recently about Joost.com, offering online TV free-of-charge. Then I tried it out, and found that their software doesn't run on Power Macs or Linux, which is all we're running these days. Harumph. Of course, Joost's downside is that they won't let you FF through the commercials, which unless the commercials are highly tuned to my interests, and much more brief than the 20-min-per-hour of broadcast, I'll just go back to Netflix, iTunes or BitTorrent anyway.

The other alternative I keep hearing about is the combo of a-la-carte cable/satellite and PVR. I keep hearing that regulations or something prevent it from happening, and the current FCC guy is in favor of it, but I'm not really holding my breath, or certain that it would bring me back to the fold, either.

Anyway, none of my current three options are optimal. iTunes costs too much per episode, Netflix essentially makes you wait a year to watch a whole season at once, and BitTorrent isn't seamless or automatic enough (plus, I hate almost all of the tracker sites). What I'd love is a $20/month, commercial free, (peer-to-peer is acceptable, I suppose), DRM-free, merging of Joost and iTunes.

Anyone? Anyone?

(Footnote: Miro is an open source Joost, with an expanding offering, but without the forced commercials, not much in the way of big-network offerings. Still, it's worth keeping an eye on, maybe.)