Control room

Here's a sneak preview of something I'm working on. It probably won't be ready for a while (weeks, maybe months) because there's a lot to do. But it's going to be awesome when it's finished.

Clicky for full size.

Drawage

there's a couple of new items on my sketch blog Mod Rocker. One is a comic, the other is just scary. This weekend I was gripped for no apparent reason by an urge to draw. I drew some other things which are in various stages of completion, including a comic I'm not sure I should post because it is just gross. I'm slowly starting to realise that if I stop trying so damn hard to get every line just perfect, things still end up looking pretty decent (or even better than they would otherwise) and I can draw like ten times faster, resulting in things that actually get finished instead of abandoned a quarter of the way through.

Duality

A few nights ago I decided to make a movie. Like most of my best work it was totally on a whim. So I got out my video camera and got to it, basically as an experiment in unplanned, scriptless, one-person film making.

It took about four hours to shoot, between 11 pm and 3 am (plus two small shots I had to re-do later). I edited it in a program called Kino, which took ages but I'm pretty happy with the result. All the gore effects were done with tomato sauce, of course. I credited myself with camera work but really most of the credit should go to various household tables, chairs and shelves.

Der Keyboard

For some reason, in the last couple of weeks I've become very interested in keyboards. Not musical ones (though I want one of them too), but the QWERTY variety. For years I've been using the stock-standard rubber-dome keyboard that came with my computer, but an article has intrigued me about the prospect of using a buckling-spring keyboard like IBM's classic Model M. They're non-existent on eBay, except in America, and they're too heavy to ship from the US for less than about $60. I found some 122-key monsters on there, which look pretty leet, but they're not buckling spring, despite the listing's dishonest implications. I'd probably buy one anyway for the hacker cred, if not for the weird, gaming-unfriendly cursor key layout. The search continues.

Thinking about this reminded me of the fact that I still can't touch type - well, I sort of can, if you call 14 WPM "typing". So, inspired by Das Keyboard's supposed ability to force people to learn by preventing them from looking at the keys, I've painted my keyboard all black. It looks pretty cool, if a little emo. I also downloaded TuxTyping, a touch typing practice program. It's aimed at kids, but it should help a lot anyway.

Maybe in the holidays I'll do something like this. If only I had the necessary tools and stuff. Oh well, I'll think of something.

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I'm going to make this into a T-shirt.

EDIT (20/10/07): So it turns out that this has been done before. I guess there really aren't any original ideas left in the world. Drag.

Speed studying

When I was studying for exams I decided to set up my camcorder to record a quarter of a second every 15 seconds, for a whole day. Then I got the footage, sped it up 2x and annotated it. Here it is: