Blancmange's Journal

Extra Rampant

2009-11-30T00:53:29Z

It would be awesome if this variant was registrable as a SCA device.

Warning: Naughty bits follow.

I'm sure most people would agree that this device is definitely me.

[Edit: LiveJournal's "Adult Content" mode is broken, so I had to link to the image on my own page than use LJ's useless scrapbook.]

All the Goodness of a Billygoat

2009-11-30T00:40:53Z

I finished my SCA device at last!

Per bend sinister wavy argent and vert, a goat rampant gules.

It doesn't look too different to the default one provided for me, which I only just discovered today.

[Edit: Hooves are now the same colour as the goat, as per the registered blazon.]

Circus, then Bread

2009-10-24T11:07:32Z

Today, Belle, Matt, Dauid, Simon, Peter, Vicki and I completed the bottom half of the bread oven at the Canterbury Faire site at Waipara. I'm absolutely knackered!

This is to be a "black oven", one that bakes bread in the same chamber used for the fire. The oven chamber, door, chimney and spark arrester has yet to be added. The steel vault at the back is for storing firewood and providing a work surface.

I've had my hand on it for hours!

2009-10-15T13:13:00Z

Today I took apart my my wee LED squeeze torch I bought for $10 a couple of years ago. Having examined fnord_fnord's shake torch and later discovered the strange disc-like objects were in fact a pair of CR2032 lithium batteries, I thought I'd have a close look at what's inside my squeeze torch.

The centrifugal clutch is straightforward. Gripping the torch and squeezing the lever spins the clutch and causes its pawls to engage and spin the flywheel. Relaxing the group allows the lever to spring back, unwinding the clutch exactly as much as it was wound during the squeeze. Though this means the pawls clatter noisily against flywheel's circular ratchet, the clattering doesn't seem to cause the flywheel to slow down noticeably. That means it's fine to relax your grip immediately after each squeeze.

The circuitry is basically the DC end of a bridge rectifier, a bank of capacitors in parallel and some LEDs, all in parallel. An SPDT switch on the on position connects the cathode end of the LEDs to the negative rail, otherwise the cathodes are connected to the positive rail (for no readily apparent reason).

Though the green package looks superficially like a 4.5V battery pack, it does seem to exhibit capacitor-like performance. Reasonably vigorous squeezing for about half a minute leaves it at 4V. I've drained it several times with no loss in the functionality of the torch and its simple charging system. I guess the torch isn't a fake, then :)

In this torch, the blue wire leads to the anode (positive) terminal of the LED assembly and a red wire leads to the cathode (negative) terminal. It's like that way with the crappy Elto plug-in power meter I bought from the warehouse. The (incoming) Phase/Live wire is labelled N and the Neutral wire is labelled L.

The really cool part of the torch's design is the circular eight-pole magnet and what may as well be called fluxguides that conduct the flux of the magnet's north and south poles to each end of the solenoid below.

Being flat and having room for a great many turns makes the solenoid rather effective even though the magnet is pretty wussy. It wouldn't make sense to have a powerful magnet anyway, since it would be prone to cogging and would then require a heavier flywheel to keep it going. This design relies on the speed of the magnet's rotation and the way the flux is reversed in the solenoid eight times for every turn.

This torch is nowhere near as bright as a 0.75W Luxeon Star Maglite, but it's way better and longer-lasting for any given effort than any shake torch.

Overall, I'm rather impressed, especially with the design of the dynamo.

BuggerIM 2.0 Icons

2009-09-26T04:33:33Z

I finally finished drawing and packing my nice icons for the XMPP clients, Psi, Gajim, Miranda IM and Pidgin.

Here are the larger versions of the icons you might want to use on a 200–300ppi display:

The whimsical icons look good and are readily distinguishable on a light background. The crystal ball variants are designed to have a more uniform appearance at the cost of distinctiveness. You may want to create your own selection of these icons to go with your client's roster.

The icons are drawn separately for each of the 16×16, 24×24, 32×32 and 48×48 pixel sizes and for each of the 24bpp+alpha, 256-colour and VGA pixel formats. I've packed selections of them for the clients:

If the above sites get eaten by goats or mutant Kauri snails, Try the BuggerIM page of my own site.

I especially recommend Psi and Gajim because they display presence status icons in the rosters of their MUC windows, one of a few features that makes IRC-only clients excruciatingly retarded by comparison.

AGG Text Rendering

2009-08-29T02:36:02Z

Maxim Shemanarev, the creator of the awesome geometry and text rendering library AGG, has a wonderful rant titled Texts Rasterization Exposures concerning the abysmal text rendering on Windows and Linux.

Not only does AGG's text rendering look nice even at absurdly small scales, it scales exactly so that automatic scaling of dialogue boxes and other GUI elements will not cause text to jump about and overflow into other elements. The Haiku BeOS system uses AGG's text rendering, presumably for this very benefit.

I'm surprised that gamma correction alone does not fix the horrid letter ms in Ubuntu.

By the way, the AGG demos include a really neat program, image_filters that demonstrates the effect of compound rotations of a raster image using a variety of reconstruction filters. The nearest neighbour, bilinear and bicubic filters severely smears the image after just a few rotations; Blackman 256 preserves the image detail even after several dozens of rotations.

RIPLinux9.3 is Awesome!

2009-08-26T13:09:26Z

RIPLinux9.3 is a LiveCD designed for repair and forensics. It's got the useful bits like ssh, sshd, sshfs, dar, partimage, gparted, Firefox, Opera and various arcane goodies.

This screenshot shows that even if all your operating systems on your hard discs are munted, you can still easily get in touch with your XMPP buddies (and those accessible through XMPP "transports") and join a Multi-User Chat room. Hopefully some of them will know how to fix a bad GRUB2 installation, say.

I used MTpaint to take the time-delayed screenshot and to convert the result into indexed colour mode before uploading it to my LJ scrapbook, all while in a RIPLinux session.

If only it supported my Wacom ArtZ II tablet and stylus. :)

Ubuntu 9.04

2009-08-07T14:19:34Z

I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 with the help of a screwdriver. (The D-Link DWL G520+ is deadly toxic to any Ubuntu system I've tried).

Unfortunately, the text was corrupted for a while. The bottom few pixel rows of various characters get progressively more corrupt over time.

It's as if the pixel map cache is affected by an off-by-one (or two) error for the y-loop during the copy from the plain rastered glyphs to the coloured and treated glyphs that ultimately get composited to the display. It started when I tried out the Visual Effects settings and went away after I tried them all on all user accounts. See Bug 293059 and this Post on the Ubuntu Forums.

A more serious issue is the handling of the Wacom ArtZ II tablet stylus. The mouse pointer tracks the stylus with a lag of about a third of a second unless you turn the stylus upside down (and use the spongey eraser) or press a button. If you wiggle the stylus at one place, lift the stylus and later, put the stylus down somewhere else, the input recorded when the stylus was wiggled will then be played back the moment the stylus is put down again. See Bug 365997.

This is much worse than Ubuntu's 8.04's handling of the tablet. At least you could do everyday tasks if you didn't mind having a phantom toddler with a second stylus randomly poking hard at places on the tablet corresponding to the edges and corners of the screen.

Bug 490964 Unconfirmed

2009-07-01T07:32:43Z

It's kinda surprising that an annoying Firefox PNG display bug I reported last month is still "unconfirmed" despite the report linking to a demonstration of the bug. I'm pleased to see there is at least one reference to it, though.

ACDSee, a stand-alone image viewer, got it right about a decade ago. Photoshop, these days, gets it right if you tell it to not care about being compatible with the way other applications do it. I see that Safari on the iPod does it right even for text rendering (which is why the text is amazingly nice to read even on a tiny, low-resolution screen). If only Windows and Linux were so capable.

The problem is to do with the way that most computer display frame buffers and most images use a gamma-compressed encoding (even images that are ostensibly not subject to data compression). That's fine for efficient storage that matches the sensitivities of the human visual system (as is the various spatial and colour tricks utilised in JPEGs) but it raises the question of how the images are to be manipulated or generated in the first place.

Most of what's displayed on a computer is an assembly of computed images, particularly in the form of scaled, faded and composited image elements (such as text rasterised to the display). Any kind of image arithmetic—geometric transformation, brightness adjustment, contrast stretching, compositing an image onto a background or even fading between two colours—must be done on uncompressed images. Otherwise you get the bizarre hue, luminance (and stroke weight) anomalies that are demonstrated by the test patterns. (It's just as well no one seriously considers performing image arithmetic directly on JPEG data streams.)

Ideally, computer displays would use 16-bits per channel and a linear (non gamma-compressed) encoding so that correct image arithmetic can be done quickly and simply. It's still worthwhile to have pre-rendered or prerecorded images stored in gamma-compressed form, of course. The alternative approach is to do it the way Photoshop does it when Blend RGB layers with Gamma of [1.0] is enabled. Photoshop decompresses the image pixels, performs the requested blending operations and then re-compresses the images on the fly. That's why drawing clouds at sunset is easy in Photoshop but impossible (or at least infeasible) in The GIMP, say.

At present, dealing with the way Firefox displays PNGs with partially opaque pixels is really hard work. It's a wee bit like the old trick of creating anti-aliased GIFs (which can only have wholly opaque or wholly transparent pixels). Both tasks require you know what the background is going to be when you're creating an anti-aliased or translucent PNG.

Creating PNG images for the Web will become much easier for me when Firefox (and some other browsers) get round to conforming to the Alpha Channel Processing part of the PNG Specification.

Memage Supreme!

2009-04-25T08:31:17Z

Propagating the sex-meme-wotsit from ogham…

I don't normally go for memes. But this one's about sex, so it's OK.

Is there anyone on your friends list you would ever consider having sex with?

Yes!
Sex in the morning, afternoon, or night?

I hope those are not mutually exclusive options!
What side of the bed do you sleep on?

I could be anywhere on my bed.
Do you masturbate?

Does a wendigo like to eat?
How often? Lately?

Whenever.
a. Have you ever taken your clothes off for money?

No. Why would anyone pay me to what I do very often for free?
b. nicanthiel added: Would you?

If it was for someone I wouldn't get naked for normally, then money probably wouldn't make any difference.
Do you prefer showers or baths?

Showers for a quick wash, gym showers for sex, and baths for a really good soak. And maybe sex.
Have you ever had sex in the shower or the bath?

Yup, though it's a hassle agreeing on the ideal water temperature. Gym showers are especially cool since you can meet in the space between two suitably aimed shower heads.
Do you watch/read pornography?

Do I have an Internet connection? I've been doing a fair job of adding more bearded longhair porn to the Wold Wide Web myself. Just wait 'till I get a decent video camera!
Do you want someone aggressive or passive in bed?

Neither. I like what I call longhair hippy sex.
Do you love someone on your friends list?

Possibly, depending how you define love. In any case I really don't believe in that revolting and debasing gimmick promoted by Hollywood, the Church or NAMBLA.
Do you know all the people on your friends list?

Almost all of them. The tricky bit is matching their weird LJ names to their real names and their SCA names.
Would you choose love or money?

Love.
Your top three favorite kinks in bed?

I'm into vanilla sex, though I suppose my emphasis of long hair and facial hair might count as some sort of kinkiness. Does bathing in and feasting on delicious hot cum count as a kink?
Has anyone ever gone beyond your personal line of respect sexually?

Yes, once. He was very lucky to get just the reprimand he got. I was washing dishes at the time and I almost stabbed him with the butter knife I had in my hand.
Where is the most romantic place you have had sex?

On the beach, in the crashing surf in broad daylight. Just the way sex is supposed to be.
Where is the weirdest place you have had sex?

I can't think of any place I've done it that is weird. It all seems perfect normal to me. Doing it in the having-sex-room with the curtains drawn closed and with the lights out, by comparison, is very weird to me.
Have you ever been caught having sex?

No. Is is illegal or something?
Have you ever been to a strip club?

Once, celebrating a friend's stag night.
Ever been to a bar just to get sex?

A few times. It never works out because the sort of people you find in bars very often tend to be the sort of people who are dependent on alcohol, and are therefore no good for conversation, sex or anything.
Ever been kicked out of a bar or a club for sexual reasons?

No. I got good food, coffee and service turning up naked at the C1 café once.
Ever been picked up in a bar?

Yes, once. But I'm too slow to notice that the guy was trying to pick me up.
Have you ever kissed or had sex with someone of the same sex?

Yes. Lots.
What's your sexuality?

Gay. I like my men wild, longhaired and bearded.
Had sex in a movie theater?

No.
Had sex in a bathroom?

Once, in a proper bathroom, a room with a bathtub. I've never done it in a toilet. If I did, the memory of the toilet smell would dominate my recollection of the experience. Public toilets here in particular, are infested with married men and politicians who can't afford to be seen to be gay, and who can't afford to ever be seen near the pox shop.
Have you ever had sex at work?

No, but I did get a fair bit of nakidity and masturbation done.
Have you ever been in an "adult" store?

Yes. Being used to an industrial environment at work, I'm ashamed of the abysmally low technology of the DC motors with the eccentric weights in the vibrators. Where are the motor controllers, the 6DOF actuators? Why are the products so expensive, yet made of a cheap, brittle plastic no one would dare use in the manufacture of children's toys?
Bought something from an adult store?

A few things. I'm proud of my Jackhammer Jesus I bought at www.divine-interventions.com. Another dildo of mine is famous for its appearance on www.realhamster.com. And a bit of porn.
Do you own any sex toys?

Yup. I show them off to my flatmates and friends. I'm not sure if Squeaky counts as a sex toy, since the plastic is obviously way too unyielding for proper use. The first thing I did when I got it home was to take it apart and tune the squeaker so it made the proper wolf-whistle sound that one expects from a penis-shaped squeaky toy.
If yes, how many and what are they?

Four dildos of varying sizes. The twelve-inch one is purely a novelty, a gift to a friend of mine who said he always wanted a dildo. He gifted it back when he moved to Australia for fear of it exciting the customs orificers. He loved the lithium batteries I put in it, though.
Does anyone have naughty pics of you or are you on film?

Check out my own home page and the xtube user bmange, sometime. (Blancmange was already taken, unfortunately.) By the way, I'm irked by terms like naughty or dirty in this context. They're more appropriately used by dirty, craven puritans who hate sex, but who want it badly anyway. When they do get round to having sex, they do it extremely badly, as if to remind themselves just how dirty and disgusting sex is to any person as right-thinking™ as themselves.
Have you ever had sex with someone and called them the wrong name?

No, but I almost did with a sweet couple of the sharing type, once.
Have you ever had phonesex?

Kind of, as a result of an IRC conversation. The other guy was really keen on phone sex, but I couldn't go very far with it. It doesn't make any sense to me.
Have you ever had cybersex?

On and off. (I'm so binary!) Seriously, it's only slightly more appealing than phone sex, and is probably no match for a teledildo.
Do you think oral sex constitutes as a form of intercourse?

That sounds like a question only a saddlebacker would ask. Just chatting while having a beer at the pub counts as intercourse.
What's your favorite sexual position?

That's like asking me what is my favourite direction to face when I'm eating.
What's your favorite sex act?

In all the kissing, cuddling, hair-and-beard-play, sucking, chatting, fucking, cum-guzzling, licking and caressing. I really can't think of a specific act that comes to mind.
Have you ever had sex with more than one person at a time?

Obviously. To me, refraining from having sex with multiple people at once would be like going to a party where people only ever spoke to each other whenever they sealed themselves off in pairs in dedicated having-chats rooms.
Who do you think has the guts to repost this?

Of those on my LJ friends list, all the rampant gay longhaired ones, at least!

The Überpad II

2009-03-06T08:15:54Z

A wee refinement of my dream PC on www.wepc.com, the Überpad II:

Actually, it's a shameless plug for votes on WePC. :)

Iron Maiden Rocks!

2009-02-22T13:14:28Z

I had a great time with Oliver (and Rob and Sarah, not too far away) at the concert. The sound was a bit mushy, being in an indoor stadium. The contrast and clarity for which I like Iron Maiden so much in the first place went a long way to alleviating that defect, though.

The cover bands were awful, but that's to be expected. I had a finger in my good ear for most of the time they were playing, partly to save myself for Iron Maiden and partly because the lack of contrast in the cover bands' music made the volume of their music effectively too loud for comfort[1]. Bruce air-raid siren Dickenson's voice was louder and Iron Maiden's music was played more powerfully but both were relatively easy on the ears. I'm pretty sure the trick was in his vocal range and the many kinds of contrast (soft vs loud, smooth vs crunchy etc.) in Iron Maiden's music that makes it so appealing.

Rime of the Ancient Mariner was orgasmic! Of course it would be for me, since it's still my favourite song. The twelve foot high Eddie-as-a-cyborg-bounty-hunter (two guys in a suit?) walking about the stage was brilliant!

It was sweet that Rob and Sarah could come and enjoy the event after all. I had a couple of tickets to sell them at a severely reduced price after Ticketek cruelly reassigned the seats for Oliver and me as a result of the unexpected change in venue. Rob said that although the sound was significantly mushier for them where they were sitting, they did actually get a good view of the stage (and the back-stage), even if it was from the side.

I'm seriously pleased I splurged out and attended the concert. Yay for Iron Maiden!

[1] They weren't as bad as Daleks singing Snoopy's Christmas, though.

Blackout

2009-02-16T07:09:13Z

I've joined the blackout in protest of Section 92A and the manner in which the law to end all laws was pushed upon us.

I've blacked out realhamster too.

That strident bitch Jidith Tizard needs to be righteously reamed with a Tomahawk cruise missile.

A Christmas movie for all the family

2008-12-26T12:07:33Z

I watched THX-1138 today (the Director's cut). I hadn't seen it for a couple of decades and I read the book sometime in the mid 1990s. The film was quite fun! It is much more in the spirit of Christmas than I remembered, electric Jesuses and all.

The CGI mutant monkeys near the end were a bit jarring, since I was looking forward to seeing lots more sexy bearded dwarves like Mark Lawhead. I should have made the connection between the words Director's Cut written on the box and the digital pox George Lucas wreaks upon films like Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

I'm grateful there was no Jar-Jar Binks in this film, though. That would have made me very unhappy. On the other hand, seeing Jar-Jar spending some quality time with the friendly and helpful robotic police officers might not be so bad.

Buy more! Buy more now! Buy… and be happy!

Happy Mithras Day

2008-12-24T23:49:35Z

The 25th of December is the birthday of a man who was born of a virgin, preached love and kindness, performed many miracles, was executed, came back to life three days after his death and flew to Heaven. Mithra's birthday was celebrated up until 336CE, when some influential Roman decided it should be a celebration of Jesus's birthday instead, even though it's the wrong time of the year.

Perhaps the 4th century Romans thought Jesus was much more fashionable because he did most of the things all the other Jesus-like figures did and he created an army of zombie saints, which is just soooo cool!

The Obfusocculter

2008-11-04T07:23:40Z

Another design I've toyed with on www.wepc.com, a tiny, highly directional display for securely entering passwords.

Silly PC

2008-11-03T05:55:55Z

Wouldn't it be cool if laptop computers could run on blood sugar?

The Xsanguinator's primary features:

Runs on ATP (adenosine triphosphate)
Embrace™ anti-theft system
Twinkies® surge protection

This notebook features bio-reactors capable of utilising the energy released from the hydrolysis of adenosine triphosphate abstracted from the operator by means of digital exsanguination. This is the first device to fully implement the TrueKerberos™ internet authentication and battery extension technology.

Dream PC

2008-11-01T11:59:21Z

I had a wee bit of fun on www.wepc.com, sketching a kind of tablet PC I've wanted for years:

The idea is that you scribble and annotate stuff on the tablet-plus-screen on the front cover and display books, photo albums and notes on the e-paper pages.

It would be very cool if the e-paper could be made flexible enough to accommodate centrefolds.

Examples of Photoshop's Lighting Effects

2008-10-24T21:58:38Z

Following are the kind of effects I applied to the hand-assembled knot tiles I did for Fitznik II:

The knotwork, used as a basis for the the height-map and adjustment layer masks:

The height-map supplied to the Lighting Effects filter:

The result of lighting effects applied to a mid-grey layer in Hard Light mode over a photograph of marble, along with other layers to darken the troughs, lighten the raised features and to simulate an ink wask:

Another series of effects applied to the same basic knotwork:

Celtic Knot Toy

2008-10-24T09:14:53Z

Wheee! I finally finished my Celtic Knot editor and renderer.

Given a base tile set like this…

…it can be used to generate images like this:

The cool thing about this program is that it handles very wide knot lines and draws circular arcs.

It's primary purpose, though, is to render height-maps to feed to Photoshop's Lighting Effects filter. From there, lighting, shading, dry brushing and ink washing can be applied to the rendered image. The capacity for drawing wide knot lines is important because the treatment I apply to the height-map means that the rendered knots appear thinner than what the height-map would seem to imply.

It's my birthday today, too. I had a good time celebrating it naked and adding more porn to the world (which is in desperately short supply).

Leader Dearest's War on Hair

2008-10-22T11:56:09Z

Apparently, Kim Jong Il thinks male soccer players with long hair look too much like women for his liking. He really doesn't like the untidy look and plans to make everyone in North Korea as neat and tidy as a bum boy.

Has anyone told Dear Leader how effeminate he looks?

Shropshire Blue

2008-10-12T01:35:21Z

I brought some lovely cheese around to Sarah's last night: Tomme de Chevve, Shropshire Blue and a teensy picee of Gruyere. They were spectacularly yummy. The Gruyere was intensely caramelly and the Tomme de Chevve was delicately goaty and moist. The Shropshire was rich and deliciously crunchy, a little like a salty and mouldy Cookies and Cream ice-cream that somehow refuses to go soft, despite being kept for weeks in an old sock stashed behind the refrigerator.

I feel pretty much like the Fonejacker mouse getting excited over Wensleydale.

Here's the Shropshire:

Next to this, the Whisky Cheddar tasted insipid. It's a pity I didn't think to bring along a Chesdale* cheese slice.

*Processed gunk made of aspic, cheese offal and Auckland tap water, presumably.

Still Life

2008-08-25T14:43:11Z

Earlier in the year, I've been spending a lot of time being sick. The house is very cold, the dampness is especially bad if I don't operate the dehumidifier in Bilge Pump mode. The biggest problem was just starvation.

I can (barely) afford to eat in principle, but supermarket food is somewhat variable. I've been annoyed by the high throw-away factor of Countdown oranges, but Pak'n'Save's variability in quality is amazing.

I've been directed to Raeward Fresh near the Tower Junction, where the food they offer (fruit and vegetables, mainly) is very often fit to eat. Between having food to eat and spending a bit more electricity on warming and dehumidifying my room, I've been a lot better.

I still shop at Pak'n'Save to get food items of the sort the supermarket isn't easily able to screw up, like rolled oats and butter. Much of the time, the (store's own) bread, the fruit and vegetables and the meat are a freak show.

One uniformly skody batch of kiwifruit prompted me to start a still life gallery. These days, if I see a spectacular display of mouldy and/or rotten fruit, I buy it, take it home and photograph it within hours. Incidentally, cameras are forbidden in Pak'n'Save and Riccarton Mall in general.

Here are some fine examples of what counts as supermarket food:

Once I feel suitably arsed, I'll take pictures of the horrid stuff¹ that poses as breads from around the world² in supermarkets these days. The brownish³ waterlogged-and-squishy meat and what happens to it when you cook it deserves a YouTube video.

¹ Bread is supposed to made with flour, right?
² They even managed to make the stuff look like Ciabatta—on the outside.
³ It's funny how the meat is bright red on the outside, fluorescing slightly when held in range of the fancy shelf lights, but is dark reddish brown or even greyish on the facing sides of the cuts.

Surprise and terror! The Mooninites are upon you!

2008-07-05T02:36:23Z

Another fine example of security theatre:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/4608086a4560.html

What is it this time? Green and yellow anthrax? Some mysterious and powerfully explosive powder that can produce an injurious blast despite it being spread thinly in the ground?

Maybe it's Mooninite poo. (Be afraid. Be very afraid!)

Thanks to the brave efforts of a small army of police, bomb squad specialists and ambulance crew, the sugary confection was deemed to be non-explosive. Presumably, a retaliatory or pre-emptive airstrike on all the traffic counters in Christchurch will be deemed unnecessary.

Bicycles are ++good

2008-06-29T06:39:10Z

It's somewhat appalling that cyclists cannot already cross the bridge that separates half the dreary volcano field of Auckland from the other half.

Obviously I support the Get Across group's aim to have cycle lanes put on the bridge.