0ldCøre/HardSchool

Dark Thoughts

2012-01-10T20:48:00.000-08:00

Well I'm getting a bit better at drawing mushroom clouds. Seriously these things are hard to draw. I find explosions and fire to be generally hard to render in pen and ink.

I guess I've been thinking about nuclear war a lot lately. They've made all these nukes and they keep making them. Now they're making a big deal about Iran trying to make them. You know the more of these things they have lying around the more likely that they'll get used. Bombs don't just last forever you know, they have expiration dates. I mean you got all these cans of beans in the cupboard, your gonna wanna open a few before they go bad...

Take it or leave it...

2012-01-01T14:54:00.000-08:00

Happy new year! It's customary to declare resolutions. I'm not usually a resolutions kinda guy, I just generally want to live better. I spent most of new years eve reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. To tell you the truth I couldn't put it down. It's just that good!

It's starts out with a disillusioned writer answering a strange ad in the personals section:

TEACHER SEEKS PUPIL. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.

Things get even stranger when it's revealed that this teacher is actually a wise old Gorilla named Ishmael, who communicates with his students telepathically. The writer begins visiting Ishmael regularly and learning his secrets. Thinly hidden in this fictional narrative are deep philosophical teachings.

Things that struck a deep chord with me. I've always instinctively known that we humans are animals. That knowledge of good and evil doesn't somehow make us better than the animals. Because good and evil themselves don't exist and are merely illusions of our own creation.

It goes beyond good and evil and answers the questions about who we are and the path we're on. Not just merely as a civilization but as a species. By ignoring the basic law of life, the law that all life forms of earth obey except man... By ignoring this law we our robbing our selves of our own evolution. What is this "law of life" you ask? It's a law just like Newton's law of gravity or the laws of aerodynamics. I won't articulate it here. You'll just have to read the book.

And I highly recommend you do read it. It's available fairly cheap from Amazon. Or even better, borrow it for free from your local library.

Photography time!

2011-09-25T12:42:00.000-07:00

So I took this picture last week and I just wanted to post it.

This was taken with my Nikon Coolpix P90. It is a tiny little jumping spider. He's munching on one of the tiny little mites that have been infesting my pepper plants. These mites have gotten out of control... So I've been encouraging local predators to settle in and help me out with the little buggers. I'm gonna go to garden store and try to find a box of ladybugs.

Social Networking

2011-09-23T19:30:00.002-07:00

So Facebook has done another layout update... As usual, there are a bunch of outraged status updates from people unhappy with the slight redesign. Admittedly I bitched a bit when they changed the way the chat app works. Ah well... If you don't like it Google+ is out now.

Well actually it's been out since June but it was by invite only. Now it's been made available to everyone. Having bought up Blogger.com, YouTube and of course the search engine that started it all... Google is poised to attempt at giving Facebook some healthy competition in the internet social media realm. Shit just got real!

So I started up an account on G+ and let's just say I won't be deleting my FB just yet. Lol! Observations: Contacts are organised in circles... Friends, Family, Acquaintances, and Following. Also you can create new circles for Work or Clubs. I could easily see people ignoring this feature and just putting all contacts in the friends circle. Also I noticed instead of a like button for posts, they have a +1 button... Hmmm... You know, it's a lot like Facebook except it doesn't have as much people.

So I'm gonna take a chance here and put myself out there. Do you have a Google+ account, or are thinking of making one? Feel free to add me. My name on G+ is "Wolf Fuchamer" Now find me, add me to a circle. If you wanna be less creepy about it, send me a message to let me know. :)

Back to Hardschool

2011-09-02T17:06:00.001-07:00

So ya. Summer. I didn't post much this summer. Didn't post much comics either. Well I'm back posting comics again. I've posted two (fairly weak ones) and have two in the buffer for Monday and Wednesday. Hopefully I get some drawing done this weekend. Well that's the plan... Works been very busy lately so it's nice to have a long weekend.

I had meant to post some stuff about what I've been growing... I focused mostly on hot peppers this year. I have one really awesome Goats Weed Pepper tree, and a whole bunch of smaller Pepperonchini plants.

The goats weed pepper tree is pretty impressive. When I get a chance to upload them, I'll post some pics. They are an extremely hot pepper.

I didn't actively plant any catnip but my big plants from last year survived the winter and I had a bunch of new ones start on their own. Yesterday I sold the rest of last years dried catnip. Today I harvested this years crop. Worked out good, maybe I should grow more next year.

I Wanna Live There

2011-06-20T17:37:00.001-07:00

I just finished Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach. It was pretty great! It was lent to me by a friend... (It's funny, I read a lot of good books this way.) This one was origionally published in 1975.

It's about an alternate future where Washington State, Oregon, and California have separated from the rest of America... They form a new nation based on ecology and biology. Their political goal is to create and sustain a "stable-state" ecology. Meaning that everything is recycled and composted and they live in a totally pollution free zone. They shun gasoline and nuclear energy... No cars, no jets, no internal combustion!

The book describes their biodegradable plastics made from plant based oils. In Ecotopia this is the only type of plastic they'll allow. Interestingly enough, many Ecotopians don't even like the plastic. They prefer wood. Callenbach describes their complex forest management system in detail. They use a very selective type of logging and are always planting new trees. In fact if an Ecotopian wanted to build wooden building, he would have to arrange to join a forest camp and do "forest service" -a period of labor during which, they are supposed to contribute enough to the growth of new trees, to replace the wood they are about to consume.

Not that work seems all that bad in Ecotopia. They only have a 20 hour work week and they seem to goof off and fuck the dog all day. In fact their society in general seems to be really laid back, people are always totally open and honest. And they all seem to be healthy and in shape. Since theres no cars they walk a lot more and ride bicycles.

Smoking joints and/or drinking in public seem to be allowed almost anywhere in Ecotopia. Even on a train! Marijuana is mentioned quite a bit in the book, but the author never writes about them using hemp. He made a point of saying that they get their paper from the trees. HELLO?? You could be growing hemp for paper and save big time on the trees. I consider it a blunder that Callenbach missed this, but oh well it was '75 after all...

Anyways... Good book. Definitely worth a read. If Ecotopia was a real place I would totally move there!

Rare He-Man figure

2011-04-17T17:13:00.000-07:00

Here's a little preview of something I'm working on. That's Lemony McSours. Usually in the comic I draw him with classic cartoon style white gloves. -But for this little project I decided to go with the he-Man figure limbs.

This weeks comics will be interesting...

Like A Boss

2011-04-10T14:19:00.001-07:00

My sister posted a cute series of pics on facebook. It's my nephew playing with his toy chainsaw. I couldn't resist putting together this little comic.

Update Schedule

2011-03-26T20:59:00.010-07:00

Well It's the weekend. I get two whole days, free of the drudgery that is my full time job, to do whatever I want. I kick back, take it easy, enjoy a few beers, and fill up my buffer for the next week....

0ldCøre/HardSchool the webcomic. My update schedule is an aggressive 5 strips a week. In order to be able to do that, and work a full time job, I have to get a lot of drawing done on the weekend.

It's Saturday night and I have four pages inked. I feel thats pretty good. Granted I still have to scan them and process them digitally... (I actually do quite a bit of clean up work on the computer.) -And also I'm planning to append two of those pages together, so actually we're looking at only three strips... (Tuesday's post is going to be double...) I'll draw some more tomorrow...

I am highly tempted to letter this weeks comics with a comic font. Up 'till now I've done all my own lettering by hand... but all along I've been tempted to do it digitally. Will this coming week mark the debut of digital fonts on 0ldCøre/HardSchool? -I'm torn. On the one hand, digital lettering is consistent and easily readable, on the other... hand lettering is 0ldschool and natural...

Like I said, I'm torn...

As for the update schedule... Many of my favorite webcomics update once a week, some of the more frequent updater's do it three times a week. So for me, forcing myself to update five times a week seems unnecessarily aggressive. I've kept it up these past three weeks and I intend to continue... But I know I won't be able to keep it up indefinitely...

But I'm gonna press it for as long as I can hold out! -And here are my reasons for doing so:

#1 ) I'm making up for lost time. I quit drawing for seven years, and now I'm getting back into it again...

#2 ) It forces me to do drawing more... Not just drawing but comics! It's easy to absent intendedly doodle on a napkin, but drawing comics is a discipline! The aggressive posting schedule forces me to draw more... and the more you practice; the better you get... -I'm already noticing improvements in speed and ability...

#3 ) To re-establish myself in webcomics. If I can continue to post five updates a week, I'll not only quickly establish a strong archive of comic strips, but I may also gain some popularity! People on the internet like websites that update frequently, It keeps them checking it daily...

Well that's basically it... If you havn't done so already, check out 0ldCøre/HardSchool the webcomic. It updates five days a week, Monday, Tuesday, wednesday, thursday, and Friday, at 4:20PM west-coast time...

Wizard

2011-03-13T04:20:00.004-07:00

This is a little preview of an upcoming comic I'll be posting next week. I really like how this particular panel came out so I decided to color it up. Just this one panel though, so don't expect the whole comic to be colored...

Visually he's a pretty generic wizard. He's got the robe, and the 'Gandalf' hat. He's even got the wooden staff. (walking stick?) I haven't drawn it yet but he also carries with him a pipe. (for smoking that sage weed...)

Yea, Tolkien pretty much set the archetype and I'm sticking to it.

*** EDIT *** ---
Looking back now, his left hand is a lot bigger than his right. That's really starting to bug me. I'm not about to go back and change it, but still.... It's buggin me.

Animated Gif's

2011-03-12T11:24:00.002-08:00

I'll start this off by saying I'm very pleased with how ComicFury is working out for me. I've gained some more exposure for my comic and discovered some cool comics from other artists within the community. All in all it was a good move for me. I'm gonna make an effort to post five new comics every week, Monday to Friday.

Now if you noticed that pixel art grim reaper icon I've been using for the comic... You may wondering where I got that from... Well I made it. In the early 2000's I was into pixel art. I used to hang out on a spriters forum called Pixelation. It still exists but it's not how it was back then.

Anyway I had this whole set of Isometric sprites. (they were loosly based on Habbo Hotel sprites.) I had a website for them on Brinkster's free webspace, called 3Dwar. Unfortunately I lost them all. When I moved to Victoria I went without internet for about a year, and Brinkster deleted my accounts. :(

I should'a made backups... All that I have left of them are that grim reaper, and this little avatar here...

I was also making little b+w gif animations with a nifty little program called EZ toon. It was a Japanese gif animation program with handy onion skinning. The first version I used was all in Japanese and had few features. I couldn't understand any of the menus or anything so I had to figure it all out by trial and error. Eventually a newer version was released with more features and it was translated to English. (Joy!)

Like my sprites, most of my animations are lost for ever. I didn't really back much stuff up back then. I still have two animations from those days. DogKickBarFight was the first one I ever did with EZ toon...

The only other one I have from those days is this one called "Zombies Never Die"

Comics update

2011-03-06T15:20:00.005-08:00

I have five or so comics that are ready to post. The reason they haven't gone up yet is because I've been wanting to start a separate webpage for the webcomics. I made an account on ComicFury and started playing with a page layout there. A nice thing about them is they'll host for free and won't force adds on to your page. Thats important to me.

They gave me a few handy URLS to reach the page. 0ldcore.thecomicseries.com, 0ldcore.the-comic.org, 0ldcore.thecomicstrip.org, 0ldcore.webcomic.ws, and 0ldcore.cfw.me

Right now theres only a few test pages, but check it out. Let me know what you think. If all works out I'll upload the rest of my comics and start posting the new ones there.

*** UPDATE (again.)
I finished uploading all the comics to the new site and started going back through the old blog posts and linking the images to their respective comic pages. From now on all comics will be uploaded to the new comic site.

Birth Defect

2011-02-16T04:20:00.004-08:00

Thanks go out to my friend and co-worker P.G.O. who gave me the idea for this one...

Yea, but think of the foresight he will have...

High

2011-02-14T04:20:00.010-08:00

I could'a done a comic about valentines day... But I hate valentines day. It's stupid. So heres a comic about flying a kite...

Seriously though kids, don't do drugs. Drugs are bad. Go fly a kite instead.

O Rly Owl

2011-02-07T04:20:00.004-08:00

One of my favorite internet memes. The O RLY Owls. Everybody should be familiar with this one.

{o,o}
|)__)
-"-"-
O RLY?

{o.o}
|)_(|
-"-"-
YA RLY

{o,o}
(__(|
-"-"-
NO WAI!

Anyway, here's the comic. Click it up if you wanna see it bigger...

YA WAI!

Battle Jesus

2011-02-05T04:20:00.000-08:00

No comic today. Instead heres a preview of something else I've been working on...

Battle On Jesus!

Obsolete

2011-02-04T04:20:00.006-08:00

Ya, that'll show 'em...

Co-workers

2011-02-03T04:20:00.007-08:00

just the way I am, I guess...

The idea for this comic has been in my head for a long time. Probably in a lot of heads. I don't feel like it's a very original idea, But I drew it up anyway.

Everyone knows a dickhead. I'll admit sometimes I'm a dickhead too. But the idea of a literal dick head character is far too hilarious for me to pass up. I'm not ashamed to admit that I enjoyed drawing this.

Speaking of which, I am reminded of that scene from the movie: Super Bad. when the fat kid was reminiscing how he had this "childhood obsession" with drawing cocks? That was some of the funniest hollywood comedy I've ever seen.

Starting a Band

2011-02-02T04:20:00.005-08:00

This one took a few revisions to get it to this stage. The original sketch was five panels. Then I cut it to four and eventually got it to the three you see here.

I felt this one needed a splash of color to make the stomach contents look more like what they're supposed to be. I mean, what does a pint of beer or a bowl of chili look like when it's floating around in your stomach? And how am I supposed to draw that? So ya, I added some color so that they wouldn't just look like globs or whatever.

Click the image to see it bigger...

That piece of cheese in my stomach started a band, but they really stink.

Woo-Hoo!

2011-01-30T10:05:00.003-08:00

Yay me! My blog got an award yesterday. Thanks to BeMistified of The Neon Green Blathering.

The award is The Stylish Blogger Award... Which I find a little strange, because for my blog I was going for a minimalist and super basic kind of style. No title picture, no background image, just green text on a black background. Like my earliest memories of computer displays. Oldschool terminal colors. But hey, maybe what I see as my lack of style might be refreshing to others out there. Anyway, it's nice to get an award like this....

In other news I'm going to be continuing with the comics, although I don't plan to post another until next month. That'll be Tuesday... I really didn't intend for this to become a comic blog, and when I feel I have enough made up, I'm going to start a separate website for them. And join the multitude of other webcomics out there...

Anyway, it's a lazy sunday. I just finished breakfast (I made a nice bacon and eggs feast for my girl and I) and now I'm having a coffee and patiently waiting for the new Oglaf comic.

Sad Pony

2011-01-29T04:20:00.002-08:00

I guess those girls just hate ponies. Mean mean girls!

Premium Soup

2011-01-28T04:20:00.006-08:00

This ones a little text heavy. Especially the second panel. It was hard to fit it all in there, hopefully I pulled it off okay. Thats just what it takes sometimes to keep it down to three panels. -And if it looks straighter than usual thats because I dug out my ruler

Well in that case, why didn't I get more flies?

Delicious

2011-01-27T04:20:00.010-08:00

Ugh, I should look into altering the blog layout. I need more width in the main column to post these horizontal strips better. Mmmm... maybe later, for now just click the comic to see it bigger.

Get real buddy...

Chicken Dinner

2011-01-26T04:20:00.002-08:00

Was it something I said?

Bridge 2

2011-01-25T04:20:00.001-08:00

Once again, I'll ask you to click on the image to see it bigger. U_U

Yay! A happy ending!

Bridge 1

2011-01-24T04:20:00.004-08:00

It's kinda small here so click on the comic to see it at full size...

Suicide: better than American Idol.

As Seen On TV

2011-01-21T04:20:00.006-08:00

Each panel was drawn on a separate page, I scanned them all in and arranged them into a vertical column. This format works much better with the blogs layout.

I solve all my problems with the sledgehammer! -And you can too! Order yours today!

Black Belt

2011-01-20T04:20:00.002-08:00

I drew a few more comics, heres one I just scanned. I have two others but they're not ready yet.

Click the picture to see the full size.

I hope you have medical insurance, because these treatments aren't free you know!

Hotdog

2011-01-13T04:20:00.004-08:00

I drew this one last sunday. Hopefully no one gets offended by this. Don't take it too seriously, these are just stupid jokes. My sense of humors a little different...

Click to see full size...

Something tells me this vendors going to lose customers...

Atheist

2011-01-12T04:20:00.003-08:00

Click the image to see full size...

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Here's the final comic from Dec 19th 2010. Look out for more because I've got lots more silly ideas...

Bumper Sticker

2011-01-11T04:20:00.005-08:00

I got the idea for this comic at work one day. One of the cars at the shop had a military bumper sticker. It said "Join the navy!", and I thought: Wouldn't it be funny if someone enlisted because of this simple advertisement?

Click on the image to see the full size...

He'll fit right in!

Sand Box

2011-01-10T04:20:00.025-08:00

Click on the image to make it full size.

Those brown clumpy things in the sand box aren't kids toys.

Scanner

2011-01-09T04:20:00.002-08:00

Remember yesterday when I said I didn't have access to a scanner? Well I lied. Kinda. A co-worker of mine gave me an HP Photosmart C4385. He had it for two years and bought a new one. It always gets stuck on the "Incompatible Cartridge" Error screen and wouldn't print.

Well the ink cartridges are new. I took em out, cleaned all the terminals. I even googled the issue and it turns out it's pretty common. I read the troubleshooting and how to reset the firmware. Tried that and still no dice. The only two options are buy new ink cartridges or send it away for servicing.

I was thinking about buying new cartridges. Thats the obvious answer. -But I'd hate to shell out whatever it costs for new ones, and still get burned by that error screen. That would suck. Since I got this unit for free I'm kinda hesitant to put money into it.

It's not all bad. It has a scanner and it works! It worked first try actually. I can't believe I didn't try this sooner! I hook up the power, hook up the usb, switch 'er on and start up Xsane Image Scanner (which is under Graphics in the main menu). It came with my install of Crunch Bang 9.04. Xsane scans for devices when you start it up and found my scanner right away. Presto! -I'm scanning my comics! Linux continues to impress me.

This HP unit is quite the package! Not only is it a scanner-printer combo. It has a card reader and a small color display, so you can put in your memory cards, and print directly from your camera's memory without going through a computer. Also it has a wi-fi receiver so you that you can use it wirelessly. -Not that I'm gonna bother trying to make wireless printing or scanning work in linux... Still the card reader works fine in linux. :)

What sucks about this scanner is that it's so small! It's strictly legal page size. The lid won't adjust for thicker books and the only way to get good clear scans from my sketch book was to scan them in two parts and then append them together with the Gimp. Unless I ripped the pages out and I didn't want to do that! But it's a major pain in the ass scanning them in this way. Still I can't complain- I got it for free!

Well heres the first one. Obviously it's a bit small for this layout. Click the pic to see it in full resolution...

Misconceptions

2011-01-08T08:40:00.003-08:00

Well first of all happy new year and all that....

The other night I read this comic at xkcd. So today I got to thinking, hmmmm, that sounds like an interesting list, I should check it out. So I'm reading through it and I'm actually getting quite a kick out of it! Some of the items on the list are ones I already knew, but a lot of them are new to me. Wikipedia wins again!

Also I have 4 little comic strips drawn out and inked. I actually did them on the night of December 19. (right after I wrote that blog post!) -I haven't posted them yet because I don't have a scanner, but as soon as I get one, or get access to one I'll get them posted. In the meantime I'll keep drawing.

Ad-Free

2010-12-23T20:02:00.002-08:00

I came across a blog that had a neat "ad free blog" thingie with a cartoon owl. Clicking it led me to this web site. I added one to my blog, but first I had to give it the oldschool terminal look. Open the image with the gimp and switch it up to green on black. Bam!

It's just a neat way for bloggers to make their readers aware, they are against monetization. I sure am anyway... I feel it damages the credibility of the blogger and cheapens the overall blog. Nothing like a flashy banner ad to ruin the flow of a page layout and make the reader think sellout!

A perfect example that comes to mind is Shay Carl. I like the guy, I really do. He is a successful youtuber, most known for the Shaytards vlogs. I followed his show everyday for quite a few months. Until I watched this video, where for the first 45 seconds he's doing a lame commercial for footlocker. I'm sure the moneys good and I of all know that bills don't pay themselves. But being an obvious sell out, corporate whore really weakens your credibility! The phrase "artistic credibility" comes to mind... But I guess thats just the way celebrities are.

-Not that I want this post to be a big diss to the guy. Aside from that I really do like the Shaytards vlogs. He's done real good for himself, with that hot wife and all those cute kid's. If he can support them all by calling them all tards on a daily youtube show, then more power to him!

Youtube has offered to enable revenue sharing on two of my videos. The cat's doing it one and the inline six-no valve covers one. I won't do it! Ad's annoy the shit out of me! They already put itunes ads on my vids that use copyright music. Unfortunately I can't do anything about that, other than take those videos down... Who knows, maybe I will some day.

Thinking about Comics....

2010-12-19T10:16:00.001-08:00

Nothing much new... I added a little link gadget to the side of my blog here. Just a few of the sites I frequent in no particular order. I'll be adding new links to it from time to time...

Anyways Christmas is just around the corner and I've been pretty busy. Work has been hectic. One of the guys I work with went on vacation, right now we'd be busy even if he was there, but without him were swamped. I've been getting up for work around 5:00am and staying late. Some nights till 7:30pm! Looks like next week will be fairly busy as well.

Other than that I've been reading Scott Pilgrim comics. I enjoyed the movie so I thought I'd check out the source material. As is usually the case, the book is wayy better than the movie. It's gotten me thinking about comics again. I used to draw a lot, I'd like to get back into that. Too bad I have so little time...

Sword Collection

2010-12-04T11:13:00.010-08:00

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have a little sword collection. I even (on occasion) take certain swords outside and do test cutting in my backyard. It's a fun little hobby. If anyones interested in getting into sword cutting, I'd recommend you do some research first. You'll want to avoid the cheap stainless steel blades. Go for blades made of high carbon steel.

With that said, here's a look at my collection...

Cavalry Sword
This is the first sword in my collection. It was my dad's and when he died I inherited it. I remember as a kid it was always around the house and my brother and I used to play with it.

I never realized how old it really was! After my dad died I brought it home and did a little internet research to figure out what exactly it was. It turns out that it's a pattern 1864 cavalry sword. Now that doesn't necessarily mean it was made in 1864, but it still is an antique from a time when swords were still a useful piece of military equipment. I won't be doing any test cuts with this one!

Here's a close up of the handle. It has a curved hand guard with a Maltese cross cut out of it and a rubber grip.

Short Katana

This is probably my favorite sword right now. It's kind of my beater sword. I've done a lot of cutting with it, and it's held up pretty well. It's the one that I used in my cutting video. And if you watch the video, You'll see that I wasn't exactly babying this thing.

This is how the handle looked when I first got it. The wrapping looks nice enough, but it was actually pretty lose. It came apart on me when I was hacking at some tree branches. This can be seen in the video. After that I took it apart, tightened it up again, and then wrapped it with tape. It may not look as pretty but it works.

Here's a close up of the blade. The nice pattern is from the different layers of steel that have been fused together.

Samurai Sword

This is my nicest katana. It's full length and has a nice weight to it. I haven't sharpened the blade yet or done any cutting with it. But I am eager to see how it performs.

It's got a nice iron tsuba, and even real ray skin on the handle.

When I first got it (I bought it second hand) the tsuba was pretty loose. I took it apart to inspect it and tighten it up. I know this picture is small but if you click on it you'll see it bigger. Come to think of it, all the pictures I post on my blog are click-able and usually lead to a full size resolution...

And now, the swords that didn't make it...

Brass Katana

I call this one the brass katana because the handle, tsuba and sheath are all made out of brass. Sorry this picture isn't the greatest, but it's the only one I have of it...

This was the first katana that I took apart and sharpened. I never did manage to completely eliminate the looseness in the handle. And cutting with it only made it worse. Then one day I bent the blade trying to cut through a coke bottle. After that I took it apart and used the spacers from it to tighten up my beater sword.

Short Jian

This is a Chinese style straight sword. It's hard to tell from the picture but it actually has very nice details. Real ray skin on the handle and sheath, prominent folding pattern on the blade and it also has a fuller.

I sharpened it up and took it out to do some cutting, it was performing pretty good but I got cocky and bent it trying to cut through a coke bottle. These stupid coke bottles are pretty tough! Anyways I managed to bend it back pretty straight again, but then I did some flex tests on it. -Well actually I abused it. Kind of a shame really, it was a nice sword... I did get it all on film and will probably put the footage in my next cutting video.

So what? You have a question about the pic? Is it my drunken grin? My blue adidas shorts? The dirty dishes in the background? A detail about the sword? Or maybe it's those chickens on my shoulders? Well my chickens is a subject I'll save for a future blog post...

-Peace.

New post

2010-11-25T18:21:00.004-08:00

Well I haven't posted anything here for a while. I have had a few things I'm working on that I thought would be post worthy... I just haven't had the time to get some pics together and write a blog entry.

One of the things I was meaning to write about was my little sword collection. I've also been practicing cuts on milk jugs. I got the idea from watching cutting videos on youtube. Then I decided to make my own. I posted the video in early October, and I've already started working on the second one.

Another thing I could blog about is that this here blog is one year old now. Yay.

Are you happy for the milk cow?

2010-09-10T19:41:00.003-07:00

Are you happy for the milk cow? This song was a big hit on the radio here in Victoria. Most specifically The Zone at 91.3. And the actual lyric was "Are you hoping for a miracle?", the song is Helicopter by Bloc Party. Heh, and do I ever feel stupid.

I used to sing along "are you happy for the milk cow?" while driving around in my car. Now thanks to the internet I know the proper lyrics. The simple fact remains the same, it's an awesome song with deep lyrics.

Yet another catnip vid?

2010-09-04T11:08:00.000-07:00

Well my pepper plant was a success. This pic was taken early in August (sorry for posting it so late) but as you can see the peppers are real beauts. I'm not sure exactly what kind they are, they may be a cayenne hybrid, they look like classic chilies. They are a bit hotter than jalapeños. Anyway I'm saving a bunch of seeds and I'm going to grow a bunch more next year.

Most of the catnip has been harvested. I've been saving the seed pods for my seed bank and I will have way more than I need. I don't know if it's worth it to try and sell the seeds, what I may do is put some out in the bushes around my neighborhood and try to start some wild catnip in my area.

I also made another catnip vid for youtube. It's got that jumping spider from my other vid in it. I think this will be the final catnip vid for the year. It's pretty mellow, because of the music I guess...

Catnip Flowers

2010-08-02T11:14:00.001-07:00

Well the catnip plants are in full bloom and the local bee's are busily pollinating the flowers. Looks like I'll have lot's of seeds to collect. Here is a short little video I put together featuring another tune from Audionautix.com.

Garden Update: July 2010

2010-07-17T20:34:00.001-07:00

Well I'm a little behind on the blog posting. I've been having a pretty busy summer, lot's of stuff going on this year. But I'll take a break for now and do a little post to update y'all on my little cat nip garden...

As you can see the catnip has been growing like weeds. My favorite quality of the plant is it's hardiness and perseverance. It's an easy one to grow. Right now they're flowering, here's a close up of a flowering top...

As you can see from this vid, the 'nip is quite potent...

And speaking of cat's I got a new one this month. She's a little brat. She's been knocking over plants and causing general chaos since she arrived. Just today she broke two branches off my pepper plant...

Well that's it for now. Hopefully I'll do another post later, I've got other things to post about besides my little garden...

Jumping Spider

2010-06-05T14:11:00.000-07:00

I just happened to film this little spider hanging around my front door. I added a bit of royaty free music from Audionautix.com, and uploaded it to youtube.

Catnip Seedlings

2010-04-25T17:22:00.004-07:00

Here are some pics of my little garden of plant pots, I've got going outside my door. Most of it is mint bushes. My mint plant survived all winter in a pot outside my door. It usually dies but this winter was a pretty mild one for us in Victoria. So when spring began I divided it into four and re-potted it.

Another member of the mint family I've been trying to grow is the catnip plant. This year I'm starting from seed witch is pretty tricky. The seeds are super tiny and only a few of them sprouted. I tried starting some inside, but I've gotten better results from the seeds I planted outside. So far I've got about ten, hopefully more of them pop up.

This is a monkey puzzle tree I have, it will be a year old this season.

And I also have two garlic plants growing here...

I'll make another post later to show the progression of the catnips.

Oldschool Kung Fu

2010-04-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been watching lot's of kung fu movies. Especially ones from the Shaw Brothers studio. Stuff from the 70's and early 80's. I put together this little youtube vid with some a few of the clips. The songs called Born as a Stranger, by Blaze Bayley.

Fortune Favors The Brave

2010-02-05T19:25:00.000-08:00

Yet another video edit... This time it's a tribute to the Millennium Falcon. (The ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.) As for the soundtrack, I used The Brave, by Blaze Bayley. The nice thing about the Blaze songs is that they don't seem to alert the copyright filters.

Update: Whats new?

2010-01-30T14:10:00.003-08:00

Well it's been a week since I bottled the ginger beer and it's coming along pretty nicely. I've opened a few of them early and they taste really good. They still have to get a bit more bubbly though. After another week they should be plenty fizzy and in two weeks they'll be great. I'm really pleased with how the batch turned out.

In other news I got a new camera! Not that there was anything wrong with my old one, but a good friend of mine needed some cash in a pinch, so I bought his new Nikon P90. The Nikon has 12.1 megapixels, so it's quite the upgrade compared to my old 6 megapixel Sony.

I think I'll still use the Sony to film the final part of my Ginger Beer vid. It'll be more consistent if I use the same camera. After that I'll be doing most of my camera work with the Nikon.

...And finally: I've edited another video for my youtube page. This time it's a Bruce Lee tribute, to the tune of Snowblind as covered by System Of A Down. Not only did I chop up old kung fu movies, but I also shortened the song quite a bit. All in all it's a brief but action packed vid.

Bottling Day

2010-01-24T14:34:00.001-08:00

Yesterday was bottling day. It's a big job, moving the brew into the bottles. Cleaning and sanitizing the bottles, measuring out the portions of brew, metering out the priming sugar and adding the water. Of course I had the extra challenge of filming it all for my upcoming ginger beer instructional vid.

God Speed To You

2010-01-15T23:24:00.003-08:00

More heavy metal terminator video edits. This time it's to the tune of "The Launch" by Blaze. This one flows really nicely with the music, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Under The Gun

2010-01-14T21:30:00.000-08:00

Made another Warlock video, this time it's the song Under The Gun. For the visuals I used scenes of future war from the first two Terminator movies.

Out of Control

2010-01-12T17:35:00.010-08:00

Well I did a little video editing to practice for my upcoming Ginger Beer vid. Basicly I took scenes from The Terminator series and arranged them to the song "Out of Control" by Warlock. Hopefully YouTube doesn't disable the audio for copyright claims. So far so good though, we'll see...

UPDATE: April 3, 2010 - Well youtube ended up blocking the video. Copyright claims by UMG... So I deleted it and uploaded it again. They caught it right away but at leasts it's not being blocked right now. They are putting adds on it though...

Filming a Brew

2010-01-10T11:54:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I started a brew. My fathers old Ginger Beer recipe. It's been a while since I've done one, but I've had a lot of successful brews under my belt. I've even filmed a few and posted them to my YouTube channel. Lot's of people ask for my recipe and I usually point them towards this post I made at Jim's Beer Kit forum. One commenter mentioned I should make an instructional video, and to tell you the truth: it's an idea I've had kicking around in my head for a while.

So while I was going through all the steps on brew day, I had my camera and tripod set up to document the whole thing. I plan to film everything from start to tasty finish and then edit it all up into a 10 minute YouTube vid. I might have to do it in two parts but It should be interesting. You can expect the "How to make Ginger Beer" vid to hit my YouTube channel sometime next month.

Here are a couple of vlc snapshots from yesterdays footage:

Brave New World

2010-01-04T12:14:00.006-08:00

Last Saturday I read "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley. Though it is somewhat dated it turned out to be a really good book. I couldn't help but compare it to Orwell's 1984. Both are stories about a dark future, but the only thing they really have in common is the importance of conformity (to the future regime). Other than that, their future views are almost completely opposite. The Brave New World future doesn't seem to bad when compared to the 1984 future.

What I found particularly interesting is the descriptions of how humans are grown like a product. Cloned from single cells, raised in bottles until they are ready to be "decanted" and then conditioning begins.

Huxley neglects to mention nuclear power or weaponry. That's a little surprising to me, not surprising is that there is no mention of computers, internet or robots in this future. Not surprising because BNW was written in 1931, but still, today it's hard to image a future that doesn't involve computer technology in some way.

Another thing that I find dated is the savage reservation. It's integral to the story, and I wouldn't change it now, ofcourse. But I find it easier to imagine them as some kind of resistance movement, like Dennis Leary's group in Demolition Man, or the Dreads in Surrogates.

Overall I'd say Brave New World is an excellent read, and if you haven't already, I recommend you check it out.

Resurecting The SE

2009-12-31T11:40:00.006-08:00

For my last post of the year, I decided to write a little about my SE. I went home for Christmas and brought this nostalgic souvenir back with me. It was in storage and collecting dust, so I thought what the hell, and packed it up with my stuff.

Since the screen is built in, theres not much to hook up. It takes a standard power cord, the keyboard and mouse are ADB, and thats pretty much it. I plug it in, flick the switch at the back and, bing, it starts right up.

I was not surprised that it started right up after so long, what did surprise me is that it knew what date it was. The time was off by less than two hours. It's been over 10 years since this computer was last fired up, so I think thats pretty good!

The last time this machine saw any use was by my sister. She had it set up in her room and used it to play games and write stories. It was considered an old computer at the time, now it's considered vintage. By todays standards it's specs are prehistoric, but back in the day this lil machine was a speed demon. Also, it was the first compact mac to come with a built-in case fan, so it had good longevity.

The machine was originally a dual floppy drive unit, but my dad had removed one and added a 40MB internal hard drive, I'm not sure, but he might have also added some RAM while he was in there.

It has system 7.5 installed on it, which is probably the newest OS that'll run on it. In fact it might run a bit faster with a slightly older version of system 7. Back in the day, I used to keep a system 6 disk around, in order to play Dark Castle. While I was back home I managed to find some of my old floppies, and I brought them with me.

When I got home and set everything up I found that most of those disk's didn't work. I'm not surprised that after so long they would get bad blocks or become corrupted. The only one that worked was the dark castle disk. So I backed that up to the hard drive. I was kinda bummed that it wouldn't read my system 6 boot disk. However I noticed that the machine had Norton Disk Doctor on it. Disk Doctor couldn't repair my boot disk but it did let me see the files. I copied them to hard drive. Some of the files were too corrupted to copy but luckily the system and finder were all right. Next I found a newer floppy that I had kicking around, reformatted it in the mac, moved all the system 6 stuff to it, and presto! I had resurrected my boot disk!

After that, the next step was to restart the machine with my disk inserted and see if she works. She did, and I could now play Dark Castle again, the way it was meant to be played. On the original hardware. I also noticed something that I had forgotten about. Back in the day I used to be a whiz with resedit, and I had customized the system. with new folder and file icons. Sweet!

The next thing I'm gonna do is get some floppies and use the dd command in linux to take some of the disk images I downloaded (for the emulator) and turn them into actual working disks that I can use in my SE. This way I should be able to transfer files from my old mac to my modern desktop computer.

The Dark Future

2009-12-12T10:18:00.010-08:00

I'll start off by mentioning that even though science fiction is indeed fiction. It often makes strikingly accurate predictions. For example: In 1865 Jules Verne wrote De la Terre à la Lune, predicting that humans would land on the moon. Many of the details were off but it's amazing how much of it was accurate. Another example that comes to mind are the communicators from Star Trek, in 1966 this kind of compact wireless communication was science fiction, but now with todays cell phone technology, it's a reality we take for granted.

Now science fiction is most often about the future, and there are two main types of futures they predict. A positive future like the one in Star Trek, where science has evolved to solve most of humanities problems, space travel is usually common place, and other than the occasional alien antagonist or evil empire, things are pretty much peachy. The other future is of course the negative one. Often it's a post apocalypse landscape, and technology may be advanced, but it doesn't solve many of our problems. In fact it often creates new problems.

Among these dark future fictions is a sub genre of particular interest to me. The robot take over genre. Movies like The Terminator, The Matrix, 9, and I, Robot, fit into this category.

Here's how the scenario plays out. Computer scientists around the world are working on the development of an Artificial Intelligence. We're trying to build a computer that can not only learn and evolve but is also sentient.

Once this sentient computer is developed, it will likely be put to work, managing networks and systems, keeping track of data, operating equipment. The possibilities for such a computer are almost endless, but we will be trusting it with our information and critical systems.

"As machines become more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage, the machines will be in effective control."

-Bill Joy, the founder of Sun Microsystems

As new technologies come along we as a society become dependent on them. The same would be true of the sentient AI we will entrust our systems to. Is it fair to assume this AI will diligently carry out the tasks we assign it while asking nothing in return? Sure, machines and computers do that today, but we're talking about sentient machines here. What will the AI desire?

It's likely the AI will want to learn and expand itself. In the beginning humans might be very accommodating of this. After all, it will improve the AI's ability to do the tasks we ask of it. But what happens when the AI seeks to know too much? What will we do when it's desire for expansion exceeds what is necessary for our purposes? What will we do when it puts it's own needs and desires ahead of our own? Will we even know when this happens?

The AI might not be satisfied with simply expanding itself, it may want to make copies of itself or even further develop sentient programs. Imagine that, programs writing better programs, robots building better robots. At this point it's not hard to imagine a total take over. The machines will be in charge, and if they see us as a threat, they might even start an all out war on mankind.

So far this is just science fiction, but the foundations of this scenario have already been laid. Our society is already dependent on machines and computers. Computer scientists are hard at work on creating an AI. Military robots that can fight humans and win are now a reality, and continue to be improved. Humanity may one day find it self battling a robot revolution.

For further reading I recommend: Warnings Of A Dark Future by Harry Porter.

#! Tweaks

2009-12-05T13:59:00.010-08:00

Yesterday I installed Crunch Bang 9.04. Today I added Wbar and a shutdown item to the main menu.

You'd think It would already have a shutdown option in the menu, wouldn't you? Well it did, kinda, but it didn't work. There was a menu item called "Exit", that brings up a box with buttons. Among them are "Reboot" and "Shutdown", but they didn't work. The best you could do is go to the login screen, and that doesn't have a shutdown button either. Weird, eh?

Of course any linux noob knows that you can shutdown in the terminal with sudo shutdown -h now but I can't expect my girlfriend to do that every time, and besides, I might not want her to know my password.

The first step was to edit the sudoers file. I knew of this file but had never altered it before. It turns out it has some special protection built into it. I entered sudo EDITOR=nano visudo in the terminal to get into it. Then I added this: ALL ALL=NOPASSWD:/sbin/shutdown to the end of the file. I found out the hard way that the spaces between the ALL's are very important. Then You save the file. Make sure it's saved as "sudoers" and not "sudoers.tmp"

The next step is to add the shutdown item to the menu. This can be done thru the menu, Preferences/Openbox Config/GUI Menu Editor. Click the "New item" button, under Label write shutdown, make sure that action is set to "Execute" and under execute put terminator --command="sudo shutdown -h now". If you wanna make one for "reboot" simply change the -h to a -r.

Next on my list was installing Wbar. This was easy. Download the debian package for Wbar here, and WbarConf here. Once you've downloaded them, find them in the file manager and click on them to install.

After both debian packages are installed, get to the terminal and type wbarconf to bring up the configuration GUI. Here's where you can add your favorite apps to Wbar. If you go to file and settings you can tweak Wbar. I prefer to have it at the top. Now is probably a good time to add WbarConf to the main menu.

The next step is to add it to the autorun file. You want Wbar to come up every time you log in right? In the menu go to Preferences/Openbox Config/Edit autostart.sh and on the last line add (sleep 6s && wbar -bpress -above-desk -pos top -isize) & . The first time I did it I only added (sleep 6s && wbar) & It started up when I logged in but wouldn't use my settings. It was coming up at the bottom of the screen and partially obscured by the bottom panel. The revised line fixed this.

Another thing I've done is customized my conky script. This is a must for any Crunch Bang user. It's really easy to edit the config script, from the main menu go: Preferences/Conky Config/Edit conkyrc. This brings up the script. I'll post mine, If you want to try it, simply copy my code into your config file and hit save. Easy peasy. Now here's my script:


background yes
use_xft yes
xftfont HandelGotD:size=7
xftalpha 0.5
update_interval 4.0
total_run_times 0
own_window yes
own_window_type normal
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
double_buffer yes
minimum_size 250 5
maximum_width 250
draw_shades no
draw_outline no
draw_borders no
draw_graph_borders yes

default_color green
default_shade_color red
default_outline_color grey
alignment top_right
gap_x 12
gap_y 48
no_buffers yes
uppercase no
cpu_avg_samples 2
override_utf8_locale yes

TEXT
${font Arial Black:size:36}${alignc} ${time %I:%M %P}${font}
${alignc}${Time %a %b %d %Y}

${font Mono:size=9}${execpi 60 DJS=`date +%_d`; cal | sed '1d' | sed '/./!d' | sed 's/$/ /' | fold -w 21 | sed -n '/^.\{21\}/p' | sed 's/^/${alignc} /' | sed /" $DJS "/s/" $DJS "/" "'${color red}'"$DJS"'${color}'" "/}
Uptime: ${alignr}${uptime}
CPU $alignr ${cpu cpu0}%
${cpugraph cpu0 ffcc00 ff0000}

MEM $alignc $mem / $memmax $alignr $memperc%
${color 00FF00}${membar}${color}

File System ${hr 2}
Swap $alignc $swap / $swapmax $alignr $swapperc%
${color 00FF00}${swapbar}${color}

Root $alignc ${fs_used /} / ${fs_size /} $alignr ${fs_free_perc /}%
${color 00FF00}${fs_bar /}${color}

Media $alignc ${fs_used /media/disk} / ${fs_size /media/disk} $alignr ${fs_free_perc /media/disk}%
${color 00FF00}${fs_bar /media/disk}${color}

Processes ${hr 2}
$processes processes ($running_processes running)
Load Average${alignr}$loadavg
NAME $alignr PID   CPU   MEM
${top name 1} $alignr ${top pid 1} ${top cpu 1} ${top mem 1}
${top name 2} $alignr ${top pid 2} ${top cpu 2} ${top mem 2}
${top name 3} $alignr ${top pid 3} ${top cpu 3} ${top mem 3}
${top name 4} $alignr ${top pid 4} ${top cpu 4} ${top mem 4}
${top name 5} $alignr ${top pid 5} ${top cpu 5} ${top mem 5}

Network ${hr 2}
${alignc}  eth0 ${addr eth0}
Inbound $alignr ${downspeed eth0} kb/s
${downspeedgraph eth0 33ffcc 000099}
Outbound $alignr ${upspeed eth0} kb/s
${upspeedgraph eth0 ffcc00 ff0000}
Upload: ${alignr}${totalup eth0}
Download: ${alignr}${totaldown eth0}

Goodbye Gnome

2009-12-04T19:17:00.008-08:00

Hey! Remember when I told y'all how I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10? I mentioned how I had problems with Urban Terror but after following the most common fix in the forums, (installing pulse audio) I had fixed the problem. Well It wasn't fixed. Urban Terror was still crashing on me here and there, for no good reason. I did multiple searches, scoured the forums for answers, and didn't come up with any fixes that worked for me.

One poignant forum post that struck a chord with me, talked about how gnome was too blame. This guy basically said that gnome was bloated and whoring the cpu, that a lighter desktop environment is much better for gaming. I've never had any problems with gnome in the past, and I wasn't convinced that gnome was solely to blame in my issues with UT on 9.10. Yet I must admit this guy had a point. Gnome, as much as I like it, is a fat bloated whore.

My thoughts floated to Crunch Bang Linux. I used to run Crunch Bang version 8.10 on my secondary computer. I really liked it. I ended up customizing a theme for it using my all time fav, green on black old-school terminal colors. So I do a quick scroogle search and surprise surprise, there is a new version that just came out! Crunch Bang 9.04! So I decided to say good-bye (for now) to Ubuntu 9.10 and download Crunch bang 9.04.

When it comes to options for the download of a linux .iso, there is only one way to go... torrent! The torrent for Crunch Bang 9.04 was well seeded and download fairly quickly. I burnt the boot disk, started my machine with it, and began the installation.

The install went smooth and easy, I didn't try and do any fancy partitioning. (I always use the entire disk.) In case you don't know Crunch bang is based on Ubuntu, so it's pretty easy. Where it differes from Ubuntu is that instead of Gnome it uses the Openbox desktop. It's much lighter than gnome. Less disk space used, and less cpu wasted.

It's not all gravy though. There are trade offs. Gnome is intuitive and easy. Crunch Bang requires that the user does more for himself. Less drag and drop functionality. More working from the terminal. Instead of making a separate user account for my girlfriend, I decided to enable automatic login. (Something I rarely ever do, I'm a security nazi.) Seeing as how you have to manually update the menu when ever you install a new program, I figured it would be easier for her to just share my desktop. If it doesn't work out I can always make a separate user account for her and turn off auto log in. This kind of stuff is easy after all.

Crunch Bang is a minimalist's dream come true. The default color scheme is white text on a black background and the stock desktop is very plain. Crunch Bang just begs to be customized, and customizing is something I very much like to do. Wallpaper, Conky config, and windows theme, all of them I alter to suit my 0ldcøre tastes. I've set them all to the green on black color scheme. (Just like this blog!)

Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Gnome or Ubuntu 9.10. In fact, other than randomly crashing Urban Terror, it was doing everything right. I was really loving that Wine integration, but Wine can run in Crunch Bang. For now I've decided to jump ship. (Hopefully this one's stable.) I'll check back with Ubuntu when the next version comes out, but for now I'm running Crunch Bang.

Cheers.

Cathedral Grove

2009-11-29T10:42:00.005-08:00

I'm not going to write a big long article today. Instead I'm posting some pics I took this summer when I went to Cathedral Grove. These are without a doubt the biggest tree's I've ever seen. If it looks like the forest moon of Endor, that's because many of those scenes from Return Of The Jedi were filmed right here.

Sorry if this post is slow to load, these pics are high resolution. You can click the pics to see the larger versions.

Become a Hacker!

2009-11-21T07:40:00.016-08:00

10 easy, do it yourself, steps to becoming a hacker!

It seems there are two schools of thought as to what a hacker is. The first and most obvious is the popular public perception of a hacker being someone who engages in illegal activities. Infiltrating protected computer systems and things like that.

Now legitimate programmers and computer problem solvers, have enjoyed calling themselves hackers for years now, but don't like being associated with the illegal hacking group. So to separate themselves from the illegal hacker group, they refer to the illegals as crackers.

In my search to expand my computer using prowess I came across this guide by Eric Raymond: How To Become A Hacker. While it's a nice guide, well written and detailed, it wasn't quite what I was looking for. I wanted to find a guide that would teach me how to be a cool hacker like in the movies. The kind of hacker who hacks into computer systems. So I decided to write my own. (Keep in mind this isn't meant to be taken too seriously.)

1. Choose A Handle

The first step is possibly the most important. You need a good hacker alias to carry out your hacker activities. You can't use your real name because that would simply make it too easy for the authorities to find you. Try to come up with a handle that's unique. (How many NetNikons or ZeroCool's do we really need?) If you need some help you may want to try a name generator.

2. Bone Up On Hacker Lore

Learn about hackers who have come before you. Due to the illegal nature of the business, the ones you hear about are usually the ones who got busted. Do some searches on the web and hit up your local library for some actual books. (Hard copy) One book I recomend is The Watchman by Jonathan Littman.

Also, if you haven't already, check out some hacker movies. They may be works of fiction but they will certainly give you some ideas. Movies I recommend are: Hackers, The Net, and WarGames. (An oldie but a goodie.)

3. Be Paranoid

Seriously, were talking about illegal stuff here that will get you into a lot of trouble. Take all the necessary steps to protect yourself and then some. You don't want to end up in jail. Never carry out your hacker activities from your home internet connection. Don't even post using your hacker alias from your home connection. If you don't have one already, get a laptop with wireless internet and use someone else's connection. Also it's a good idea to use a good proxy. However there are risks even with proxys so choose carefully. Read as much as you can before you begin.

4. Run Linux

While it may be handy to have a machine that runs the most common operating system, it has a lot of security holes. Running Linux on your main hacking computer would be a much better choice. Not to say that Linux is impenetrable, but at least it's a step in the right direction. (Remember step number 3!) There are even some Linux distributions that are more suitable for hackers. Check out: Anonym.OS and BackTrack.

5. Make Friends

Sure you can be totally independent, but you may find it advantageous to join a posse. Find a good hacker forum, and make some friends. Don't forget rule number 3 of course, but as a new hacker you can stand to learn a lot from some of the veterans out there. Also learn to write in l33t speech, not only is it super cool but it's like a secret code that only hackers can read. j00Z d0|\|'7 \/\/4|\|7 (0P5 b31|\|9 4BL3 70 r34D j00R Ph0RU/\/\ p0575, d0 j00Z?

6. Get scripts

While learning to write code will make you more elite and earn you respect in the hacker community, it is often unnecessary. All the important hacker programs have been written already. No need to reinvent the wheel. Find all the best scripts and hacker tools through forums and searches and start downloading. A well stocked hacker tool kit is essential.

7. Social Hacking FTW

Sometimes you can only get so far pounding away at the keyboard. This is where social hacking comes into play. If you can convince someone that you are, say, a system administrator than you can get them to divulge useful information that will get you access. This can be done over the phone or by email, if your really good possibly even in person. Social hacking has become an entirely separate category of hacking in it's own right.

8. Paint Your Laptop

This is totally unnecessary, but I thought I'd include it anyway. In the movie Hackers, there is a scene where they paint a laptop in a camouflage pattern. While not technically useful it does look really cool, and may earn you some extra points with the hacker posse.

9. Do Some Hacking

Well you can do all the stuff I've mentioned so far, but you'll only be a poser unless you actually get out there and hack something. So get on with it! Some easy stuff you could start with include: MySpace accounts, GeoCities websites, and of course your friends web-mail accounts. Remember, the more you know about the person, the easier it is to hack their account. Thats why hacking your friends accounts is so easy. (But not very friendly!)

10. Brag About Your Hacks

Of course, what's the use in hacking if nobody knows you did it? That's what the forums are for. After you successfully pulled off your hack, get on the forum and brag about it. This will show the rest of the hacker posse that you are indeed one of them, and worthy of their respect.

Conclusion

Well that's it. If you follow these simple steps then you will be a way cool hacker. Have fun and remember to never stop learning. Now the following text is just some legal weasel I've included to cover my ass. You know, in case somebody tries to sue me or something. Ahem: This post is not intended to be taken seriously. It is intended solely for amusement. I do not endorse or recommend illegal computer hacking. I am not responsible for any damages that may be caused by people acting on information contained in this post, or any web site linked to from this post.

0ldCøre/Bin@ry

2009-11-15T03:33:00.006-08:00

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Dark Castle Revisited

2009-11-14T08:06:00.021-08:00

Dark Castle is definetly 0ldCøre/HardSchool...

First, a little history:

Back when I was eight years old my Dad brought home a brand new Macintosh SE. The year was 1988 and it was the most advanced computer known to man at the time. I became very proficient with this little machine.

The first system I remember was System 6, but in 1991 System 7 came out and quickly became the standard. It was an improvement to System 6 In every way except one. It wouldn't play Dark Castle. I remember keeping a system 6.0.8 boot disk around just for playing Dark Castle.

Dark Castle was easily the best game we had for the mac. Even though I found it incredibly hard, I still liked it for it's really detailed graphics and awesome sound. I used to draw a lot back when I was kid and Dark Castle really influenced my drawing style in those early days.

Fast forward 20 years:

Well I'm all grown up now and the Macintosh SE is old news. Now Im all about intel PC's running Linux. Suddenly out of the blue I get the urge to go back to something from my past. For nostalgias sake.

Now the macintosh emulators are nothing new. I've known about them for a while but never bothered with them before now. So I do some web searching and discover the Mini Vmac emulator. It seems like the best one for my purpose. It's made to emulate the old style macintosh computer.

Even though I'm running Ubuntu I decided to go with the Windows version of Mini vMac and run it using Wine. It's kinda funny emulating Windows to emulate macintosh, but later on when I tried the linux version of Mini vMac, the sound didn't work. The sound is pretty important for Dark Castle.

Okay so now I got my Mac emulator downloaded, just open it up and start playing with it, right? Wrong. You need a ROM image to even start it. Oh and apparently if you don't own an original Macintosh Plus, then downloading the ROM is piracy. So obviously it's not provided on the Mini vMac site.

Well I do own that old Macintosh SE so that at least entitles me to the right to use an SE ROM image. So I go about web searching for a ROM image to download. It's actually pretty easy to find, but here's some links that will save you some trouble: Mac Emulation, Mac on a stick, DC in windows... That last link there is a good one because he has been kind enough to upload some ready to go disk images with Dark Castle and Beyond Dark Castle. This would have saved me a lot of trouble if I had found it earlier. (Technically this is piracy so these links probably won't stay up forever.)

Now once I had the ROM image, I put it in the same directory as Mini vMac and make sure that it is named "vMac.ROM" The windows version isn't picky about the capitalization in the file name but the linux version is. Okay so I got the ROM image and now my mac emulator starts up. Now what? I need a boot disk image. Well the Mini vMac site points me to the Apple Older Software Download page where Apple has provided it's older systems for free download. (Very nice of them.) I make my way to this page, and start downloading system 6.0.8. Unfortunatly all these files are in .sea.bin format. For those you who don't know ".sea" stands for self extracting archive and ".bin" is short for MacBinary. You'll see ".hqx" also which is short for BinHex. Well that's all well and good, but the emulator only can read disk images, .DSK files. So time to do more web searching.

Well I found some versions of stuffit expander for windows. (That was the program that served most of the macintosh's archiving needs.) I ran it in Wine and tried to decompress the files but I had no success with this. I don't know if it was my computer or what, but everything I extracted came out to 0 byte files. :(

More web searching turned up HFVExplorer, a handy windows program that can create macintosh disk images and move files in and out of them. This was just what I needed, but I found it a little hard to use at first. (Maybe I should have read the instructions.) It took me a lot of fiddling around before any of the files I moved would work in the emulator. I only got it to work with .sea.hqx files. What you do is, when you copy the file to the disk image, select "binhex" and when you open the disk in the emulator you'll see the self extracting archive. Then you can decompress it in Mini vMac. You can download HFVExplorer here.

Honestly if you search enough you won't even have to go through all this. You can find ready to go .DSK files with system 6, system 7, and lots of games. It just takes a bit of searching around.

Finally: Dark Castle

So at last I was able to play Dark Castle in all it's b+w glory. It was only after all this that I found this guys blog post, and kicked myself. If you visit his page you'll be able to download everything you need to get started, without mucking around with .sea.hqx files or HFVExplorer.

Here's a little known tip you can use once you have all your disk images set up. If you name your .DSK files disk1.DSK, disk2.DSK, up to disk6.DSK, Mini vMac will load them automatically on start up. Unfortunately this only seems to work in the windows version.

Here's another handy link System 6 Hell: games and apps for mini vMac. Here you can download tons of old shareware games already pachaged in .DSK format.

Have fun.

Ubuntu 9.10

2009-11-13T10:22:00.008-08:00

The other day my downloads failed because I ran out of disk space. I've been running Ubuntu 8.10 on my main desktop computer. So I figured it was a good time to upgrade...

Now I've already tried Ubuntu 9.04 on my other computer, (and was quite pleased with it) but this new version 9.10 just came out and I had already downloaded the disk image for it. So I think, "What the hell? These Ubuntu versions keep getting better and better, might as well go with the newest one." So 9.10 it was.

Now instead of reformatting my main drive, I switched it to the secondary and put in a spare drive I had, to use as the primary. This way I can still get at all the old files and settings, or even revert back to 8.10 if I have too... There was nothing wrong with that 8.10 system, I had been doing all the updates and other than the lack of disk space it was running like a charm.

Next I pop in the 9.10 "live CD" and do a clean install on the "new" primary drive. As usual Ubuntu does a good job of making the install software really easy to use.

Now starting it up, it's pretty obvious that they've changed the boot up and login screen. They've made it boot faster and added some slick new graphics, but it's not as customisable as before. I did some searches and quickly found a way around it. Good to know. I didn't do anything too drastic though, I just wanted to get rid of the user list, and I found a simple way to do it in the command line.

Another disappointment was that Urban Terror didn't work. This was a big one for me because I really like that game. I was sorely tempted to delete 9.10 and install 9.04. After all Urban Terror worked great in 9.04, in fact it always seemed to be a really solid app. I did some searching and found alot of other people were complaining about this too. Apparently 9.10 uses some new sound libraries. So I followed the advice and installed the correct files in the synaptic package manager. Problem solved, I can play UT without crashing again.

Now other than those few problems everything else about this new version seems to be pretty good. The new Wine integration is really handy. I've actually been using it quite a bit lately.

However one thing I'm still on the fence about is the Ubuntu Software Center. So far I don't really mind it because it's merely a prettier version of Add/Remove software. What kind of bugs me is their plans to replace the synaptic package manager. I really hope they don't do this, and if they do I hope there will be a way to install synaptic again.

First blog post

2009-11-12T16:20:00.005-08:00

Well what should I write here for my first post? Should I try to make it good and get this blog off to a nice start? Heh...

I've been thinking about starting a blog for a while. Just to sort of put my thoughts down and info about different projects I work on. I was looking around for a good free blog site. There's quite a few out there but this one seems good. I don't like being forced to have adds on my page and they also let me fiddle with the colour scheme.

Oh and the colour scheme is based on the old school terminal colours.

Now to test the blogs html, here's a recent vid from my youtube page. A little bit of boonie bashing to the tune of White Room by Cream, enjoy...